Sensational Smoothies

“Mom – can I please have an apple? I’m staaaarving!”

“Well of course you can, honey!” Overcome with giddiness, I reach into the fridge for a juicy organic apple…brimming over with pride that my daughter has asked for a healthy treat instead of cheese puffs or candy. My constant yammering about healthy eating has taken hold! I stand in the kitchen, all dreamy-eyed as I pat myself on the back for being such a supermom…I –

“Here – I’m full.” She hands me the half-eaten apple and retreats to her book, leaving me totally deflated with what’s left of the apple in one hand, and my burst balloon in the other. Oh, how quickly the mood changes…I get really frustrated when we waste food – even more so when it is something expensive like an organic apple. %#^&*#!!

butternut squash

No worries though – we just toss that apple into the blender with some other fruits and vegetables and it is transformed into a sensational smoothie…a tasty titallating treat for those taste buds. Oh yes! Anything goes! (And yes, if you were over I would definitely cut off the teethmarks 😉 )

Juicing is great, but it wastes all the fiber, and your body really needs that to help you metabolize the sugar from the fruits more slowly – so why throw that all down the drain? If you want to add harder, more fibrous fruits/vegetables like carrots and spinach, you really want to get a high-powered blender like the Vitamix that I use. It’s a big investment up front, but if you’re like me you’ll use it almost daily and it is so worth it.

At the end of the day I can meet my nutritional needs with a smoothie – adding some type of milk or yogurt if I need calcium, tofu or chia seeds for protein, spinach for iron, flax seeds for omega-3’s.. the possibilities are endless. Today I needed a boost of vitamins A and C, so I made this one with clementines, the rest of that apple, a carrot, some pineapple, the rest of the butternut squash and a little ginger root. So delicious, bright and colorful – a ray of sunshine on what was yet another rainy day this winter. Ahhhhh…

…and there’s me right in the thick of it! 😉

Approximate Nutritional stats are for these amounts: (made 2 servings)

• 115 gram Apples, with skin, fresh
• 70 gram Pineapple
• 50 gram Carrots, fresh
• 2 gram Ginger root, fresh
• 60 gram Butternut Squash, baked
• 205 gram Clementine Mandarins

(1 Serving)

Calories 117
Total Fat 0.2 g
Saturated Fat 0 g
Sodium 19 mg
Total Carbohydrate 28 g
Dietary Fiber 5 g
Sugars 20 g
Protein 2 g
Vitamin A 405 µg
Vitamin C 83 mg
Calcium 68 mg
Iron 1 mg

*this was 58% of my day’s vitamin A and 111% of my day’s Vitamin C, plus 27% of my day’s recommended fiber