Blendtec Around the World: Jerusalem

Join the Richey Family as they travel the globe with their Blendtec blender! Brandon Richey is guest blogging today to share their story and big plans for the next year.

Our Background

Let’s begin by telling our story. It's been years in the dreaming and took months of planning for our 12 month around the world trip that my wife, six daughters and I are on.  DeNae, my wife, and I fell in love with travel after our honeymoon to Cancun and spending a year in Kuwait as students.  We loved the adventure of it, the people we met, and the opportunities for education that travel offers.  So naturally, we wanted to give our kids that experience. I won't go into all the details about how we ultimately ended up on this great adventure or all our plans for it, what matters is we're doing it.  If you are interested, you can read the full story on our blog page entitled “You’re doing What? And Why?”

Don't Forget the Blender

The one thing we did not leave behind on our adventure is our blender. It goes everywhere with us. I know what you’re thinking now, “so you’re lugging a blender around the world for 12 months?”  and the next thought that follows is “are you crazy?” Well, I tend to agree a little, DeNae is a little crazy… but I’m a firm believer in “happy wife, happy life," so the blender came.  To add to the “crazy” factor, not only are we lugging a blender around the world, but we’re lugging a high powered, heavy duty, will last through the apocalypse, Blendtec blender and it’s ended up in my pack!

The third thought that may to your mind is,"why?" Outside of the fact that my wife said that she couldn’t go a year without her Blendtec, it really boils down to health.  Five years ago, we bought a Blendtec as part of a general lifestyle, health transformation and started making all sorts of food in it.  Our three family favorites are the taco soup recipe from the Blendtec recipe book, ice cream, and of course smoothies.  Smoothies are a daily thing around our house, we use it on average four times a day.

There are many benefits of smoothies but to sum up our experience, in the past five years we’ve rarely been sick and when we are its been much shorter lived than those that have had the same thing around us.  We attribute much of this to our change in diet and much of that change revolves around raw foods in the form of nutrition dense smoothies.

So, since I  “get to” lug our Blendtec around the world for the next year, I decided we’d have a little fun with it.  Over the course of the next year we’ll throw local foods into our Blendtec and see what concoctions come out the other side.  We’ll share our favorite recipes, and in the spirit of “you have to try this, it’s so gross” maybe even some of our not so favorite recipes.  Below is our first delicious smoothie recipe from Jerusalem.

Our First Jerusalem Smoothie

This is the first of many smoothies we’ll make as we start our 12 month around the world family adventure.  So, what did we find in Jerusalem to make this first smoothie with? Well, very similar items to what we have at home in Seattle, but with a few twists.  Keep in mind that this is what my girls call the “good” smoothie, even though it's green. We created this to celebrate our first day in Jerusalem!

Ingredients Background

• Bananas - they look well ripened, but they oddly weren’t. I believe they came from one of the kibbutzim in northern Israel.
• Peanut butter – no natural peanut butter at the local supermarket so we went with sugar filled Jiffy… turned out to be a good choice since the bananas weren’t ripe enough to be very sweet. A week later we did find some natural PB which ranks much higher on DeNae’s healthy food list then Jiffy.
• Spinach – since we don’t read Hebrew we were glad it came packaged in a clear bag.
• Almond milk –The main label was in English but everything else was in Hebrew and turns out this was sweetened too.

It’s a delicious and quite a healthy smoothie, even with the refined sugar, we made to celebrate our first day in the Holy City and to help us through the exhaustion from a few weeks of moving and international flights. We hope you enjoy it and our recipes to come!

Our next Jerusalem recipe will be homemade hummus, one of my favorite foods and is a staple food here in the Middle East.  So, stay tuned for our family’s adventures in blending as we explore the world this year and share our “Blendtec Around the World” experiences! Let’s see how it helps keep our family healthy and happy.