Smoothie Recipe

What best way to start your day than by drinking, or eating with nuts and cereal, a healthy and delicious smoothie?

The following recipe can be adapted to the fruits and herbs that are in season,  that you grow in your garden or have at hand in your fridge. Change the fruit, the tea, the herbs, the spices to get a different flavor.

In a powerful blender such as a Ninja or Vitamix place the following ingredients:  

• 1 ½ cup tea: ginger, hibiscus, lemon grass, etc.
• 3 TBSP flax seeds
• 3 TBSP sesame seeds
• 3 TBSP sunflowers seeds
• 5-6 almonds

Soak the seeds in the tea overnight; if you prefer a very cold smoothie keep the blender in the fridge.

In the morning add:

• 1 organic orange or grapefruit (remove seeds and use the peel and all, if they are not organic then don’t use the skin)
• 2 bananas (make sure to rub the inside of the skin with a spoon)
• 1-2 organic carrots
• 2-3 kale, Swiss chard, turnip leaves or collard greens
• A bunch of one or two of the following fresh herbs: parsley, cilantro, lemon balm, mint, peppermint, rosemary or any other fresh herb available.
• A few fresh stevia leaves (or use the dry ones to sweeten the tea)
• 1 cup frozen berries (blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries)
• ½ cup frozen figs (fresh figs that are gently dried and then frozen are superb)
• 1 tsp alfalfa powder
• 1 tsp kelp powder
• ½ tsp ginger powder
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp turmeric
• ½ tsp nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper

Blend and drink or serve over popcorn, cereal, nuts and raisins … healthy and yummy!

Notes:

We prefer using tea instead of store bought juices for several reasons, most importantly tea is freshly brewed and we don’t need to buy the juice plus the plastic container! We use any tea that we've made for the day - green tea,  mint, ginger, yogi tea, chamomile, Echinacea, elderberry, lemon grass, hibiscus, rose hip, etc. In the summer we use slices of watermelons and there is no need to add anyother liquid.  

We love to harvest or purchase fruits when they are in season; then we freeze them in gallon bags, which is something I learned to do when I came to live in Alabama, traditionally we don’t freeze fruits in Mexico; blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, mulberries and even figs keep well up to a year.

We have several fig trees growing in the orchard, in August there are literally a thousand figs; we eat them fresh and the rest we dry in a solar dehydrator that Alden built; we dry them only enough to concentrate their sugars and then we freeze them… delicious! Figs and bananas  add sweetness to the smoothie.

Other fruits to include to vary the flavor:  apple, apricot, coconut, dates, guava, kiwi, lychee, kumquat, mamey, mango, melon, papaya, pawpaw, peach, pear, persimmon, pineapple, plum, pomegranate, Satsuma, sapote, tangerine, etc.

Awareness Heals!