If you’ve lived on Planet Earth for any time during the past few decades, you’ve probably heard the news that green leafy vegetables are good for you. At the same time, there are a lot of things that conspire to get you off track from eating enough of these nutrition-packed leaves.
- It’s hard to eat them in the quantities required to realize serious nutritional benefits – unless you really like chewing salad for an hour
- Some of the best greens, such as kale, can be an acquired taste – especially when raw.
- A large salad is hard to carry in a typical lunch bag.
Green smoothies are the best way I have found to get around all of these challenges. Not just get around, but completely liquify them.
The following is my favorite green smoothie recipe (or meta-recipe, since it can be used to generate arbitrarily many specific recipes…).
The green foundation - use about 8 oz / 250 g of greens. Possibilities include:
- spinach
- mixed baby greens
- kale
- lettuce (romaine, green leaf or red leaf)
The fruit – make it sweet. Use both of the listed items:
- 2 bananas (fresh or frozen) and
- 10 oz / 300 g (1 bag) frozen fruit – good choices are strawberries, blueberries, mango, peaches, cherries. Mix up your choices to get a variety of tastes and nutritional benefits!
The fat of the land – make it creamy. Possibilities include:
- 2 oz / 60 g raw nuts – I usually use cashews, but almonds and walnuts also work great.
- 1 avocado – this tends to give you a thicker smoothie that flows less easily (still delicious though!)
The Special Bonus Power-Ups. I use all of these. They are completely optional and change the flavor just a little bit.
- 1 tbsp / 15 mL flax seed
- 1 tbsp / 15 mL maca powder
- 2 tbsp / 30 mL protein powder (I use brown rice, pea, or hemp)
The Water.
Fill the blender pitcher with enough water to cover whatever solid / dry ingredients you used. (If you want to go overboard, you can use juice, but I find this makes the smoothie too sweet, and adds lots of extra calories.)
As listed, the recipe makes about 2 liters of smoothie, a quantity that I would typically drink in a day. It also requires a fairly badass blender such as a VitaMix or Blendtec, because of both the volume involved and the need for high speed to liquify the nuts and frozen fruit. For a conventional 5 cup blender, I recommend halving the recipe, using avocado instead of nuts, and using fresh, ripe bananas instead of frozen.
Happy blending!
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Love making green smoothies, though I never thought of adding avocado before. Will definitely be trying that out this weekend.
Since I have a cheapie blender (though I lust after a VitaMix), I use almond milk in place of raw cashews and finely ground flax seeds. Sometimes I use a splash of organic apple or pomegranate juice and other times I’ve found green tea to be a great liquid to mix with!
Have you ever switched out berries for mango or pineapple? Also very yum with the green smoothie.
The avocado idea arose after I was looking for alternatives to silken tofu (too processed and gave a strong “soy” taste in most cases) and nuts. I was essentially looking for something rich and creamy.
I’ve definitely used mango but not pineapple. The latter would probably be extremely sweet and delicious.
Hey Jack! This recipe looks awesome! We have been making smoothies almost every morning, and loving them! I like your ideas of avocados and nuts — haven’t tried that (although we’ve tried almost everything else)!
You know what else is yummy? Ginger! We can buy little frozen ginger cubes, and those are super-convenient, but fresh works too. Another awesome ingredient — carrot juice. It makes more of a mess in the kitchen though…. getting the juicer out, running it and cleaning it. I call it the “let’s use every kitchen appliance” smoothie!
Loving your blog (but not keeping up to date, sadly). Perhaps I will get caught up this weekend….
Most pleasurable considering to color!
And the flavor too!
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