Savory Spinach Soup Day 8 Avocado Smoothie Plan

Hi, I'm Jane from BlenditandMendit.com. Welcome. Today is Day 8 of the 21 Day Avocado Smoothie Plan that I'm doing. I've chosen the Savory Spinach Soup / Smoothie from page 16. The first ingredient is 1-2 cups of water, depending on how thick you would like it. 1/2 - 1 cup of spinach. I'm going to go for one cup because I love the taste of spinach. Look at that. Let's make that a heaping cup of spinach. So that's what I'm adding to the blender. 1 kale leaf. And Ariel says to remove the stems, so I'm just going to do that. This is a red kale leaf. I love the deep, dark color of that, it's almost purple. I'm adding that. You can use Dino kale or curly kale, whatever variety you have. 1/2 cup of zucchini, which is pretty much half of a zucchini chopped up. I'm sure this will add to the creaminess, along with the avocado, of the soup. 1/4 -1/2 avocado, so I have this quarter left over, I'm going to use that, and then tomorrow I'll open up another one for the next avocado smoothie. 2 TBS of parsley. I'm estimating it. I'm using the curly parsley. The blender's looking pretty good there, isn't it? 2-3 TBS of fresh basil. I have this beautiful basil here and I'm estimating that to be 2-3 TBS, the aroma is unbelievable. 1 clove of garlic. This one fell apart as I was peeling it, but that's one small clove. 1 tsp of onion. This is just a regular yellow onion. 2 Medjool dates, pitted. Here's one and here's two. 1/8 tsp of cayenne pepper, so this is a quarter tsp measure so I'll take half of that. And 1/2 tsp of cumin, one of my all time favorite spices. I cannot wait to blend this up. If we blend it on low, it will remain a soup. Keep it on low for a couple of minutes and it will be a warm soup or you can run it high and you'll get a savory spinach smoothie. Your choice. I'm going to leave it as a soup today. I blended this between speeds 1 and 2 for 3-4 minutes. It's warm, but it's not so smooth that you can call it a smoothie. You can still see the vegetables in there, some larger than others so you get texture. Here's the Savory Spinach soup. The cumin and the cayenne, that's a pairing. That is really good. I love the heat from the cayenne pepper in this. Love the crunch of the vegetables. I used the tamper in there while I was running it on low to push the vegetables into the blades so that they would break up. Yesterday's Tomato Smoothie was one of my favorites from this book and I can see this might run a close second. I'm getting more into the savory, less fruit, green smoothies. I now like them better. I've been drinking my greens a long time and the taste buds change. Whereas I used to need a lot of fruit with my greens, I just don't need it anymore. This is wonderful. Please try this one and let me know - did you leave it as a soup or did you turn it into a smoothie? Love the bits of purple color in here from the red kale. I can't talk anymore because really all I want to do is eat this. Thank you Ariel and Lori. This is an excellent soup.