Wheatgrass

My frozen wheatgrass shots turned up yesterday. You're supposed to take it on an empty stomach, so I've just had my first one and am giving it a few minutes before I have breakfast.

This stuff is a very disturbingly deep green colour. My first mistake was in believing the bit in the instructions where it says, "Put your frozen shot in room temperature water for about five minutes and then drink it". All I can say is, it must be an awfully hot room if it can melt one of those shots in five minutes. It took me at least ten minutes of determined stirring, with the sneaky addition of a bit of warm water from the kettle, to melt my shot.

The best way I can think of to describe the smell is to think of grass that's been left to grow a bit too long and has been mown when it's a bit damp. Which makes sense, because that's pretty much exactly what this stuff is. It also tastes like that, and if you happen to do a little burp after drinking it, you get the same flavour repeating on you - regardless of whether you've had anything to eat in between.

So I have another form of torture to go through and to hold against my eventual child when it becomes a stroppy teenager. (Hmmm, perhaps that's why the universe doesn't consider me a suitable person to become a parent...)

On the plus side, the claims for the health benefits of wheatgrass began with a coincidental observation by a farmer. He used fresh cut grass in an attempt to nurse his sick hens back to health. Not only did they recover, but they produced more eggs than the previously healthy hens. In later experiments, he found that hens which had their diet supplemented with wheatgrass produced twice as many eggs as previously.

Now, I know I'm not a hen, but if I could double my egg production, and make them better quality too, it'd be worth having the flavour of damp grass in my mouth for a couple of months.

It's also claimed that wheatgrass helps blood flow, digestion and general detoxification - if it helps me to flush out all the drugs I've been taking over the last few weeks, that'll be no bad thing as a start.

There is one thing I'm not prepared to put up with, though. Some people have reported that this stuff stains their teeth green. If I end up with green teeth, the wheatgrass shots are going in the bin...