I thought I would go with some sort of 40 day Lenten breakfast theme until Easter and then do an amazing Easter Brunch spread, but I couldn’t find a way to make it fun and exciting and pretty and delicious.  40 days of porridge! Eggless breakfasts!  Deprive yourself with oatmeal!  I finally came to the conclusion that the way to be a breakfast eating blogger during Lent, would be to use items in my fridge that may otherwise go to waste.

We do Cook Smarts at our house, which is wonderful and amazing and something I should really blog about another time, but for the purposes of this post let’s just say I had a ton of leftover mint and a bit of leftover plain greek yogurt.  I also had leftover orange marmalade from the Cook Smarts recipes for the week.  I’ve been known to let the dregs of the fresh herbs wilt and turn brown before they hit the compost bin ad sometimes greek yogurt has been known to grow mold, despite my best intentions.  I’ll probably finish the marmalade in a couple years, or move it to the retirement home with us when we finally get too old to maintain this ranch house ourselves.

Dave said that marmalade is best on toast so I didn’t bother coming up with a recipe for orange marmalade scones, which was my original plan.  I thought this would be the week to perfect my bread by getting it to double in height compared to last week.  The bread ended up the exact same height despite my best efforts so I officially give up on the recipe I have been using.  (It was good though.  Luke and I ate it with orange marmalade.  Jack doesn’t like orange marmalade and Dave was too traumatized by the smoothie to try anything else, he had oatmeal.)

On to the smoothie.  I was actually pretty excited about this recipe that I found on PopSugar.   And as you can see, I totally nailed it.  It was pretty, healthy, vitamin packed, you could taste the chocolate and the mint.  I was excited to be sneaking veggies into the kids breakfast without them knowing, it basically was everything you want in a breakfast recipe.  My only concern was that it wasn’t going to be sweet enough.  (My other concern was that our 1000 year old blender wasn’t up to the task.  It did an OK job.  Running our blender before everyone is awake is a sure fire way to wake everyone in the house, and some of the neighbors too.) Luke had one sip and kind of shrugged his shoulders about it.  So I took his smoothie back, dumped it back in the blender and added some sugar.  He tried it again and said it was OK.  I thought it was good.  I’m actually really glad I tried it because I have always feared spinach smoothies, but it was delish.  And I don’t think you could taste the spinach at all.  Jack hated it.  Luke tried to tell Jack it was full of kale and then said, “just kidding, it’s green from the mint.”  That made me wonder if I should feel guilty about the spinach.   Regardless, this recipe supposedly one serving and after Luke and I had our fill there was a lot left over so I tried to get Dave to drink it.  He asked if there was anything gross in it like yogurt and I said no.  That was a lie.  If I ever had any regrets in life, its that I did not video tape Dave trying the smoothie.  I could have made the perfect GIF expressing the following emotions seamlessly in a 5 second period: “This is good! This is OK. This is disgusting!”  Or “Yum! Um? Yuck!”

I posted on Facebook that I needed someone to come by and drink the rest of the smoothie.  I got one response from someone who said he would, but it was too far to drive. And one response from my neighbor, but by then it was too late.  Now I know where to deliver unpopular smoothies though, for future reference.

Failures two weeks in a row… Time to do something amazing.