Recently, a friend who visits Florida twice a year, every year, gave me a gift. It was a glass from Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Café and it had taken her a lot of alcoholic, frozen drinks to accumulate enough glasses to pass around to her friends.
In the last days of August, as the humidity had lessoned, the gift made me appreciate the fact that I shouldn’t be a total summer scrooge. I was still waiting with deep excitement for my favorite season, autumn, which I have decided will start on 9/4/12 this year.
I don’t care that my calendar claims the official first day of fall is 9/22- what does my calendar know? Fall will start next week- I demand it!
Translating all of the above into my healthy eating plan, I decided to finish up the last days of summer by making Montel William’s Tropical Smoothie. The first step in that plan, of course, is a visit to the grocery store where I actually found the coconut milk required for the smoothie.
Did you know there is a whole aisle in the grocery store that sells only super healthy stuff? I had never ventured down that aisle before as it looked too weird and scary. But I braved it this trip and that is where I found the coconut milk. Good thing too, as if I didn’t find the coconut milk there I planned to head to the liquor store for coconut rum instead.
It took me forever and major determination to find frozen vanilla yogurt. I am not opposed to frozen yogurt but most of the varieties I found weren’t plain vanilla. There was Ben and Jerry’s New Greek Vanilla Frozen Yogurt with graham crackers and blueberries, (blueberries are healthy aren’t they?) and all kinds of other types of frozen yogurts with delicious add ins- cookies, chocolate, caramel, fruit and nuts (yuck on the nuts.)
Eventually I found plain vanilla, and ignored the more tempting varieties. As fall would start in a few days (per me), and Tuesday I would wake up to a chill in the air and automatically need a sweater, I also purchased the ingredients for Montel William’s Potato and Leek Soup. At least I think I did.
I have had leeks before in restaurant versions of this same soup filled with gooey cheese but I am not sure what leeks look like before they go into the soup. I didn’t see a sign anywhere and so I asked a store employee who looked about 12 where the leeks were. She had no idea and asked another employee who looked about 16. He pointed to these palm tree looking things with grubby roots and I put them in my cart. I hope they are actually leeks and I am not the butt of some cosmic produce aisle end of summer prank.
Anyway, the next day I made Montel’s Tropical Smoothie and enjoyed it immensely. I drank it in my Margaritaville glass to truly honor the end of the summer season.
I thought I should drink the smoothie at the beach while I looked for sharks (there had been a lot of great whites in local waters lately), but I didn’t know how to safely transport my smoothie in my Margaritaville glass. And frankly, I was kind of tired and not really into going anywhere.
A pool would be nice. I wished there was a pool in my yard to lounge by while I drank my Tropical Smoothie and bade goodbye to summer.
I decided to celebrate in my own MS kind of way. I grabbed a beach-read kind of book, put in a Buffet cd (fins to the left, fins to the right), and lounged on my sofa in front of a fan while I drank my Tropical Smoothie.
Ahhh, paradise……
Remember to submit your recipes for the 50 Shades of Green/Doing It Veggie Style Contest by midnight tomorrow, 8/31/12!
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net