Vegan MoFo 19: MacGyver Smoothie

As I was approaching my office building this morning, it occurred to me that I had no idea what I would blog about for MoFo today.  Then, as I was climbing the stairs to my floor, I realized with a panic that I had forgotten to pack my pre-run smoothie.  Last night, I made a double batch, so I'd have one for last night's speedwork run and another for my noon "easy" run today.  But when I packed up my lunch for today, I failed to pack my smoothie.  ::sob::

We have a little newsstand/convenience store in my building, so I devised a plan for a replacement smoothie.  I keep soymilk in our shared office fridge, and we have a blender in our kitchen.  So I thought I'd buy a banana and also a trail mix so I could mine some dates for the smoothie.  Then, a terrible thought as I approached the store:  it's Friday!  More often than not, they are out of bananas come Friday.  And sure enough:  As I entered the store, I saw there were no bananas.  My next thought was that maybe I could find a replacement ingredient that would allow me to MacGyver a smoothie.

The shelves and the drink case were not promising.  But then I thought of the frozen-dessert case.  FrozFruit!  Some flavors are vegan and some are not, so I hoped for the best and had a look.  Luckily, there were strawberry FrozFruits.  I checked the ingredients to be extra sure, and while it passed the "vegan" test, unfortunately it did contain HFCS.  But the only other possible option was strawberry Italian ice--and that didn't even contain any strawberry or other actual fruit.  So I decided to go with the less-than-optimal FrozFruit.  Next, I picked up a tropical trail mix. Not only did it have dates, but it also had dried, shredded coconut--a partial replacement to my usual coconut oil.

So I mined some dates, coconut flakes, a few pineapple pieces, and sunflower seeds from the trail mix.  I put them in a container and soaked them in my usual mix of soymilk and water (.5 cup of each).  I tucked that away in the fridge and allowed the FrozFruit to thaw for a little over an hour and then stashed it in the fridge to avoid total liquefication.

Smoothie-making time arrived about 2.5 hours later.  I assembled the ingredients in the blender, mixed them up, then added my usual four ice cubes and ground them in, as well.

The smoothie ended up tasting pretty good, though sweeter than what I'm used to.  I did find that I was getting a bit of an odd aftertaste/repeating-on-me effect for maybe 15 minutes after having the smoothie, but that didn't last, fortunately.  And my run went well, too.

That was more drama than I'd prefer to have surrounding my pre-run fuel, but the upside is that my smoothie for Sunday's long run is already made.  Plus, I had something to blog about today.  :)