Healthy Green Smoothie

Ahhh Summer!  Time for trips to the beach, lounging by the pool, and....

A view of Hammocks Beach, NC from the end of Emerald Isles, NC.  Oh summer, I hate to see you go!

*drum roll please*......green smoothies!


I do love to have a healthy and refreshing green smoothie on a hot summer day!  Or on a fall, winter, or spring day...

My green smoothie is full of nutritional foods, but doesn't have as many calories as some others I have tried.  That being said, you can add ingredients like ground flax seed, celery, apples, kale, etc. to up the calorie count or nutritional value if you would like!

I always keep 3 or 4 bananas chopped and in baggies in the freezer so that if I get a craving for a smoothie they are ready to go.  The bananas chops much easier in my blender if they are already chopped.  I start by putting 1 frozen chopped banana in the blender, then I add 1/2 cup of light soy milk, and sprinkle in some cinnamon.  If you need to measure the cinnamon, I would say about a teaspoon should do it!  Once those ingredients are all added to the blender, I blend them until they are smooth and creamy.  Next, I add the spinach.  I CANNOT even taste the spinach in this smoothie.  Once all of the spinach is blended in to the banana mixture, I add a few ice cubes for volume.  YUMMY!!  One variation that I often use is to substitute Just Great Stuff Peanut Butter Powder for the cinnamon, which gives this smoothie a peanut butter banana taste.  I find the peanut butter powder at our local Fresh Market or Vitamin Shoppe.

The ingredients:  Up front you can see the bagged frozen bananas!

This picture makes me think of the word "groovy"!  This is a view of the inside of the blender before blending your banana, milk, and cinnamon.



You can see that this shake takes a lot of spinach-This is a post-banana blending, pre-spinach blending picture:)

Yummy Green Smoothie!

Recipe for Healthy Green Smoothie:

1 frozen chopped banana
1/2 cup light soy milk
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2-3 cups of spinach leaves
5-6 ice cubes

1.  Blend banana, soy milk, and cinnamon in a blender until smooth,
2.  Add spinach to the blender, and blend until completely mixed in with the banana smoothie mixture.
3.  Add ice cubes and blend to increase volume of the smoothie.
4.  Enjoy!!

Total Calories:  165

Homemade Granola Bars

It's Tuesday Blog World!  And I see no reason to tiptoe around what was on my mind today-Granola yumminess!  

I got the urge this morning **and every other morning** to bake something, but I wanted it to be a healthy option so if I accidentally ate the whole batch, I wouldn't feel as bad about it! Hmm.  Where to begin?  I decided to play around with some of the items that I had in my cabinet to bake up some fresh homemade granola bars!  There is only 1 tablespoon of brown sugar in this recipe, so there is very little added sugar.  The sweetness comes from the banana and unsweetened applesauce, which also bond together the bar.

Here are the stars of my granola show in order of appearance:

1/2 cup of unsweetened applesauce

1 banana

2 tablespoons of powdered peanut butter

1 tablespoon of milled flax seed

a few drops of vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups of old fashioned oats

1/2 cup of campground trail mix

2 tablespoons of chopped walnuts

1 tablespoon of brown sugar

1/2 tablespoon of cinnamon

1 teaspoon of nutmeg

To start, I combined the unsweetened applesauce and banana in my chopper.

 

Before

 

After

 Next, I added the powdered peanut butter, vanilla extract, and milled flax seed to the chopper, and blended them with the banana/applesauce mixture.

 

After you have finished the wet ingredient mixture, add your oats, trail mix, brown sugar, spices, and chopped nuts to a large mixing bowl.  I used my kitchen-aid mixer, but any mixing method will work!

 

Pour your wet mix into the bowl, and get to mixin'!

 

Pour the very thick mixture onto a baking tray.  I don't have a smaller pan, so I made sure that my granola mix only filled up half of the pan.  The size of the pan will determine the thickness of you bars.

 

Bake for about 20 minutes at 350 degrees.  Once the bars have cooled, cut them into 10 bars.  *I may or may not have eaten half of the one at the top AS SOON AS I took it out of the oven!

 

After the bars have cooled, wrap them in plastic wrap or baggie them up and store in the fridge or freezer!

 

 

These bars are chocked full of nutritional value and protein, and are very low in added sugar.  If you make 10 bars, each bar has about 95 calories, and only 6.4 g of sugar!  You may find that these bars are not as sweet as you may like, and you could certainly add honey or more brown sugar to adjust the sweetness to your liking!  Happy baking!