Pumpkin Pie Smoothie

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G’day! No Monday Munchies today – after my sister told me she thought Monday Munchies meant I showed everything I ate each Monday (rather than a random day), I decided I should rethink the concept of the big MM.

Instead, I have a recipe … and a warning. Let’s start with the warning, shall we? (If you just want the recipe, skip to the end of the post.)

I’ll title this section

Why You Should Always Format Your Memory Card (or Hard Drive) Before Use

(I think you can see where this is going.)

Last winter/spring, Peter and I digitized all his parents’ stacks of pictures from when Peter and his siblings were kids, as well as pictures from before they were twinkles in their parents’ eyes. I’ve been running the best pictures through Adobe Lightroom to clean them up, correct white balance/exposure, get rid of red eye, etc.

Now, before you think the worst has happened and we lost all 15,000 pictures, let me just say: no worries. We have, with just a little exaggeration, about 5 million digitized copies of these pictures in various places. The world could be overrun tomorrow by genetically modified talking monkeys with a taste for computers and we’d still be okay.

No, the problem occurred on Saturday, when I plugged a new memory card into my computer that essentially doubled my hard drive space. My native hard drive space was smaller than the likelihood of Peter smoking me some veggies, so I moved my latest batch of Lightroomed pictures to the memory card. Rather foolish, in hindsight.

Picture this: yesterday, early afternoon. I had just cleaned up an adorable picture of Peter at age five dressed as a mailman (blackmail, anyone?). As I dragged it to the new memory card, I realized the card seemed a bit … empty.

Yep, the memory card had erased my latest batch of pictures.

Cue screech (lady-like, of course), and much bargaining with the computer. I think I moved through the five stages of acceptance at least three times. My first hopeful outlook was when I remembered Lightroom can recover pictures if you use the “Find Folder” function.

Then I realized I’d renamed all the pictures by year. D’oh.

All in all, I lost a day and a half of work.

Peter and I discovered the problem was that I hadn’t formatted the memory card for Macs before using it. Like many cards, it was formatted for PCs by default. The lesson? Always format your memory cards and hard drives before using them. And bargaining with your computer totally doesn’t work.

This has been a PSA from your Friendly RD.

Now! Let’s move on to more delicious topics. Pumpkin pie is not my favorite dessert (that great honor is held by Take the Cake‘s Purcell Torte, followed closely by Peter’s dad’s apple pie), but I love the flavor combination of pumpkin and cinnamon. I’ve wanted to switch up my morning smoothie for a while, so with a excess of pumpkin hanging around from last Thursday, I did.

Behold: the Pumpkin Pie Smoothie.

Frozen strawberries are added for sweetness and chill, while a dollop of Biscoff spread adds a nice graham cracker taste. Even Peter loved it despite the Greek yogurt (he’s not a fan). I topped the smoothie with a little honey Noosa yoghurt, some of William‘s granola, and a graham cracker.

Pumpkin Pie Smoothie

  Prep Time: 5 minutes

  Keywords: raw breakfast snack vegetarian pumpkin

Ingredients (1 serving)

  • 1/2 cup low fat/nonfat yogurt or milk
  • 1 small banana
  • 2 small frozen strawberries
  • 1-1/2 tablespoons pumpkin puree
  • 1 tablespoon raw oats
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp chia seeds
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 2 tsp Biscoff spread (optional, for extra graham cracker crust taste)
  • Optional toppings: Graham cracker, granola, dollop of honey yogurt

Instructions

Combine all ingredients except toppings into blender. Blend until smooth. Add toppings.

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Q: Have you ever had a technological “hiccup”?

4 Comments

  1. Gah!! So sorry about the memory card! I hate technology fails like that.

    But I LOVE pumpkin pie…and I imagine I’d love it even MORE in smoothie form!

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