Shawn and I have been making fruit/protein smoothies for some of our meals, so in the spirit of things I thought I'd make myself a quick vanilla smoothie. Just a basic, non-complicated vanilla smoothie. I had ice, non-dairy milk, and vanilla extract. This was supposed to work.
Did anyone ever make that ice cream in a bag when you were a kid, where you put basically those three ingredients (except I think it was rock salt, not straight ice) in a Ziploc bag and shake it until it turned into ice cream? This was sort of the same idea--at least with having the same ingredients.
So I'm pouring the vanilla in and it's not really having much of an effect. I know you don't need much, but there was a lot of the ice and milk, so I kept pouring more in, trying to get a more potent, recognizable vanilla flavor. Well I ended up having to dump the entire bottle in (it was a tiny one anyway) and it still didn't taste like a vanilla smoothie. In fact, it tasted really bitter. It was terrible. So I've got a blender full of what should be vanilla smoothie and no more vanilla to try and improve it.
So I grab for the honey, something Shawn and I have been adding from time to time in our own smoothies to get a sweeter taste. I think I put way too much because now it really tasted like honey. I thought I would try and balance it out with some pancake syrup (sugar, right?), but this additional ingredient actually made it taste even worse than the vanilla.
So in a desperate attempt to reset my smoothie I poured a ton of more honey into it, obliterating the syrup (and every other flavor as well).
Great. Now I had a stupid "vanilla smoothie" that just tasted like I was drinking cold honey. I tried sucking it up and just drinking it, but I knew if I did I would wind up with a terrible head ache and probably just generally feeling sick.
As a last ditch effort to save my smoothie, I tried throwing in some peanut butter, hoping it would override the other flavors and make my smoothie okay (I had dramatically lowered my expectations by this point). But it was clear the honey wasn't planning on going anywhere, as the peanut butter only helped to make it a little creamier, but nothing else.
So I said to heck with it and threw a whole bunch of more ingredients into the mix. First I tried Johnny's Seasoning Salt (Shawn has said you can put it on everything. He's a liar. It's terrible in a smoothie). Then I threw in some baby spinach, mostly because I've had it for a week and haven't touched it yet, so I've been feeling rather guilty about that.
Yeah, it was terrible.
