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

Healthy Hams

A 12-year battle with cancer that started as colon cancer makes one a veteran in the eating wars. My wife does make sure we eat healthy .. lots of fish, chicken, limited amounts of red meat, veggies, salads, fruits. I've learned a lot from her about what to eat and what to avoid. It has paid off for both of us, but we did get a dietary shock this week!

We monitored the trans-fats, the fat grams, and the sodium in our foods. But we had not really paid much attention to the sugar. So even though we were diligent, we were still surprised.

One of our favorite cereals (that we thought was a healthy choice) came up in a magazine article as high in sugar. It turns out that this popular and well-regarded cereal (KASHI brand) had the equivalent of 3.25 teaspoons of sugar in a 1-cup serving! Well, that is a lot of sugar to take in at one sitting, so we started checking out other things in our daily diet.

One of our other favorite cereals is Raisin Bran. Seems safe enough, right? Well the box in the cupboard showed 24 grams of sugar in one-half cup - YIKES! Just to compare, we did a little math and came up with 4 grams of sugar equals 1 teaspoon. So a 1-cup bowl of this cereal was a whopping 12 teaspoons of sugar.

We decided we would go back to our winter staple of oatmeal for breakfast and try to save the sugar for desserts!

So for Healthy Hams all around, check out the sugar in your daily diet - may not be earth-shaking, but this is something we can control!

...AR