Saturday, May 26, 2012

Housemate smoothie (again)

I have several posts on housemate's smoothie preparation, because I change it up every once in a while.   The ingredients are pretty stable, but my preparation method has evolved.  I used to prepare a whole week's worth on the weekend and freeze them as described here.  That has two problems:  1) after thawing, they just don't taste as good as when they are freshly prepared!  maybe it's that 12 hours in the fridge thawing makes them lose their freshness a bit; or maybe it's the freezing process  2) there's usually a bit of leftover for each smoothie which I drink, but when you make 7 of them, that adds up.  So I was overeating on a food that is more than sweet enough for my tastes.

So I've been making the smoothies every day, but doing some weekend food prep to make it easier.  Now I also drink a little bit of the leftover every day but it's a small enough amount that I can just consider it an allowed treat.  plus it's a nice little boost of energy that I usually get before exercising.

Here's what I do on the weekend.  I buy 7 10-oz bags of frozen berries or an equivalent amount of fresh fruit or a mixture.  In most seasons, I go with frozen but in the spring and summer, the fresh berries and grapes are great additions.  I try to include a mixture of berries with some sweet fruit like frozen sweet cherries, grapes, bananas.  Here's all the fruit in a giant bowl:

I feeze that into a large freezer bag.

Each night when I make housemate's fresh squeezed orange juice, I also squeeze 4 oz into this measuring cup, to which I add another 4 oz of grape juice:

Now each morning, assembly goes quick.  Here are all the ingredients:  2 cups of the frozen fruit, seed mixture (in the container with the blue lid), supplements at bottom right, juice, and spinach:


here's the juice, seed mixture, and supplements in the blender pitcher


Add in the spinach


I blend this up first, then add the frozen fruit and blend until smooth.  Here is the final product, served with today's newspaper:



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a similar system for my own morning smoothies. I portion about the frozen fruit into small plastic containers instead of ziploc bags, but besides that it's about the same. Makes the prep super fast every morning.

kneecap said...

oh good idea with the plastic containers. I think I have enough to do that. yeah, it's fast and also allows me to mix a lot of different fruits together.