Tasty Thursday: Smoothie Style

Smoothies have become a staple in our house, especially with this summer heat we have been experiencing.  We all know smoothies can hide a lot of calories, sugar, and carbohydrates but your smoothies can also be very healthy if you make them healthy.

This is a smoothie we often have in our house.  Notice all that green?  That's about 2 cups of spinach.  Are you curling your lip at me or are you still interested?  Trust me, the first time I heard of spinach in a smoothie I had the same reaction, but trust me, it's delicious.  

This all started with the blender.  Each year, Rick and I go to the fair and eat terribly tasty food but we also check out some of the indoor vendors where we found the Vitamix stand.  Year after year, we would spend 30-45 minutes at this stand staring in awe as the blender grinds peanuts into peanut butter, cooks ingredients into soup, and freezes milk & ice into ice cream.  The blender is ridic!  

After leaving the fair in 2010 we began saving for this blender, because trust me, it's not cheap but we knew we'd get our money out of it by using it often (and it has an amazing warranty) and making lots of foods, drinks, spreads, etc.  So last year, we were excited to go to the fair for more than just stuffing ourselves full of corn dogs and elephant ears.

One of our most common things to make is the smoothie.  The started out only fruit smoothies and the more often Addie was denying veggies the more I thought I have got to find a way to hide the veggies.  And then it hit me, the smoothie!  This kid can't get enough of the smoothies so I began hiding spinach, carrots, squash.  You name it, that bad blender can blend it into nothing so you're never drinking a gritty smoothie.

Tropical Fruit & Spinach Smoothie

Serves 4

1/2 cup water

1/4 frozen blueberries

1 1/2 cups mixed fruit (strawberry, pineapple, mango, peach)

2 cups spinach

Place ingredients into your blender in this order.  Start blender on low and turn to high immediately, using a damper to push the ingredients down to the blades.  Blend until smooth, approximately 1 minute.

Disclaimer:  This smoothie was made in the Vitamix, which is a professional blender that restaurants and gourmet chefs use.  Some blenders may not process the ingredients as well as this one so be prepared to make adjustments so as not to ruin your blender.