Strawberry Season!

I love strawberries. Ok not always, but I do now. When I was a little girl my Nana and I grew our own strawberries and I was not the best gardener. In fact I was asked to stop tending to them after killing several plants from overwatering. I just assumed that I didn’t like strawberries after that, I don’t know some sort of self-protection deal.

But recently I’ve rediscovered my love for strawberries and with it rediscovered a dessert that was once a childhood favorite. A frozen strawberry yogurt pie.

Ingredients:

1. Pre-made graham cracker crust

2. 8 oz. whip creamed

3. 12 oz. of strawberry yogurt

4. 1-2 cups of fresh strawberries

To Make:

Mix the whipped cream and yogurt together and pour the mixture in the pie crust. Let it firm in the freezer and top with the fresh strawberries, easy peasy! Also don’t worry too much about the measurements here, so long as there is the general proportion of whipped cream to yogurt is basically the same, I mostly just eyeball it. In addition I tend to like to mince up a few of the fresh strawberries to mix in to bump up the strawberry flavor of it all.

This is literally the quickest and easiest dessert anyone can make and makes such a wonderful dish to bring to potlucks and bbqs over the summer! When you cut it let it thaw just slightly, we still want it to be firm! It helps if you wet the knife with warm water before cutting too. You can certainly choose to make your own graham cracker crust, but I like the ease and speed of this dish with the premade.

Finally because it is mostly yogurt and fresh fruit, it makes a pretty healthy dessert option. The whip cream does add a bit of calories and sugar, but when compared to most desserts the health factor of this is pretty strong.

Note: I haven’t tried this with greek yogurt yet but that’s the next try! I’ll let you know how it goes!

In Which We Attempt a Cleanse.

Marie’s Pinterest addiction and my habit of saying yes before thinking makes a dangerous combination.  Naturally, this resulted in a three-day smoothie detox cleanse.  Three days of smoothies really didn’t sound bad, in fact it sounded pretty good. HA! Thus began the longest three days of our lives.

 We chose to use Dr. Oz’s three-day detox cleanse which entailed a breakfast, lunch, and dinner smoothie plus one more of our choice as a “snack.” So basically we drank 12 smoothies.  Put that way it really doesn’t sound that bad, but by the end all we wanted to do was chew and never look at a fruit again.

http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/dr-ozs-3-day-detox-cleanse-one-sheet

We began the Tuesday after Easter mostly due to the large amounts of candy and chocolate that was consumed over the weekend. (I just can’t say no to the Easter Bunny!)  Thursday night we finished with pounding headaches and a serious lack of energy.  Friday was the most glorious day ever.    I have never been so happy in my life to be able to chew something!

Because those three days were a monotonous repetition of chopping fruit, blending fruit, drinking the smoothie, washing the blender, and repeating, what follows is Allison’s general impressions of each day/smoothie and changes we’d make for our next cleanse. (And yes that means that somehow I’ve been tricked into doing another cleanse.)

Day 1 – Breakfast Drink

Pretty darn good. But this could also be because I was so hungry I was starting to see spots.  In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a good idea to go the dentist the morning of starting a cleanse.  I was dentist-stressed hungry and regular hungry.

Day 1 – Lunch Drink

 This drink will go down in history as the grossest thing we have ever eaten in my life.  Not only was it lukewarm (note to self: make sure all vegetables and fruits are frozen/refrigerated beforehand), it was also very chunky and vile tasting.  It made me wonder if Dr. Oz had taste-tested these recipes.  I have decided to call it the “green polyjuice potion.”

Day 1 – Dinner Drink

I was very scared to drink this smoothie after the lunch smoothie debacle, but it was also pretty good.  The color was really not appetizing but I was so hungry that it didn’t matter.

Day 1 – Overall Feelings

Day 1 felt like the longest day ever.  As a result of being hungrier than an elephant, I also realized that I was starting to stare inappropriately at other people who were eating.  My bf felt like it would be a good idea to bring home a tostada salad for his dinner, in revenge I stared at him the whole time he was eating

Day 2 – Overall Feelings

-Because there was no way in hell we would be drinking the polyjuice potion again, we decided to buy green smoothies from Trader Joes instead.  This was the best decision ever.

-I was surprisingly not that hungry when I woke up  but I dutifully drank the breakfast smoothie and an hour later I was back to being starving again.  My head was pounding for most of the day – either from the lack of food or from the alleged toxins leaving my body…the jury is still out on that one.

Day 3 – Overall Feelings

Day 3 consisted of fantasizing about chewing food 100% of the time.  I was so hungry and tired of smoothies that I started crying when someone brought donuts into my internship.  Donuts have never smelled so good.  We also thought it was a good idea to run our scheduled 4 miles on day 3.  Not recommended.   About 1 mile in Marie started seeing spots and due to this and the fact that I would be unable to drag her back to the car, we decided to turn around.  The rest of the night was spent planning what we would eat the next day.