Smoothies!

I love smoothies. I mentioned before that I'm not too big on vegetables, but when they are blended up with fruit and juice, I'm all for them. The problem is that I'm often swayed to buy smoothies from Jamba Juice or a local juicing company because I can't use up all the fruit before it goes bad. That is until I recently stumbled upon an idea so simple that I'm honestly surprised I didn't think of it myself. Go ahead and buy a whole case of strawberries and a whole bunch of bananas. But prepare the fruit when you get home and freeze it. Voila! Now you don't have to worry about fruit going bad, plus you can make your smoothie cold all at the same time! I'm in love with this idea.

Here's what I started out with as my ingredients. You can honestly use this method with any mixture of fruits and veggies, but these are some of my favorites. As I was putting away my groceries, I set aside these items and prepped them. I pealed my bananas, washed off the strawberries and cut off their tops.

 Here's my fruit and veggies ready for bagging! I use quart size ziplock bags. It helps me portion out my ingredients, instead of putting way too much in and not being able to finish my HUGE smoothie (even though my boyfriend will sometimes pitch in when necessary).

Here it is all bagged up! I put a few strawberries, 1/2 to 1 banana and 2 big handfuls of spinach in the ziplock bag. Then I sealed them up and threw them in the freezer. When you are ready to have your smoothie, throw all these ingredients in a blender or a Vitamix. Side note- I LOVE my Vitamix. It is a high powered blender that can blend just about anything; whole fruits, peanut butter, and even knead bread! It has so much power that you can make a soup in the Vitamix by blending it for a minute. The Vitamix will heat after using it for over 30 seconds, heating up your soup! It's a pretty cool machine. Anyways, after you throw in your frozen fruit and veggies, pour in 8 oz of any kind of juice (orange, apple, cranberry, etc) into the blender and blend it up!

It does turn out to be a greenish color, but it tastes awesome. Trust me! Plus my favorite color is green, so I'm completely fine with this. I hope you use this idea to extend the shelf life of your fruit and veggies! It's much better than buying too much produce and then having to throw some out because it went bad before you could use all of it. Enjoy!