rainbow smoothie

This is not the first smoothie I've ever made. I can recall back to the year 2004 when I was 13 and my mom let me purchase The Idiot's Guide to Smoothies from Kohl's(a department store), of all places, in addition to my family's first blender.

I still remember getting that book very dirty from making several of the smoothies from that book. My mom never liked when I wanted to make a smoothie because then she would have to clean up the blender, so I eventually stopped making smoothies.

I had that blender for almost 10 years(most of the time it was unused) until I bought a newer, functional, not dusty one from Sur La Table.

Smoothies were the first type of dish I've ever cooked for myself, even if it was just putting stuff into a blender and blending the contents of it.

But when you think about it, smoothies are very similar to meatloaf and stews, in that it involves putting a bunch of ingredients together and cooking all of it in some fashion.

Now smoothie recipes aren't going to become a regular thing on this channel. I just like rainbow-colored food so I figured I might as well make a smoothie, since a certain POPSUGAR video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E-RUgjbETE) doesn't include a blue ingredient in their smoothie- until I realized their recipe was a healthy rainbow smoothie.

I guess including blue soda into a smoothie isn't considered to make a smoothie very healthy. But there are not many things in nature that are the color blue, save for blueberries, and even then, blended blueberries are actually purple in color.

But you may be wondering where you can get blue soda. I used: 

HELPFUL LINK: Jones Berry Lemonade Cane Sugar Soda(http://www.jonessoda.com/collections/jones-beverages/products/12-pack-of-berry-lemonade-jones-pure-cane-soda).

Initially, I envisioned this smoothie to just be a bunch of liquids blended together and nothing else. But there's no fun in making a smoothie without any fruit in it to be blended!

Although I did take creative liberties in using orange juice as my orange ingredient, even though orange juice is yellow in color. Plus the green vegetable juice I used(V8 blend) is more of an olive green than grass green in color.

When I was a kid, I thought the color pink was part of the rainbow and that it came after purple(violet), but my art teacher dispelled that assumption. So that's why I include pink ingredients into the smoothie. Of course, had I omitted the use of any pink ingredients, the smoothie would've turned out to be a much different color than pink.

I said in the video that the cranberries and bananas were blended in but that wasn't really true- in some of the other glasses, I could detect a chopped up cranberry or a mushy banana that wasn't blended into a liquid.

I believe the whole purpose of a smoothie is to blend ingredients together, not make a bunch of layers and stack them on top of each other in a blender.

My dad liked the smoothie too. I'm a big professional wrestling fan, so when I was drinking this smoothie, the only voice in my mind was Chris Jericho saying, "Drink it in, man!"

Jericho has this spiel of his where he stands on top of the ring and he tells the audience to drink in "The Gift of Jericho"- he's really talking about how great he is("The best in the world at what I do, do you understand!?"), which is then followed by boos from the audience since his character is a heel(villain). 

Just another interesting tidbit about the Meatloaf Princess.

Makes 4- 8 oz. glasses and 1- 4 oz. glass of smoothie

You will need:

For the equipment:

A blender

For the smoothie:

1/2 cup of fresh or frozen(but not dried) cranberries
2 chopped up bananas
A little over 1 cup of orange juice
1/3 cup of green vegetable juice
A little under 1 cup of blue soda(see helpful link)
1/3 cup of grape juice
9 oz. of a strawberry yogurt protein drink
6 oz. of strawberry milk

1. Put all ingredients into a blender. Make sure the lid of the blender is closed tightly, otherwise there will be leakage during the blending process! Blend until the cranberries and bananas have turned into liquid.
2. Pour into a glass. Bon appetit!