I was introduced to green smoothies in my college friends' shared house -- a two story dripping with tie dye inside and out. I recall the front yard tall with grass, a hula hoop or walking stick perhaps hidden in the mire. Musical instruments took up every corner of the living room. Cheap thrift store art hung alongside posters of moon cycles and mayan astrology charts. It was a delightful hodgepodge -- like the personalities of each roommate was stuck into a blender and splashed all over every square inch. The pantry was full of cheap, bulk staple grains and tall sticks of licorice (the herb not the candy), jars of curry sauce and homemade chutney; one corner dedicated to the raw-foods-roommate's goji berries, cacao, maca, lucuma, dried peppers, and massive jugs of aloe juice.

Those guys used to host poetry potlucks and Sunday morning free yoga sessions and acoustic house shows. I spent a lot of time there over the years. It's where I learned that I really really really love to cook, and love to share good food with people. I have a particular memory of a mushroom and pepper curry that I made that was so good we all had to go into different corners to enjoy it by ourselves (and we weren't even high). It's where the raw foods roommate told me about his giant smoothie experiments -- most of them green (he would tote about a gallon of it to work with him every day). This of course was completely foreign to me. I was into smoothies for a stint, when my dad used to make yogurt and berry smoothies for us during a health kick when I was in high school. But green smoothies?

It intrigued me more than grossed me out. It's more how crazy these particular smoothies sounded that got me feeling a bit freaked. They were pro-level, not for the uninitiated -- mostly consisting of aloe juice, kale, and handfuls of seemingly random super foods. Even now I'm not exactly sure how palatable they actually were. But of course, this is the same dude that introduced me to raw cacao and date fudge, with maca and cayenne peppers mixed in. I've been chocolate obsessed ever since, so I guess you could say it altered my destiny. He knew how to indulge, but balanced all of those decadent treats by essentially washing his life green.

I have to say, I'm pretty into that. Not in an extreme way. I can't say I eat green for every meal. But I try to get it at least once a day, if not more. So -- this smoothie. It's a great way to get more greens and super foods in a delicious, creamy, soft-serve ice cream sort of way. The greens are mild tasting (spinach and avocado) and the real, overall flavor is the pineapple/mango. It's no beastly aloe-kale-flax-oil-lemon-juice concoction. It won't detoxify your eyeballs. But it will act as delicious breakfast fuel or as revitalizing nourishment for any time of day.

Recipe originally post over on Relay Foods blog. Thanks to Relay Foods for sponsoring this post!