Every Tuesday in The Hipster’s Cookbook, Meghan Bongartz teaches you how to make delicious food on a small budget. This is a special Wednesday edition.

I have a confession to make: I’m kind of on the green smoothie bandwagon. I never meant to drink anything with kale in it. A few months ago, my mom decided to do a juice cleanse that entailed liquid vegetables only for three days, and my reaction was somewhere within the realm of, “Dear God, why would you do that to yourself?” Don’t get me wrong: I love vegetables. It’s just that I’ve always been content to see them in salads and stir fries and other chewable preparations. Anything that required a straw conjured up images of wheatgrass shots, which are legitimately disgusting.

And then I purchased a CSA (community supported agriculture) share. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have a lot of carrots right now, but the carrots are really only the tip of the iceberg. This is the part where I’d like to make a bad pun about iceberg lettuce, but that is, in fact, the only leafy green that I have not eaten over the past month. My refrigerator has been overflowing with greens: spinach, red Russian kale, red rain mustard greens, tatsoi, vitamin green, bok choi, komatsuna, Tokyo bekana, yukina savoy, turnip greens, green concept lettuce, Cherokee lettuce, Swiss chard, and mesclun mix lettuce. I didn’t even know what most of these things were until I had them in my hands, and figuring out what to do with them has been like a part time job. You can only eat a green salad for so many meals in a row, and it’s getting a little warm out for kale soup.

It was inevitable that I would eventually shove everything in a blender to avoid it going bad before I could eat it. The shocker is that it wasn’t awful. I’d even go so far as to say that it was pretty yummy. Granted, I’ve been adding a lot of fruit to these smoothies, but fruit is good for you, too, and they still contain more greens than most people eat in the entire week. I also do sort of feel like Superwoman after drinking a green smoothie. I always assumed that the people who said that drinking green juices made them immediately feel better were mostly full of shit, but it’s true. Ugh. So this is what I’ve been making with my leafy green vegetables. I’ve been adding a little bit of milk to mine because I’m marathon training and need the protein boost, but you could just as easily use water or a non-dairy milk and it would probably taste fine. My favorite green for this has been Tokyo bekana (one of the things I didn’t previously know existed), but since finding that at your local supermarket is probably a long shot, lettuce, spinach, or chard will do nicely.

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Not for Rabbits Green Smoothie

½ cup milk

3 cups spinach/lettuce/your leafy green of choice

2 tbs cilantro

1 banana

1 cup fresh or frozen chopped pineapple

1 kiwi

1) Place milk, greens, and cilantro in blender and process on liquefy or another high setting until smooth.

2) Add fruit and blend a second time until all ingredients are incorporated. If the mixture is too thick (if you’ve used frozen fruit), add additional liquid as desired.

3) Drink up and go be a badass.