Smoothie Operator

This weekend I found myself in a situation that most modern ladies will experience at one time or another: I woke up with an overnight guest in my apartment, taking up way more than his fair share of the bed, and next to nothing in the kitchen to offer the handsome gentleman for breakfast.

"Well," I sighed, "would you like anything in particular this morning, George?"

Yes, it's Freckled K's George! Yes, even after I fed him those dreadful looking Sandra Lee dog cookies made from Heinz Gravy, he's still willing to hang out with me.

(He also likes to make sweet, sweet love to his dog bed, though, so I probably shouldn't look on this as some sort of ringing endorsement of my character.)

I wasn't about to put him through another Sandra Lee experience, though, so I looked for other dog related recipes. And I found these "Power Pooch Smoothies" from some sort of Rachael Ray Feeds Your Pets special.

Rachael Ray has her own dog food line, called "Nutrish" (because apparently in Rachael Ray's world, even dogs must abbreviate everything), and she has her own dog who she apparently hasn't killed yet, so I felt like her recipes might be ok. Plus, there was no gravy or baby food in these.

George still looked skeptical, though. So I made him a deal -- the recipe was supposed to make four dog portions. I told him he could have one portion, and I'd drink the rest.

So you will need: ice water, strawberries or other berries, a very ripe banana, yogurt, and honey.

Coffee mug with the Evil Queen from Snow White on it optional. I'm using a frozen banana here, because I had frozen bananas on hand (I use them to make my own non-power pooch smoothies).

The recipe also calls for a mango, but I don't care for mango myself, and I wasn't about to buy one just for George. Sorry, George. I love you, but it's not like a mango's worth of love.

So you cut up the strawberries and the banana (and the mango, if you love your dog or your friend's dog that much). And then, just like with every other smoothie in the world, you put it in a blender and . . .blend it.

So we ended up with one nice big breakfast smoothie for me, and about one and a half for George. I put George's in the freezer as the recipe indicated, and then drank mine.

"It's good," I told George. "You'll like it."

And it was good -- it was a lot lighter than the recipes I normally use for myself, which seem to involve yogurt and milk and the banana and some other fruit and often peanut butter and sometimes a little bit of Nestle Quik and often the last of the morning's coffee. . .anyway, you get the picture. So I liked it, and found it refreshing.

But I'm easy. I'll eat pretty much everything. I'm sitting here right now eating Jelly Bellies off of my stomach, because Kelly Killoren Bensimon made them look like an integral part of every sane person's diet last week.

The real question was. . . would George like it? So we took his out of the freezer. . .

George ate it with gusto, pushing the ramekin around the floor with his tongue to get the best angles at it. The result of this was that he left a little crescent moon shape of smoothie around one edge of the dish where he couldn't get at it. So he abandoned that part of it, and came back to it after it melted.

So we give the Power Pooch Smoothie two thumbs up -- or one thumb and one paw, rather. But really the best part of the experience was this:

George has a little pink smoothie beard! It's like a milk moustache, but for dogs, and it's adorable.

So I felt satisfied that I'd given George a good breakfast to make up for the horrible Sandra Lee cookies from last summer. But I also felt that, given how little effort it had taken to make the smoothies, and the fact that I'd kept 3/4 of the mixture for myself, I still wasn't being the best hostess.

The question was, was there anything else George and I could make together? What else could we do?

Stay tuned for the exciting answer. . .