Well, that's just peachy!

I just made myself a smoothie for lunch because I am dying for a sandwich but I can't eat bread, so I decided to compromise with a less menacing treat (I shouldn't be eating peaches either, but they are less evil for my innards than bread). Oh, man, I added all the things that people with normal digestion would never add to a self-respecting smoothie: kefir (points for you if you've ever even heard of the stuff) instead of milk or ice cream, peaches (normal maybe, but sin city for me), raw almonds and hazelnuts, vanilla (okay, that's approaching normal), unsweetened carob chips(!!), and the grand finale . . . VEGETABLE GLYCERIN instead of sugar. Oh, yeah, and blonde flax seeds.

(I know you won't believe this, but it tastes good.)

(I know you also won't believe this, but I AM a decent cook. If you're not expecting Betty Crocker, that is.)

But back to the smoothie. When you make a smoothie like this it takes a long time for the blender (my blender, anyway) to get the smooth thing down. It takes patience to wait for the right texture to happen. Stopping the blender when I thought it should be finished with the job, I heard something that sounded like the concoction needed more time, so I pressed "on" and gave it another long whirl.

I must have collected some bad karma from my peach cheat, because after I made myself a whole blenderful of this delicious ambrosial grog, and got about halfway through my first round, I started noticing an occasional piece of tiny gravel in my smoothie. Not so smooth. What? Then I started noticing a little more tiny gravel. When I poured some more of the not-so-smooth smoothie into my glass, a big grog-enveloped THING slid out of the blender and TONK! hit the bottom of my glass. I thought, Hazelnut . . . it was just a large hazelnut . . . a really large hazelnut, or maybe several that were friends . . . yeah, that's it . . . no need for alarm. But it still scared me.

Maybe I'm a slow drip, but I eventually catch on. Hold on. Didn't I put two small peaches into the blender? And how many pits did I throw away a few moments ago? One? Just one? So maybe that's not a hazelnut at the bottom of my glass. (Do you hear the Jaws theme song playing in the background?) I fished and fished around in my glass with a spoon, trying to find the tonking thing, but it resisted capture. Oh, well, thinks I, just keep drinking. Now with every glug I get a mouthful of gravel--peach pit gravel. I've still got half my lunch left to drink and them hippified ingredients ain't cheap, so I am determined to see this through to the end. But wait, thinks I. Does gravel get lodged in that mysterious place in the body that hoardes all swallowed watermelon seeds from childhood and allows them to grow into vines in your stomach? Will my not-so-smooth smoothie mean that I will one day be on a waiting list for a peach pit gravel pit transplant? Will my family have to put a money collection can with my photo on the side at the checkout stand of each of our local grocery stores so that we can nickel and dime our way to my highly invasive and self-pay surgery?

That's when I get the bright idea to strain out the gravel. I pull out a sieve and pour my lunch into it. Now the problem is getting it to pass successfully through the holes. I thought this would be a cinch, but not so. The flax seeds have done their job a little too well today and have thickened the stuff up so that it's just sitting there like a blob, looking up at me helplessly: "I tried to be your svelte and stylish smoothie! Really, I tried!" I don't know what to do with it now. It can't be forced through the strainer, not even with a rubber spatula, my favorite of all kitchen utensils.

*sigh*

So much for my health regimen. I'm thinking a Pier 49 sourdough pizza sounds like heaven about now.