Early Christmas Presents

I know it's super-early to be getting a Christmas present, but my husband just got me a new toy, and it's the one thing that I have been telling him that I wanted for Christmas, so that's what I'm calling it. But semantics aside, I just got something new that I'm very excited about.

This is my new Ninja Mega Kitchen System. If you've seen the infomercial, then you know how awesome it is. I mainly wanted it for its juicing capabilities, but it has a lot of other cool features too, and I'm looking forward to trying them out in the weeks to come.

Since pretty much everything in my house is a family event, the inaugural run of the Ninja was no different. We decided to make orange cream smoothies (because we happened to see someone making them while demonstrating a similar machine the day before, and the kids loved them.)

It was very simple to make, and the kids were happy to be able to help.

We just added two cups of milk, roughly two cups of ice, two peeled oranges, a splash of vanilla, and roughly two tablespoons of Splenda. (The demonstration we saw used Coffee Mate instead of milk, so it was considerably sweeter. The milk is better for you, but it definitely needs a little bit of sweetener if you do it that way.)

The machine worked great, and really did crush the ice like the infomercials say it does. (Of course I forgot to take a picture of that part.) But it really did turn out nicely.

And most of us thought it was yummy.

Unfortunately not everyone was as thrilled with the outcome.

You can't please everyone, I suppose. But we'll definitely have some fun trying out different recipe ideas and finding things that we all like.