Kidney Bean Soup & A Green Feel-Better Smoothie

The color of that soup right up there is quite unbecoming...half-eaten, orange-ish, ugh.

But it's pretty tasty.

I realized last night that I gotta get on track with this eating thing...it's back to work on Monday and if I don't eat well today, I'll be feeling lousy again tomorrow.

So before bed last night, I threw these into the slow cooker:
1 can of kidney beans (drained and rinsed)
about a can of water
2 tablespoons of tomato paste
3 bay leaves
a shy 1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/8 teaspoon tumeric
salt and black pepper
1 chopped carrot
1 chopped celery stalk
4 fingerling potatoes, chopped

10 hours later, it smelled great, but the combo of cloves, thyme, and tomato, made for a very tart/sour soup, so before serving I added a huge dollop of miso paste (enough to change the overall color) and a huge dollop of cashew cream.  I left out onions and garlic hoping to have a nice mellow stomach-repair soup.

Star Rating: 3.  Don't make this soup, but I share the contents so that you can learn from my mistake (so that I can learn from my mistake)...don't do so much tomato paste w/cloves and thyme.

Next time I'm going back to me ole favorite recipe here.

***

When I woke up this morning, I had a sore throat and felt my sinuses becoming infected (do you know the feeling I'm talking about?).  I even tasted funny inside.  I'll detail the reasons why in another post.

Is "detail" a verb?

Anywhoo, when I checked my blog feeds, I saw my friend Aimee's post right here and felt that it couldn't have come at a better time.

So as my coffee was brewing, I threw into the Vita-Mix:
a few kale leaves
an apple
a small baby banana
three dates
some chia seeds
a few frozen blueberries
a handful of fresh parsley
two peeled clementines
lots of water

Sehr Delightful!

I'm feeling better already!

Time to go buy that new coffee maker that you saw on my computer screen up there...