MAMMA CHIA - BLACKBERRY HIBISCUS

As I mentioned in my last post (which was written about a hundred years ago, give or take a few days) I have been trying to lose weight. The weight loss attempt has been one of the major reasons I haven't reviewed anything lately.  I'm not on a carrots and water only diet or anything, but I haven't really eaten much of anything interesting enough to review.  Regular, healthy food is kind of boring, am I right?  The only times I've really gotten to eat anything new and exciting and reviewable, I'm usually hunched over in a corner, growling at anyone who gets too close, and shoving it into my face at a rate that isn't conducive to actually writing about it.

Plus, y'all, I'm not so good at the whole dieting thing.  I get mean when I get hungry, and unless you wanted to read profanity laced rants about vegetables, I didn't think reviewing would be such a good idea.

However, even though I'm still on the elusive trek of weight loss, I just had something that sort of begged to be reviewed.  BEGGED!  It is a strange little beverage that I picked up at my local Fresh Market and it needs to be talked about.

I don't really know what possessed me to buy this.  Just looking at it kind of gives me the heaves, and as I have fairly well established, I have trouble with anything that has a strange texture, and no matter what one might think just by looking at this stuff, it would have a strange texture.  Bet on that.  When I was looking through the beverage cooler for something new and exciting, I came across this bottle and thought:  "Why not?"  At the very least, I figured, I wasn't actually going to drink this stuff.  I'd just leave it in my fridge until it expired and throw it away unopened because that's how I roll.  But no...this time I made myself promise that I wouldn't waste my money.  If I was going to buy it, then I was going to try it. 

I'm not a novice when it comes to actually consuming chia seeds.  I actually bought a 5 pound bag of them a couple of years ago, just out of curiosity, and have steadily eaten them in one thing or another.  I mean, I'm still not done with that 5 pound bag, but the supply has dwindled.  I've added the weird little seeds to just about everything, even sprinkling them on french fries at one point, but the one thing I would not...could not...make myself do is pour them in liquid and drink them.  I just absolutely couldn't do it.  I tried, I really did, but just the idea of the little gelatinous blobules having to slide down my throat just gagged me.  I'd read that whatever indigenous peoples that the chia seed pushers credit with first eating them used to drink them like that, as some kind of lumpy energy tonic, but I couldn't think about it without seriously almost horfing.

So why did I buy an already mixed bottle of chia seed slime juice?  Well, because it was pretty, OK?  It was pretty!  I liked the color, I liked the shape of the bottle, and the little floaty seeds looked like pearls!  I'm not proud of my reasonings, but there you go.  Don't you dare judge me.  Of course, I also like blackberry and hibiscus flavored drinks, and I figured that if I DID manage to make myself drink this stuff, I'd at least not be put off by the flavor.  Both of those flavors are fairly strong, so even if the drink was grassy or tasted green...the other flavors might cover that up. I was strangely determined to drink this stuff for some reason.

So anyways, as usual, I left the bottle in the fridge for a long, long time.  I kept looking at it and them pushing past it for something else.  I hadn't quite gotten brave enough to try it.  Had it not been for the sheer laziness born out of recovering from a nasty upper respiratory infection, insomnia, food poisoning and a  bad reaction to some codeine cough medicine, I probably would have passed it up again and just made a smoothie.  However, I was too tired and I didn't want to have to clean up my blender, so I grabbed this drink and a protein bar and prepared to try it.

I figured that the best way to deal with it was to just jump in with both feet and take a huge swig to start things off.  I had the protein bar as kind of a safety net, just in case the texture of the drink was too off putting, so with that open and at the ready, I dove in.

My first thought was "Oh, God...it's lumpy. It's slithery...it's, well, it's not so bad, I guess."  I took a chomp off of my protein bar, glad to have a foil to the the slippery, frog-spawn texture of the drink.  The blackberry and hibiscus flavorings were actually pretty good, and it even sort of gave me a kind of impression of eating ripe blackberries.  You know, with the seeds and all.  However, I couldn't keep up the illusion.  As determined as I was to finish the bottle, I had to keep my mind off of what I was doing.  It was like trying to drink Jell-O that had been firmed and then cut into tiny pieces.  Chewing the seeds only made it worse.  The taste was fine but the texture just got more difficult to deal with the more I drank the stuff.  It seemed like I'd never get done with the bottle.  Maybe it was the hydrated seeds that sort of filled up the empty space, but the amount in the bottle didn't seem to go down.  I tempered each sip with a bite of protein bar, and finally just convinced myself that I needed to pound that stuff, just to make it gone.  So I did.  I think I probably could have finished the whole thing if I hadn't looked into the bottle and saw the seeds oozing along the side of the container, but at least I got most of it down.  Whew.

I have to say, it didn't taste bad at all.  I actually liked the flavor I picked out quite a bit.  I was also really, very full when I was done drinking what I could, although some of that has to be attributed to the meal bar I was chowing on while drinking the Mamma Chia.  I even kind of think the name is clever, if you like ABBA puns of course.  Will I ever drink this beverage again?  I can't say that is going to happen.  Granted, I'm happy for the health benefits of the Omega-3s, fiber and calcium that I sucked down.    If the web site is to be believed:

“In terms of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone. As tiny as those seeds are, they’re superpacked with Omega-3s, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber and antioxidants."

I would certainly prefer to drink another Mamma Chia rather than the smoothie they describe.  I just don't think I could brave the sliminess of the product again.  Do I recommend it?  Sure, if textures don't bother you and you're looking for a new and healthy drink to give you an extra boost, give it a go.  It tastes good and has a lot of good stuff packed into it.  However, if you're like me and you wouldn't be able to get the image of purple frog eggs out of your mind the entire time you're drinking it, give it a pass.  

WEBSITE- www.mammachia.com

SERVING SIZE: One Bottle
CALORIES: 120  CARBS: 20
TASTE: Quite good, if you can get past the frog-egg texture.