Smoothies!!

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Hey there EM Biggest Loser ladies!
MaryAnne mentioned talk of smoothies and asked me to run through my routine.
That woman will get in to your head.  Embrace it.  Once she got into mine my grocery trips started looking like this more frequently:

(yes that is Hagen Daas in there.  But it's sorbet and lasts a long time so I'm totally off the hook!)

I love to get cases of fruit during the summer when it's super cheap and freeze it, so I have all of that to go to through the winter, but I skimped there this year in favor of convenience.

Yay for giant bags of frozen fruit!
Ahead of time prep has really helped me up my intake of fruits and veggies since the beginning of the year.  The bonus is that my little vultures are not as prone to try and eat the whole blender full of smoothie the second if finishes if I'm not making them every day.

I've actually gone two ways on the ahead of time prep for smoothies.

Route one was to use sandwich size freezer bags to stash ingredients for enough to make one or two smoothies  Then I can just grab a bag, add some ice and water and toss it in the blender.  No divying out from giant bags of frozen things or trying to figure out what sounds good that morning.  It was great to have a dozen or more bags all set to just dump and blend.
But you did hear that mention of circling vultures, right?  So this method has taken backseat for a while and I've moved on to route two.

Voila!
Lots of smoothies all ready to go.  Ok, the white one is pina colada, so that's a treat.  Ignore that one.  And yes, those are golf balls on the end.
Thankfully this keeps the kids a little more at bay.  This prep method, not the golf balls.
(I swear I feed them. a lot.  I promise.)  Occasionally I'll get little spoon scrapings along the top of one of these, but oh well.  If a kid wants to work that hard for some frozen smoothie shavings, more power to them.

So here's my big smoothie recipe secret.  You ready?
Fruit.
and that's it.  Ok, well, water also.  If I'm using fresh fruit instead of frozen I'll throw in ice too.
You get the people with fabulous fancy pants recipes....different yogurts, protein powders, juices, even oatmeal....not me.  I don't even do greens.  Shhhh-don't tell the green smoothie fanatics.  I just don't love them.  It's true what they say about taste-throw a handful of spinach or kale in there, you can't taste it at all.  I just really don't do well thawing out a bunch of green sludge.  Fresh, sure.  Frozen, no.  It's a total aesthetics things for me.

My smoothies look like this:

Today we have blueberry, strawberry, mango, peach, pineapple.
With that much fruit I add about 3c of water.

I was blessed with an amazing blender when the hubby brought this sucker home eight years ago and I didn't kill him.  I thought about it, especially when I heard the cost, and one of his biggest reasons for buying it ("it makes soups!"), but I didn't.  And I can say eight years later that it really was worth it.  Good investment dear.  If you have one, fabulous, if you are worried about your blender's capabilities, start with the water and add the fruit slowly so it doesn't get too thick and lock up.

Push go.
Blend.
Tough stuff.

My favorite storage method is these big plastic cups from Walmart.  Four for a dollar.  Hard to beat.

You could pour the smoothie in a ziploc bag or try a disposable cup for easier disposability if you're on the go, but honestly, my gigantic van is so full of crap most of the time anyway that it really doesn't bother me to have a cup in there if I'm headed somewhere.

To thaw I just pop it in the microwave for 45 seconds.  Soft enough to make it easy to chop up, but it doesn't make it all nasty melty.  Thick enough to spoon up, or give it a few more seconds to make it straw worthy-which is definitely the easier option if you are headed out somewhere.  If you're headed out it would probably be even better to dump it in your giant gas station lidded cup that you usually fill with Diet Coke.  You don't want that garbage anymore anyway, right?

And remember those vultures I mentioned?  uh-huh.

The blender started up and they came running.

If you are looking for exotic smoothie recipes, go play around on google.  I'm sure you could find more than you could possibly know what to do with!

Drink up!