Healthy Food Choices: Smoothies

The other day I was thinking a lot about how poorly I’ve been feeling and starting thinking about what was some of the differences between days when I feel pretty good and when I don’t, and one thing that came to mind was the amount of fruit I’m eating.

Lately, I’ve not been eating much fruit, mostly because we are low. And then I realized that my son and I had stopped making smoothies as well.  So I headed downstairs to see what I could scrounge up for a smoothie.

Smoothies are just cold blended drinks. My sister-in-law juices her fruit first and then blends the juice with milk or yogurt.  I prefer to just blend up whole fruit and have my smoothies a little thicker and more filling.

A while back,  thanks to this video from Craig Ballantyne, the fitness trainer behind Turbulance Training, my son and I were inspired to start experimenting with adding different things to smoothies.

(in case you are interested that link Craig talks about is www.EasyVeggieMealPlans.com)

An Orange & Banana smoothie made with yogurt, oatmeal, and flax seeds

Since then we’ve found our favorite smoothie recipes include the following ingredients:

• Fruit (usually a banana and something else)
• yogurt
• a handful of oatmeal
• about a tablespoon of flax seeds

My son’s favorite combination is banana and orange juice (I keep an ice cube tray full of frozen orange juice for smoothies and cooking).

My favorite combinations are:

• blueberries, mixed berries, and banana
• banana and strawberry

I’ll even throw fresh spinach in with the mixed berries.

my 6 yo making a pomergrante/blueberry smoothie

We don’t have a blender any more (I broke it), so we use my Cuisinart SmartStick hand blender, and it makes it really easy for the kids to use and for clean up. And, in September, we discovered that the stick blender is really easy to travel with and make smoothies on the road.

So anyway, after I had this realization that I hadn’t been having my fruit or a smoothie in a while. Found some frozen banana slices in the freezer, added in a handful of frozen blue berries (that we picked for a local berry farm), and added in the yogurt, oatmeal, and flax seed.

My son of course drank 1/3 of the mixture. (”Smoothie, you’re making a smoothie? Can I have some?” )

But it tasted good and I felt much better for the rest of the day. So lesson learned (I hope), my smoothies and fruit are impacting how I feel. So Tomorrow I get to go grocery shopping again – and smoothie making ingredients are on the top of the list!

If you haven’t experimented with smoothies, I recommend doing so! It’s a lot of fun to experiment with… and if you have  10 year old son who likes to play with ingredients in the kitchen, like I do, this might be right up his alley

Enjoy!

…Shannon

P.S.  Angie has been experimenting with Green Monster Smoothies, you might enjoy reading her experience with Green Smoothies where Spinach is a major ingredient.