Healthy Hams Smoothie

Of course we are supposed to eat fruits and veggies. Most of us don't get enough of either of these in our diet and we know it. So if there's an easy way to improve our diets, maybe that will be something we can do to make a change we already know we should make - right?

One 12 ounce glass is about 3 1/2 servings of fruit. So, here's a way to get your fruit for the day and it is almost painless!

The Fruit Smoothie (and, yes, my wife gets the credit here):

This recipe makes about two 12 ounce servings (or you can drink the whole thing if you want.)

Make ahead and freeze these ingredients...
1. A medium-sized banana sliced into fairly thin slices (don't go crazy). Put into a ziploc bag or just wrap in saran wrap and place in freezer overnight.

2. 1 cup of strawberries. Use fresh or frozen. Either way, slice into smallish pieces. Again, ziploc bag or saran wrap one cup portions and freeze.

3. 1/2 cup of blueberries. We buy frozen and that works great. If you want to try fresh, then see the strawberry prep but you should not have to slice a blueberry.

You can do the prep and make enough ahead for several smoothies. That makes the actual smoothie preparation go pretty easy. It goes something like this:

1. Get out your blender and put in 2 cups of orange juice (not frozen)
2. Add the packets you've made using the frozen banana, frozen strawberries, and frozen blueberries to the blender.
3. Let set for a few minutes before blending. Sometimes the fruit is hard to blend.
4. Start blender on slow, then increase the speed until the sound is smooth (get it?) and everything is blended.
5. Pour into glasses and enjoy a very refreshing drink.

You can get as creative as you want with this recipe, but this is as basic as you can get. If you want to make it thicker, you can add some yogurt. OR, you can freeze 1/2 cup of pineapple and add that in the mix.

Anyway, this is an easy way to get your daily servings of fruit. I guess the cleanup is the hardest part, but even that goes fairly smooth.

Although I haven't tried it, you could buy one of the frozen fruit packages at the store and measure out equivalent amounts for the berries. You'll still need the bananas, tho.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

...AR