Clean and Green Start

It's the beginning of a new month and after all the indulgences and heavier food of the last couple of months, the beginning of February has me all fired up about lighter, cleaner, greener fare. So the motto for this month's cooking will be: clean and green.

With that in mind, I started the family off with a great breakfast smoothie this morning. According to them, it was my best smoothie ever and completely dairy-free. Here's what I blended this morning:

Best-ever Breakfast Smoothie

Ingredients:

12 oz. fresh strawberries, washed and hulled

1 1/2 medium bananas (fresh or frozen)

1 large orange, peeled

1 cup water

Preparation:

Add all the ingredients to a high-speed blender and blend for 30 seconds or until smooth and creamy. Pour into glasses and enjoy. Yield: approximately 4 cups or 32 oz.

Variation:

Many times I like to add 1-2 Tbsp. of freshly ground flax seeds and 1 Tbsp. of wheat grass powder. If you add flax seeds, add a little more water, too, since flax seeds will jell the smoothie slightly.

Apple-Orange-Banana Smoothie

When I grew up, my mom's favorite fruit salad consisted of apples, oranges and bananas. I don't remember her ever dressing the salad, but just cutting up the fruit and tossing the chunks to mix them well. The orange keeps the bananas and apples from turning brown, so it's a salad that is not only healthy, but also looks lovely. After the morning walk with the buddies, I made a smoothie based on my mother's fruit salad combo. It is very tasty and quickly blended.

Apple-Orange-Banana Smoothie

Ingredients:

1 banana

2 apples

2 oranges

8 oz. orange juice (freshly squeezed is particularly nice)

1/2 cup low-fat yogurt

2 Tbsp. freshly ground flax seeds

Preparation:

Wash all fruit well and cut into large chunks. Put all ingredients into a blender and blend on high for about 30 seconds, or until everything is smooth and creamy. The recipe makes about two 16-oz. servings.

Perfect Spring Day, Perfect Smoothie

Here's a perfectly blended smoothie in a beautiful color for a splendid spring day:

Ingredients:

1 papaya, peeled, seeded, cut into chunks

1 orange, peeled and cut into chunks

3/4 to 1  cup of low-fat yogurt

dash of nutmeg

dash of stevia to sweeten smoothie (optional)

Preparation:

Blend all ingredients in a blender for at least 30 seconds until smooth. Pour into glasses. Makes about two 12-oz. servings.

Green Goodness

A few years ago I discovered how good green smoothies are and thought, what an easy way to ingest a lot of fresh, green vegetables. When I started making them, I only used fruit and spinach because drinking a green drink is a little bit of an acquired taste–at least for starters. Spinach actually tastes quite sweet compared to many other greens, so it is perfect to blend with fruit, making the combination very palatable to the "green smoothie novice." Over time, I started adding a few other things, such as a leaf of kale, collard greens, or a stalk of celery. These additions make a green smoothie taste a little more robust and–in the case of celery–even a bit salty. My husband likes them that way, but our kids prefer the "sweeter" version. Here's the recipe for a very simple green smoothie, just the way my daughter Emily likes it:

Ingredients:

1 mango

5 oz. baby spinach

1 1/2 to 2 cups water

Preparation:

Blend all ingredients in a blender until smooth and creamy. This makes about 2 large servings (12 oz. each or more).

Pretty Tasty All-Fruit Breakfast Smoothie

It's been very busy around here for the last couple of weeks and all I have time for today is record the recipe for a pretty tasty breakfast smoothie, dairy-free, that I whipped up in a jiffy this morning before dashing off to another appointment:

Dairy-free Breakfast Smoothie:

1 orange

1 banana

1 apple

6 oz. orange juice, ideally calcium-enriched and non-pulp

Mix all ingredients in a blender on high speed and serve. Makes about one 20-24 oz. single serving that'll fill you up till lunch-time.

Strawberry-Banana-Yogurt Smoothie

I made an excellent breakfast smoothie this morning:

Blend in a blender:

1/2 cup plain, low-fat yogurt

1 fresh banana

6 large strawberries, fresh or frozen

1/2 cup of cranberry water*

This makes about one 16-oz. glass of creamy, pale pink smoothie. Delicious! If the smoothie tastes a little too tart–after all, it all depends on how ripe the banana and how sweet the strawberries are–, you may want to add a little agave nectar or very, very little stevia (sweetleaf) extract. If you're unfamiliar with stevia, please check it out. It's a great and healthy alternative to sugar.

*I make a quart of cranberry water to either sip on its own throughout the day or to use when blending juices and smoothies by mixing 28 oz. of water with 4 oz. of unsweetened cranberry juice.

The Chocolate-Banana-Flax-Flax

Even though I love smoothies, I've never liked my husband's favorite breakfast smoothie because it's too sweet for my taste. But he loves it for some inexplicable reason. So, for the record, here it is. It's a quick recipe!

Dan's Chocolate-Banana-Flax-Flax

Ingredients:

2 scoops chocolate whey protein powder

1 banana

2 Tbsp. ground flax seeds

1 good and generous squirt of flax oil

1 cup water

Preparation:

Add all the ingredients to a blender and blend until smooth and creamy. Then drink.

Morning Rush

As a kid, I remember a Heinzelmännchen cartoon on TV that depicted a little sleeping Heinzelmann that woke up when the alarm rang, hit the snooze button and proceeded to sleep with a smile on his face while a speech bubble above his head read, "only 15 more minutes." Or something like that. (Heinzelmännchen are, according to legend, little Black Forest gnomes that would come into the city of Cologne at night and do all the work for the people, so they could rest and be lazy during the day.)

This morning I had that kind of morning and overslept royally! Awakened by the soothing sounds of my wind chimes buzzer at 6 a.m., I hit the snooze button to stretch out for only one more minute and continued to sleep until 6:46 a.m. That spelled trouble! Of course I had planned on being up early and baking fresh rolls for the kids while making their school lunches, but with all the lost time, I had to make a new plan–and quickly.

The quickest breakfasts, and in all honesty some of the most nutritious, are fruit smoothies made in a high-speed blender. I use a VitaMix and love it. It can turn anything into a smooth puree. In any case, a quick look into the freezer and I found some frozen wild blueberries. The idea of a fruit smoothie was born. Bananas? Check. Yogurt? Check. I toasted two slices of whole grain bread and whipped up the following recipe in the blender:

Blueberry-Banana Smoothie:

2 bananas

1 cup yogurt

1 cup frozen blueberries

a good squirt of flaxseed oil

Blend everything until very smooth and creamy. Pour into two glasses. Makes about two 10-oz. servings–the perfect amount for the whirly-birds before school.

School lunches had to be done quickly, too, so I made sandwiches for the girls with ham and baby swiss cheese, cut up a whole orange for each one and filled their waterbottles with fresh water. Well, that was my rushed morning in a nutshell.