Energy day 2: Chichers

Yesterday I had a glass of blood orange juice...kind of. The blood oranges weren't that bloody and pretty much tasted like "regular" oranges, which was rather disappointing.

After that I made myself my first matcha smoothie. I could have followed a recipe, but nooooo, not me! I thought "how hard can it be to throw some stuff in my VitaMix and blend up something tasty?" Apparently, the answer is "hard". At least if you're me. Let's see, in the Vitamix I put a frozen banana, frozen blueberries, some soymilk, several heaping little spoonfuls of matcha powder, some packets of Stevia and a few kale leaves. A normal blender would never have been able to get through this thick sludge and I relied heavily on the tamper that came with my VitaMix.

(Yeah, I put kale leaves in it. I didn't think I was going to have a salad yesterday but I wanted to have some greens. I've had kale in a smoothie before, one with concord grapes and fresh figs, and I liked it just fine, so it didn't seem like such a wacky idea at the time.)

Well, the smoothie tasted terrible and looked like toxic sludge, but I didn't want to waste it so I tried to fix it. I added the juice of several oranges and a LOT more Stevia. This made it drinkable but also increased the volume of the smoothie. So it now tasted maybe 50% better but there was 50% more of it. It took me hours to finish all of it.

Then later I made Chichers, which is a recipe from the book "Vegan Planet", a book I just got that contains about 400 recipes, many of them extremely tasty sounding. Here is the recipe for Chichers (the original one says use olive oil, but if you have a nice peanutty tasting peanut oil I think it would be a better choice, but what do I know...I am the one who made the horrible kale-matcha smoothie above.)

Chichers

1 15 oz can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
Peanut oil
Salt

Preheat oven to 400 F. Put the chickpeas in a shallow baking dish with one or two tablespoons of peanut oil and stir it around. Grind some sea salt over it (or sprinkle) and put the dish in the oven for about 20 minutes. Stir once or twice during cooking, adding a little more salt. Take out of oven when they begin to brown, sprinkle a little more salt if you like. Eat.

Yum. Tons of fiber and so tasty. Better than popcorn or any other snack like that, or hummus or chick pea gravy or anything else you might do with chickpeas. Addictive. Try it, try it, try it! If I had more garbanzo beans in my cupboard, I'd be making it again right now.

So, did I have more energy yesterday? Well, I didn't feel like taking a nap, and I went to bed a bit later than normal, but I wasn't running around going "OMG I have so much energy!!!" and I didn't do anything more than normal. In fact, I didn't do much of anything. That could be my problem, though. What good is energy if you don't USE it?

I'm going to try and eat a salad every day, and try and stay away from refined grains. I know when I have a meal with a lot of refined grains and/or sugar I just want to declare the rest of the day nap time.

I'm also going to look at some books I got a few months ago about increasing your energy, and work on doing more stuff that actually TAKES energy.

Will report back!

I have to go drink my smoothie now...I went really basic. Juice of three oranges, three packets Stevia, two heaping little spoonfuls of matcha and 8 ice cubes. It is quite tasty! Whew.