Hi. I’m Cambridge. I work at Alchemy and Alexis is my boss. She asked me months ago to write a blog post telling you all what it like on the other end of it all. I agreed back then, but only now does it feel right to post this.

…Because she’s going out of town. And I’ll have a head-start at skipping town before she gets back.

Quick summary on me. I’m a certified yoga teacher currently searching for my tribe who trusts that their practice can only be improved with sludge metal growling in the background.

I used to be a mortician. Yis. Fer rill. Creeping out strangers with terrifyingly accurate anatomical knowledge since 2011. I also have a cat named Dirt Bike and I love him. He is my golden prince. My trashbaby. My little sunny-side-up breakfast platter. I talk about him too much and will never stop because he is perfect.

Anything else important you’d need to know about me is on my Tinder profile.

Okay. So. What’s it like to work at Alchemy? Well, under our current regime of Alexis Joseph, it sort of adds a North Korean-dictatorship-quality to your day: weep uncontrollably on the inside but never show weakness to Great Leader under threat of punishment. Do you know why “salt” is on the list of ingredients in the chocolate avocado pudding? It’s secretly tears.

Alchemy is successful because of three things: regular blood sacrifices to minor demons, the Cthulian occultists who live in the janitorial closet and whisper prayers to the Drowned God, and our staff’s patience with the many creative mispronunciations of the word “cacao.” I do have to say, though, that I appreciate that the ritual whippings are scheduled ahead of time so that I can plan my day around them; and the whispered prayers aren’t so annoying once you learn to follow along: “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

In all seriousness, I’ve worked a lot of different jobs and Alchemy is my actual favorite. I work with and for some of the raddest humans on the planet! I mean, I just compared my boss to Kim Jong Un and not only did she not fire me, she published it on her blog! (And when I sent her the draft of that particular paragraph, she replied with FOUR cry-laughing emojis!)

This is the first job I’ve had where I am encouraged to be my REAL self! The weirdness that I bring to the table is embraced and that unconditional love allows me to let go and get creative. This leads me to the main point of my post today, which is to give y’all a smoothie recipe born of that weirdness.

Now for a little backstory. One day, we were discussing what our spirit animals were and I said mine was a crow. Crows are traditionally seen as a fearsome omen, the harbinger of death clad in black. In reality, crows are incredibly intelligent animals that possess certain abilities (such as complicated tool-usage) that were once thought only to be available to humans and other higher-ape species.

And yes, in some folklore crows are depicted as fools, thieves, and demons but in others, Crow is a wise trickster who is a friend of Death. And what are crows usually doing when you notice them? They’re laughing! They are called terrible names, they scavenge to survive, they see Death… and they laugh.

So now I present to you a smoothie invented to satisfy your inner trickster. It’s filling, caffeinated, packed with loads of good nutrients, and is probably the only black smoothie you’ve ever seen. Regarding the protein powder in this recipe, we love Healthy Skoop vanilla brown rice protein.

For blog purposes, we renamed this smoothie from The Crow (its name at Alchemy) to Midnight Mocha Smoothie. But we all know The Crow is where it’s at.

Midnight Mocha Smoothie

• Author: Alexis Joseph, MS, RD, LD
• Prep Time: 5 mins
• Total Time: 5 mins
• Yield: 1 1x

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A unexpectedly delicious superfood-packed smoothie with grapes, blueberries, coffee beans, spirulina, and raw cacao. Perfect for a quick, nutrient-dense breakfast!

Ingredients

• 1 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk
• 1/2 cup frozen blueberries
• 1/2 cup frozen grapes
• 1 scoop vanilla brown rice protein powder (add sweetener of choice if omitting this)
• 1 tbsp cacao powder
• 1 tbsp whole coffee beans
• 1 tsp spirulina*

Instructions

1. Combine all ingredients in a high-speed blender until smooth (I use my Nutribullet). There will be some texture from the coffee beans–that’s a good thing!

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And there you have it! A smoothie that would make Jon Snow proud. If he’s even still alive.

Thank you so much for letting me interrupt your regularly-scheduled food blog with my really awful macabre humor! I hope the smoothie makes it worth it, at least.

And a huge thank you to Alexis and the rest of my Alchemy family for making me feel so welcome. If you’re ever in Columbus, Ohio, stop by and I’ll make a Crow for you and we can talk about how rad Dirt Bike is! And maybe, if we’re both lucky, we will both have swiped right on each other. But just remember…

[Tweet “Drink your superfoods! Midnight Breakfast Smoothie via @TheHummusapien”]