Mega Green Smoothie Cubes
Smoothie cubes are quite possibly my new favorite thing. I’ve always loved having a nice, thick, fruit and veggie filled smoothie for breakfast, a lot of times with a hard boiled egg or some low fat cottage cheese and a piece of wheat toast on the side. What I DON’T like is all the prep work. I’ve worked out a system that makes this a pretty easy breakfast.
What I do is pile all the fruits and vegetables into the blender with the minimal amount of liquid necessary to achieve a smooth puree. In my blender, when using fruits and vegetables with a pretty high water content, it only takes a cup of liquid at the most. I pretty much fill the blender with fruit and veg puree, adding until I’ve got a pretty thick and tasty puree in there. Then I spoon it into ice cube trays and freeze it. Then all I have to do in the morning is pop a handful of smoothie cubes into the blender with some yogurt and my liquid of choice, give it a couple pulses and a quick whirl on my smoothie/ice crushing setting, and voila, tasty smoothie in less than five minutes in the morning. I thought I’d share one of my favorite smoothie cube “recipes” below (really, I’m not usually so precises as to call it a recipe, but this is one I keep repeating). I like to have a couple different types of cubes on hand to mix and match a bit so I don’t get tired of having the same thing every morning.
Mega Green Smoothie Cubes
Ingredients:
-3/4ths of a 10 ounce bag of fresh spinach, stems removed
-2 medium bananas (the riper the better), broken into 1 inch chunks
-3 medium to small apples, peeled, cored, and cut into 1 inch chunks
-1 cup of the best orange juice you can afford, bonus points for fresh squeezed (they do pretty gross stuff to our orange juice before it makes it to a store)
Directions:
1) Add banana chunks and orange juice to blender. Pulse a few times to get the banana broken up and then let it go until smooth on the highest setting.
2) Add one apple worth of chunks and then about a third of your spinach. Pulse a few times to get the apple broken up and the spinach tore up and incorporated. Then let it go on the highest setting until the green spinach flecks stop getting smaller.
3) Repeat step two for the remainder of your ingredients.
4) Spoon or pour into ice cube trays or molds, keeping in mind that it will expand as it freezes. Leave a little room for growth. Pop in freezer.
5) Once the cubes (or in my case, Christmas trees, skulls, and pumpkins) are frozen you can take them out of the trays and keep them in gallon freezer bags. I always write a date on the bag, but they’re usually gone way faster than I ever have to worry about.
I swear, as much spinach as there is in these smoothie cubes, they pretty much only taste of apples, oranges, and bananas! It’s a great way to get a good serving of greens in you for the day!
