A Smoothie a Day

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but with three little kids to feed and all the chaos that comes with them, preparing and eating a healthy meal for myself turns out to be a near impossible task. So, thanks to Pinterest, I found a couple yummy-looking green smoothies to try and make mornings easier and healthier.

The two that I decided to try first were from here and here. A green apple and kale smoothie and a strawberry and spinach smoothie. 

On Monday, I went out to the grocery store to purchase all the ingredients I would need. It was a memorable experience as I bought kale for the very first time in my life. I didn't even know what it looked like or where to find it! Ha ha! Same goes for flax seed! I felt pretty awesome at the checkout, with all my veggies and fruit and flax :)

In under a hour I had washed, chopped, and portioned out all the ingredients together in ziploc bags for freezing. I was able to put together 6 packs of each smoothie. After looking at my grocery bill, I calculated that each pack cost around $2! Sa-weet! 

Here are the recipes for each:

GREEN APPLE AND KALE

- 1 cup Kale (stems removed, coarsely chopped, firmly packed)

- 1/2 cup Parsley (loosely packed)

- 1 Granny Smith Apple (cored and chopped)

- 1 Banana

- 2 1/4 cup Water (to be added just before blending)

STRAWBERRY GREEN SMOOTHIE

- 2 cups Strawberries (Frozen)

- 1/2 Banana

- 2 Tbsp Flax Seeds

- 3 cups Fresh Organic Baby Spinach

- 1 cup Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk (to be added just before blending)

I was excited for the next morning to give one of the smoothies a try, but unfortunately a little accident in our house caused me to have to bring our middle child to the hospital, nothing serious, but still unpleasant :( I was back at the house by noon, so I quickly pulled out an apple and kale smoothie pack from the freezer and gave it a whirl in the blender. 

Bleh!

I still don't even know what kale tastes like because the smoothie tasted entirely of parsley. If it were not for the fact that the smoothie was ice cold, I would have tried to chug the whole thing as quickly as possible just to get it over with. Okay. Okay. Maybe I'm being a little harsh. It wasn't THAT bad, but it wasn't THAT great either. Also, as I suspected while portioning out the ingredients, 1 pack yielded 2 whole servings. I ended up sharing some with the whole family. Everyone said that they liked it, but nobody drank very much of it either. I think that for the future I will remove some of the parsley from the pack before blending. We'll see if that works, and I hope it does because I will be very annoyed if food goes to waste. Especially if it's HEALTHY food that I so proudly bought at the store this week.

Tomorrow I will be trying the strawberry spinach smoothie and I'm thinking that it will go over better than the kale one. But I am also certain that as my body and my tastebuds get used to new flavours I will be trying all sorts of healthy green smoothies will all kinds of new and delicious fruits and veggies.

I am still learning and it will only get better (I hope)!