Smoothie tips please

Start simple, then you can add more things when you discover what you like. My go to smoothie is 1 cup frozen fruit and 1 cup fresh fruit with a 1/2 cup of your favorite yogurt. This way you can avoid messing with ice and the yogurt acts as your liquid base. You can add a half cup water/milk depending on how thick you like. I make these most mornings for part of my breakfast or as a quick snack. Takes me about 3 minutes to make. Some of my favorite combinations: frozen strawberries with fresh peaches, frozen strawberries with fresh raspberries, frozen mango with fresh blueberries. It's pretty easy to throw in some spinach, kale, whatever you like, and the fruit will mask the taste. You can also add bananas, avocado, or oatmeal for a thicker shake, but I normally avoid because I'm allergic to bananas.

hpygal wrote: »

Any tips on your evening/morning organization to make the smoothies? I would also like to try the smoothie route for breakfast, but for me, I think, it would take just as much time making the smoothie than to just make breakfast.

Just curious why you want to go to smoothies for breakfast? Is this for weight loss? Or other reasons?

hpygal wrote: »

SylvieKuchma- Can you freeze the kale and spinach with your bananas into the individual portions? And what would you say is your sweetening agent in your ingredients?

i don't since i use 3oz bananas for green/fruit smoothies and also various shakes that i don't put greens in but you could if you wanted. i would freeze the banana chunks/slices a little first though (wax paper on cookie sheet, layer bananas and freeze for about an hour), otherwise you may end up with a frozen altogether block of ingredients that is hard to break up to fit into your cup/blender later. the ripe bananas tend to freeze to themselves and other ingredients like a rock when not prefrozen before portioning them out..alone in like 3 oz portions, its no big deal for they fit and break easy enough so i don't prefreeze them beforehand.

the 'ripe' bananas are extra sweet when very ripe, so they add natural sweetness to your smoothie/shakes.
also for me, adding 1-2 oz of simply orange juice to all my green/fruit smoothies makes them sweeter and more delicious.
however, i often have days when things are just not sweet emough for me so i add 1-2 drops of ezsweetz liquid sweetener to my smoothies on those days and when i want to rid of any fruit/veggie tart/bitterness.

I would suggest using more greens than fruit, and adding protein and a fat source if you're planning on making smoothies as a meal. Any protein powder will work, and fat sources that add nice flavour are things like nut butter, avocado, coconut cream/milk.

I've had no issue freezing greens with fruit - stops it wilting and going soggy and limp in the fridge over the week!

I'm using a nutribullet, about £70. It is brilliant.

If you want smoothie for breakfast I would recommend adding oats to your smoothies. It will keep you full for longer.
My favourite ones for breakfast:
1. Banana, blueberries, spinach, milk, oats
2. Banana, strawberries, mango, milk, oats
3. mixed berries, yogurt, oats

If you take out oats, they also work great for snacks. Fruits is enough for me to sweeten it up, but if you need extra sweeteness I would recommend honey.

Don't let smoothies overwhelm you. They are easy! Whenever my fruit is about to go soft, I freeze it. Same with kale. I have a ton of frozen kale/fruit(from summer)/bananas in my freezer ready to go. I just grab out a bit of what I need and pop it in my bullet blender. I also add greek yogurt, a splash of milk(cow/almond) and blend away. YUM! I have decided to replace my lunches with smoothies, since I usually eat a big breakfast and I am not extremely hungry in the mid afternoon. I am going to experiment more with adding chia seeds, juices and some other things. But I have learned, it's really hard to mess up a smoothie! Enjoy!

When I'm going to have a smoothie the next morning, I portion out 100g of Trader Joe's Fancy Berry Medley (frozen), 50g of banana (about half of a small-to-medium; I either feed the rest to my kids or save it for another smoothie), and 7g of ground flax seed and put it all in a baggie in the freezer the night before. (Obviously you could do whatever fruits/veggies you want, but that's my fave recipe. It's not bad with a bit of kale, too.) Then the next morning, I throw it in the blender with 1 cup of unsweetened vanilla almond milk. 200 calories, 11g of fiber...if you want more protein you can throw in some protein powder or sub some or all of the almond milk for vanilla greek yogurt (I just personally don't care for either of those options - just taste preference). It takes about 5 min to prep the night before and then about 2 minutes to assemble the next morning before work when those 5 minutes are preciously spent elsewhere!

I've also added raw oats to my smoothies in the past, though I haven't been lately. Works best if you put them in the blender first (dry) and pulse them a bit to break them up to a powder before you add everything else. I actually really like the taste of raw oats (weird, I know) so I liked it a lot (just looking to spend my carbs more wisely these days), but your tastes may vary.

Sorry, no recs on the blender - I've got my Cuisinart regular blender that I got as a wedding gift 8 years ago and it does a great job . If you're looking for low-cost, you might want to consider a stick/immersion blender - they're often a lot more powerful than you'd think.

Here's something that people from the USA would likely freak out about, but is perfectly safe:

For extra protein, replace part of or all of your liquid for a raw egg. You won't even be able to tell the difference, and it's way cheaper than protein powder.