Last summer was so hot! We had 70+ days with temperatures above 100 degrees. And the drought! Our normal average rainfall amount is around 32 inches. Last year we had 11 inches of rain. We’ve had 18 inches of rain already this year. We are desperately hoping that the 18 inches recorded so far are not all that we are getting for the year. We had a mild winter, a warm spring and we are suspicious of the upcoming summer, thinking that it might be a replay of last year’s.

With the extreme heat and drought of last summer in mind, I have a plan: I’m going to blend my way through the upcoming summer. Smoothies and easy soups are on my supper menu. I treated myself to a Vitamix machine. (It was demonstration and sample day at the store and everything the Vitamix demonstrator made was really good!)

The first recipe I conquered was the Banana Blueberry Orange smoothie. It’s really cool and refreshing; definitely a keeper. To balance my diet, my next recipe was the Potato and Spinach soup that can be prepared mostly in the Vitamix; you just have to bake (or nuke) the potatoes first. There are only five ingredients in the soup (my kind of recipe), so how hard can it be?

Well, I don’t know how hard it can be in reference to an upper limit of “hard,” but I know that this recipe is making me work. I think the potatoes I use are too big and they overpower the soup. At least that’s what I think happened on my first two efforts. This recipe makes a lot of soup: seven cups. The instructions say that you can cut it in half, but I didn’t notice that until after I made the soup saw how much there was. (Really? I’m supposed to read all the instructions first?)

I was hoping to have success with one recipe before moving onto another one. However, if I keep this structure, it may turn into a Banana Blueberry Orange smoothie summer.