Raw Beet Orange Strawberry Smoothie

It never gets old sharing my experience with raw green smoothies! I know that out of all the things I’ve consumed over the last few years, the greens in the smoothies have helped me regain a youthfulness that I thought I’d lost. The best part about this is that I’ve actually experienced it. I’m pretty sure that it would also work for you!

It never seems to get old posting another raw green smoothie recipe on the blog. Even though they can start looking the same, each one is a different set if experiences, flavors and textures. This one has the excitement of strawberries with an after taste of orange. The beet greens give it a little bit of a wild ride.

If you’ve got a collection of beets you haven’t harvested from the garden, you might be able to give this one a go and see how easy it is for yourself. If not, Swiss Chard or Spinach might be really good substitutes. Just make sure you use a large amount of greens! Remember, the health benefits come from the greens.

Recipe:

  • 2 Oranges seeds removed
  • 10-12 Frozen (or even better – fresh) strawberries
  • 1 cup Orange juice
  • 2 Medjool dates (seeds removed)
  • 1 Large bunch beet greens

Place all the fruit in your high powered blender and grind it up for a few seconds. If you put the orange slices in first things will break down faster (even though it only takes a couple seconds). Next, add the greens.

The liquid fruit will flow up and around to fill all the empty space in the greens making it pretty easy to place a blender full of greens into a blender full of fruit purée. Blend for 60 seconds or more. If you’re using frozen fruit, you might let it go a little longer in order to warm it above freezing. It’s a lot easier to consume if it’s not ice cold.

The oranges take on the pink color given up by the strawberries only to be overwhelmed by the red of the bet green stems. But in any case, it’s easy to drink and filling!

Enjoy!

Same fruit, different greens – smoothie

There are times when you know that a different type of green would just mix better with a particular type of fruit, but that opportunity to actually give it a try doesn’t come along very offend. Yet, for me, this last week I was blessed with 5 lbs of amazingly great black grapes, a ripe pineapple and 10 fresh young Thai coconuts! That’s right, 10.

What an amazing deal on coconuts. Last weekend Lori and I stopped into the local Uwajimaya and the first thing we saw was the 10 for $10 posted above the coconuts. Knowing that I wanted to make cacao pudding and smoothies (using the water) I figured 10 was a good round number that we’d be able to put to work.

So, what was Dave’s experiment? Well, it was short lived, and consisted of making the same smoothie using the following different greens: Parsley, Lettuce and Beet Greens.

Recipe:

  • ½ to ¾ cup water
  • 1 inch ripe pineapple
  • Big handful ripe black grapes
  • 6 young fresh Thai coconut water ice cubes
  • Greens of your choice.
  • 1 probiotic optional

They all looked pretty much like this:

And, because I’m an advocate for getting a full day’s worth of greens, I show this blender as being FULL.

The first time, I added Parsley. The parsley in the garden still looks beautiful. The weather has turned a little cooler so it’s pretty much stopped growing, which means it starts to turn bitter. I don’t mind, but Lori simply hates parsley – regardless if it’s bitter or sweet (more for me… lol). I figure I’ve got a week or so before my garden crop turns to mush and I LOVE parsley, thus today, bitter or not, it’s mixed in.

That full blender made a bit more than this quart. The taste was definitely ‘full’ (from the parsley) and sweet (from the grapes). To me, it’s a great combo.

Next day, Beet Greens.

The color is a little more brown form the beets, but the flavor is a lot more smooth. Drinkability wise, this smoothie was better than the parsley based one. Parsley is really strong!

Third day, lettuce.

Notice that big pile of leaves! The lettuce that I planted at the end of July is now bolting. When the plant bolts, the leaves pick up a deeper bitter flavor. Yet, I don’t want to let this bounty go to waste. And, because Lettuce is lower on the mineral charts than the other two, I figured I’d just pile it in.

The end result was the best of the three. Lori liked this one the best, yet the entire mixture is not something that stands out as being a killer-combo. Yet, it meets my goals of making greens consumable!

I wish I’d picked up some spinach or tried the same recipe with Swiss Chard, but I guess I’ll have to wait to finish this experiment another day.

No matter how you look at it, it’s all about masking the off flavors of the greens in a fruit melody that’s not too sweet. This combination of ingredients played out just fine this week so I wanted to share.

Beet greens Peach and Watermelon Smoothie

Every year there’s one crop that stands out better than all the others in the garden. This year, I’ve been blessed with beets! What a wonderful veggie. Most people grow them for the wonderful bulb, but I put them in specifically for the greens! I like the fact that the greens are not really bitter and the pests don’t like them like lettuce of spinach. They are also pretty hardy. You can take off for a week and know that your plants will still be alive when you get back. They may have wilted a bit, but a gentle watering brings them right back to life.

Another great part about beets is that you can pinch off leaves while the plants growing and you don’t have to worry about losing the ‘bulb’ crop. As long as you get sunlight hours, the plant will keep pumping captured sunlight into the bulb so you can enjoy the juice (mixed with carrots and celery) later in the year.

But for now, I’m getting smoothie after smoothie with nutrient rich leaves that look like this:

Recipe:

  • 3 peaches
  • Watermelon (about 1 inch slice ½ way through)
  • 5 to 6 little dates
  • Probiotic (optional)

You’ll have to notice that I didn’t add any water or juice to this smoothie. The watermelon is going to provide all we need.

Just make sure you place the watermelon on the bottom for it’s not until that gets ground up that anything else starts. I love just being able to through watermelon in as the base without having to juice it before hand. Normally, I’ll juice up a watermelon and get 4 quarts that last a few days. This way, I get just what I want when I want it. It’s like juice to order.

The beet greens always give off a redish color, thus the end result is nearly always brown. If you look closely at this one, you’ll see that it’s pretty creamy. The smoothie is standing up just a little at the top of the jar. I love these drinks thick. Most people don’t. To make it runnier, just add ½ cup water or a bit more watermelon (like a full ½ inch slice).

Peach, Watermelon, Beet greens Smoothie

I love it when I can harvest a half dozen beets the size of baseballs and get enough greens for two smoothies. I also love 24 lbs peaches for $7.50. What a screaming deal. The abundance this year looks to be peaches and beet greens.

Even through the base ingredients are the same, the smoothies don’t have to all taste the same day after day. In this case, the difference between this smoothie and the previous day’s smoothie is that I’m adding sesame milk to make it more like a milk shake.

Recipe:

  • 3 peaches
  • 1 inch slice watermelon ½ way through the fruit (seedless)
  • 4 to 5 little dates
  • Big handful beat greens from the garden
  • 1 ½ cups sesame milk (with pulp)

Combine all ingredients into the blender with the wettest items on the bottom.

Turns out that when putting this one together, I had to spin the fruit before adding the greens.

If you look closely, I like to spin the fruit just long enough to get it turning and then stop. The less you time you spend running the blender, the less heat you generate. Thus, I want to turn the greens for a minute so I spend as little time as possible getting the fruit to turn.

The end result, once again, looks a bit muddy. This is beets we’re talking about even if it’s just the tops!

When it really comes down to it, beet greens are really good for you. They have a metric butt ton of vitamin A and K along with Potassium, Calcium and Magnesium. Even if the greens are not the ‘stored sunlight’, they are the chlorophyll factories. And as we’ve seen before (Is food another form of light?), the chlorophyll molecule is a great molecule to consume.

Beet Melody – the early summer smoothie

Baby beets are finally in season again and the Saturday market always has the best selection. One of my favorite vendors there is Full Circle Farm.

Don't panic - It's organic!

I’ve thought about signing up for their fresh produce delivery program, but it seems that I’m always in town on Saturday morning, so I just take 15 minutes and stop in. And this time, as it turns out, they had four different types of beets in their selection. I grabbed two bunches with the heaviest collection of greens with the idea that the first most valuable part would be my blended breakfast.

Thus, the Beet Melody Smoothie!

Here’s what I started with:

Beautiful beet tops

As you can see, this smoothie is a bit on the tropical side, for the fruit in abundance in this house happens to be oranges and pineapple. Which, I have no problem with.

If you want to reproduce this, you’ll need:

  • A few seedless oranges (I used three)
  • About an inch of pineapple
  • One banana
  • Seven or Eight little Deglet Noor dates
  • And, of course, beet tops.
  • (optional spoonful ORMUS Supergreens, Reliv Classic and Probiotic)

As you can see in the picture, I’ve already trimmed the beets. Turned out they made a beet-carrot salad last night. The beets were red on the outside and white on the inside. By sight, you’d probably mistaken them as radishes.

In any case, wash these greens! Anything that sits next to the ground is bound to have a little extra dirt in it. I use a water bath to really get it out.

Easy rinsing process

After shaking the greens in the water and carefully rinsing them off, they stack up in the strainer on the right. Afterwards, this is what you’re left with:

Leave the dirt behind!

No worries. We all process a lot of dirt in our lifetimes, a little more shouldn’t hurt. But I really like my minerals in the more bio available form – plant form.

After trimming the outer part of the pineapple, pealing the oranges (and picking out the seeds) and pealing the banana, everything stacks up like this:

This is what you'd normally have to chew up!

When I start blending something this full, I always start out slowly. I use the tamper to move the larger pieces down and get the mixture to start moving. As soon as it does, I remove the tamper, place the clear cap on top of the vita-mix and work it up to full on.

As with most smoothies, I start counting and cleaning. After about 60 seconds most the mess is cleaned up and the smoothie is ready to pure. These are always so easy!

And the results

Remember that the Queen of green smoothies says that to really change your life you’ll want to consume at least 1 quart (1 liter) of green smoothie every day on an empty stomach. All my recipes make between 5 and 6 cups. You’ll probably also notice that there are a few hundred calories in these smoothies. That’s actually a good thing! Fill up on healthy stuff rather than cheeseburgers.

Let me know what you think of this one. Beet greens are better for you than the roots and they’re easy to prepare.

Enjoy!