Yummmm... Healthy Green Shakes For The Slurping

Looking to get more greens in your diet? Then definitely check out Alma Schneider at the Montclair Farmers' Market on Saturday, July 17 where she'll be whipping up her Healthy Green Shakes.

Don't worry, they have a sweet side too, and are sure to make even the most skeptical eater want to try them at home, said Schneider of Take Back the Kitchen.  She'll be blending greens, all available at the market, with bananas to make a neon green shake that's sure to increase the number of leafy greens in anyone's day.

"People see me with the big blender and this green stuff and wonder ... what is she doing?" Schneider said. Her go-to recipe includes greens like spinach, collards or kale, as well as some kind of tropical fruit like bananas, mangoes, or pineapple, and finally water, all blended together. Check out her many variations at her blog.  She's also a consultant for the perpetually-stumped-in-the-kitchen types, but she didn't start out that way.

Schneider grew up in New York City before heading to Madison, Wisconsin, where she studied to be a social worker. "It was a bit of a culture shock," she admitted of the midwestern hub of 1960s liberalism. She worked as a licensed clinical social worker and moved to Montclair where she and her husband are raising their four children, all under the age of nine.

Here she met lots of smart, educated moms who seemed to freeze at the thought of cooking dinner every night. Some of them thought they were completely incompetent in the kitchen. "I'd talk to these educated moms about a five-minute recipe and they couldn't do it," she said, still amazed.

She grew up in a family that loved to cook and eat, so it all came naturally to her. But not so for all her friends. The idea for the business came after several challenging attempts to teach one friend to cook something at home. Frustrated, she finally started asking her friend questions about what cooking was like at home when she was growing up. Who did the cooking? What was the atmosphere in the kitchen? At the table?

She wrote up a report for her friend to help her get cooking and when she read it over, she realized she had something more than just a report for a friend. She found she could use her therapist's skills to help people overcome cooking obstacles in the kitchen and Take Back the Kitchen was born in 2007.

"I love to teach people to cook, " she said. Empowerment in the kitchen is a basic tenant of her philosophy because - as she points out - you have to eat.

Next up she's working on a book and maybe even some TV segments. Before her star completely takes off though, she's making her Healthy Green Shakes this Saturday between 9 a.m. and 12:00 p.m.

The Montclair Farmers' Market runs Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Walnut Street Train Station parking lot.