Tropical Smoothie + Pictures from Jamaica!

I don't know about you, but it seems like pineapples have been staring me down lately. They're on sale at all my local grocers and on a whim, I bought one last week. I had the highest aspirations for my precious pineapple. It travelled so far just for me to eat it after all. But out of nowhere, a stomach bug struck on Wednesday and I had no choice but to put the pineapple in the fridge. I trimmed it today and filled 2 pint-sized ball jars with pieces for future use.

I threw the rest of the pineapple (about a cup) in the Vita-mix with a banana, a few pieces of frozen mango, 1/3 cup of light coconut milk, 4 ice cubes, a tablespoon of chia seeds, 1/4 cup of coconut water, and... 2 kale leaves. I had to get something local and green in there somewhere!

I turned the Vita-mix up gradually from one to ten then flipped the switch to high and blended until smooth, about a minute. My post-yoga smoothie was so delicious that I drank the whole thing (the recipe yielded about 16 ounces!) before I even thought about sharing the recipe. Shame on me for not taking any pictures of my tropical smoothie, but I hope you'll take a few pictures from our recent Jamaican vacation instead. :-)

We visited a rasta village, where this rastaman oriented us to their plant-based diet 

The rastamen fed us some delicious fresh fruit!

Then the rastamen made some music for us!

Then they made us make some music with them.

We also went to the Blue Mountains to see where Jamaica grows coffee. That's me... roasting coffee beans!

And that's me grinding coffee beans (or at least pretending to)  ;-)

It was so cool to actually PICK a coffee bean!

Popping coffee beans out of their berry is fun! 

Our tour bus dropped us off at the top of the mountain and we rode down to the bottom, stopping for lunch and to learn about the local plants. We had a blast, despite the rain, and decided to really ham it up for our poncho pics!

Where's the sun?

Can you see the waterfall?

We just used our imaginations to see through the fog.

Pretty ponchos... er... waterfall ;-)

It was too cold to swim!

We made it down in one piece!