friday, I'm in love ... green sludge

i don't care if monday's blue 

tuesday's grey and wednesday too

thursday i don't care about you

it's friday, i'm in love

It had to happen at some point. In fact, I’m a little surprised that it took this long. I’ve run slap-bang into a topic that’s too big for a single blog post. 


The attention span of an average blog reader is said to be around 120 seconds - that’s 2 minutes in old money. When anything is quoted in seconds you know it’s a very short time indeed. They pop it into seconds to make it sound impressive; to make it sound longer than it actually is. If they said 2 minutes it’d throw bloggers the world over into a panicked frenzy. I suspect there’s nothing worse than a blogger in a panicked frenzy.

My very first 'two-blog topic' is a good one. It’s guaranteed to get the juices flowing. Literally. Fad Diets & Superfoods.

But today is Friday ... and Friday I’m in love. So we’ll dip into diets from a healthy vantage point. Green sludge. It's the stuff that me & Picky have for breakfast most mornings. 


Pearl doesn’t. Pearl refuses to have anything to do with green sludge. Even when we tell her it’s breakfast and it’s healthy and despite the fact we say ‘num-num’ twenty or thirty times. We can tell that she’s not convinced. 


Well, to be fair to Pearl, she is convinced. She’s convinced it’s green sludge and as such she's convinced it's inedible.  

The green sludge is green because of kale. When Picky first announced that she was making a smoothie for breakfast with kale, I told her it’d be far too salty. She looked baffled. Salty? Yes, salty. She disagreed. I stuck to my guns. 


I thought that kale was seaweed. I still do. Even though I now know it’s not. Even though I’ve bought it myself in the supermarket, chopped it up, blended it and guzzled the damn stuff in a smoothie. I still think it’s seaweed. It’s in my head as seaweed. It’s like I still think that Bonn is the capital of Germany. It's not. Berlin is. Berlin replaced Bonn a while back. Poor old Bonn, I say.

Kale isn’t seaweed. Kelp is. There's the confusion. Kale is a vegetable that’s found in the supermarket amongst all the other vegetables. I’ve no idea where kelp is found in the supermarket.  

Kale is the new wonder-food. It’s one of those new-fangled 'superfoods' that everyone is raving on about. 


Superfoods are good for everything; brain function, bowel movement, blood flow and anything else your body is supposed to do that begins with a ‘b’. Kale is a bloody belter. 

When Picky first had it for breakfast I wasn’t convinced. I still thought it was seaweed. I also didn’t think it was a 'proper' breakfast. To me it looked like green sludge, and I didn’t think green sludge would fill me up. I love a good brekky, and ‘that’ didn’t look much like one. 


Picky did the usual thing. She made a few 'mmm's' and 'ah's' - enjoyment noises - ... and I immediately needed to have a taste. It was great. Better than great. It was awesome. And it wasn’t salty. Even though it was full of seaweed. 

Look, I don’t know about all these superfood thingies. They're probably just the latest food fads. Things have a habit of being a superfood one minute and then, a few years later, some bright spark in a white coat tells you it causes a wide variety of very nasty diseases. 


Back in the old days my gran used to say that butter and cream would ‘put hairs on me chest’. Now we're told the same stuff will put fat on our thighs. Who knows! 


Pomegranates, blueberries, goji berries, quinoa, chia seeds, acai powder. They're all supposed to be foods that'll have you hunting for the nearest phonebox and stripping into your Superman gear. 

All I know is this; the green sludge that I have for breakfast each morning tastes great. It’s not remotely salty. Even Pearl has started to appreciate it. Some mornings she'll come running up saying ‘num-num’ and demanding a few gulps herself. 


Green sludge fills me up a treat and I always feel great after I’ve had one, or even two, in the morning. Here’s the recipe. Grab yourself some kale and give it a whirl sometime to see for yourself;

Green Sludge

A good fistful of kale 
or feel free to use silverbeet or even spinach (don't use kelp, that’s seaweed)

Half a mango

1 peach

1 banana

Half a cup of water (or coconut water - another alleged superfood)

A little bit of fresh ginger (for added zing)
A squeeze of a fresh lime
A few ice cubes
Optional - add half a cup of oats to bulk it up a bit

What to do ... 

Chuck the lot in a blender and press the ON button. 
Pour into a glass. 
Drink. 
Feel great.

Have a great Friday and a super weekend

pip pip

Ps ... On sunday i’ll be dipping my toe further into the world of fad foods and fad diets. I’ve done a few in my time and one in particular stands out from the crowd. It didn't end well. Do Fad Diets ever end well?