This green smoothie bowl with spinach, cardamom, peach, pineapple and topped with strawberry, granola, goji berry and roast dessicated coconut. Perfect way to start your day.
Have I tell you about my obsession with cardamom recently? It’s all started since I tasted Indian dessert that use cardamom. I couldn’t believe that spices in dessert is actually quite good. I started making my Indian dessert protein ball with cardamom, lentil cashew ladoo. Now, I’m making a smoothie bowl with cardamom.
I couldn’t believe how much I changed. Exactly 2 years ago, during summer that year, I like to make smoothie for breakfast every weekend. One day, I saw a cheap and beautiful rockmelon. Then, I bought that rockmelon, and decided to make smoothie for Dydy during the weekend.
While I was making it, Dydy was giving a request that he love thick rockmelon juice without additional water, and extra cardamom. I was like… What??? Firstly, who makes rockmelon juice without water? I remember back when I was young and my mom made juice for us, she added the total amount of water and ice are equal to the amount of rockmelon pieces. Without additional water and ice, 1 big rockmelon can make a maximum of 2 to 3 cups of juice, while usually my mom could make rockmelon juice for the whole family for up to 6 or 8 people.
Still, because it’s only 2 of us, and Dydy dearly requested it without ice or water, I made it as how he wanted his juice to be. But then, adding cardamom in the juice? The thought of it sounds disgusting. I meant like, who put spices that suppose to be put in curry into rockmelon juice. It’s ruining the flavour of the juice. Juice is juice, why did he want to make a curry-like-juice? I just couldn’t swallow it. I ended up blended my pure rockmelon juice first, and blended his juice later with his cardamom.
And now, 2 years later, without anyone force or request, I voluntarily added cardamom to my green smoothie bowl. Looking back, I never imagined that 2 years later, I will drink smoothies with cardamom. I changed my mind now. Cardamom is a unique taste. Once you get the taste, you will start to love it. Besides that, it’s not curry-like taste, it’s like a smell of flower, something unique. I’m totally falling in love with cardamom.
Besides that, adding cardamom in my green smoothie, reduce the smell of spinach, making green smoothie more drinkable. I couldn’t drink green smoothies before because of the smells. I tried kale, baby spinach, and nothing works. I felt vomiting everytime I tried green smoothies. Cardamom is my saviour. Now, I could drink green smoothies as long as I added cardamom in the smoothie.
To make my green smoothies really thick, I like to freeze my fruits. To easily use it for smoothies, I clean and cut fruits into smaller pieces. Then, arrange it in baking sheet with some spaces between fruit pieces. Freeze it for 4 to 5 hours, and store it in air-tight zip lock bag. I make separate bag for every kind of fruits. That way, I can just mix and match fruits depend on what I feel like drinking. If you don’t want to freeze fruits but still want the thick consistency, substitute milk with yoghurt. Yoghurt will thicken up the smoothies.
Feel free to add any smoothie toppings that you love, either fruits, nuts or superfood. For this green cardamom spinach smoothie, I topped mine with my homemade granola, strawberry, goji berry and roasted dessicated coconut.
- 1 cup loosely packed baby spinach
- 1.5 cup peach
- 1 cup pineapple
- 2 cardamom
- ¾ cup milk
- strawberry
- goji berry
- granola
- roasted dessicated coconut
- In a mixer, blend cardamom until it breaks and smells good.
- Add milk and spinach, and blend until spinach is incorporated.
- Add peach and pineapple, and blend until thick. If you are using fresh peach and pineapple, reduce the milk or add yoghurt to have thick consistency.
- Pour in the bowl, and serve with toppings.