Hi I’m Cheri with Nourish Your Lifestyle.

And today I just wanted to do a recipe that I really love. Actually I just tried it recently a few weeks ago to test it out and it worked fine, so I’m passing it on to you now. I saw this paper here over the holidays from Whole Foods, it just has a bunch of recipes for holiday foods, and one them that caught my eye was the Double Green Smoothie. When you hear the word green and it comes to food, it usually means some leafy greens and putting them in a smoothie is a really, really easy way to get your vegetables in for the day instead of having to really do the five servings. You can just throw a bunch of this in a smoothie and pretend like you’re just eating fruit or something.

So the two, it’s called Double Green because there’s two different kinds of green in here. We’ve got Kale, which is one of the most nutrient-dense, sort of, greens that you can get. Actually, Whole Foods gives us a little list here of the most nutrient-dense foods and actually kale is second on the list out of all the green vegetables. Spinach is fifth so that’s going to be our other one. We’re gonna have spinach and kale in here as our vegetables and trust me you won’t even taste ‘em.

I just wanted to give a little tip here about what I do with my spinach and leafy greens and things like that, I actually got this tip from my friend Nicol. You take a container like this, and this is one that I got spinach in before and I’m just reusing it. You take the container, you line it with a piece of paper towel on the bottom, then you wash your produce, you wash your greens, put ‘em on top of that paper towel there, and then throw another paper towel on top and close it up and keep it in the fridge. This is gonna to keep your greens really fresh and it’s an easy way to prolong the life and then that way once you get home from the store you put those in there, wash ‘em up, put them in there and then they’re ready to go any time and the chances of you actually using spinach or greens in that case are just a little bit higher than if you hadn’t washed them in the first place.

So let’s go ahead and make this recipe here. So for the Double Green Smoothie, it calls for one and a half cups of unsweetened non-dairy beverage such as almond, rice or soymilk. And we can do that, that would be fine. I don’t have any so I’m just gonna use regular milk. I usually use 1% but whichever one you wanna use is fine. And it will just be a little bit healthier if you use like the almond or the soymilk but I’m fine with milk today. So I’m just gonna put one and a half cups in the blender, just like that. Then I’m going to take, it calls for one cup of kale and one cup of spinach. It says chopped, it doesn’t really matter. When you have kale, kale comes in a form that looks something like this. And basically it has this spine, this big thick spine along each section and all you have to do is just sort of rip off the kale from the spine. ‘Cause you’re not gonna use the spine at all, you’re gonna actually throw that part out. So I rip off all the kale from the outside just like this. And I’m going to take the pieces, rip ‘em into a little bit smaller pieces, but it doesn’t really matter ‘cause the blender is gonna do that work here. Rip that into smaller pieces, throw it into your blender with the milk and you’re good. I did another piece here to, let me just put that in there. This looks like a lot of greens, but actually you won’t even notice it, which is the surprising part. Take some of you’re spinach and throw that in there; it calls for a cup, I’m gonna put a little less cause I did put a lot of kale in there. And that’s good. I’m gonna put this back on top. Then it calls for two dried apricots or four pitted dates. I have some organic Turkish apricots from Whole Foods here. You can get them from wherever but. You take two of these guys and just throw them in. And these are good for fiber. They do a little bit of sweetening as well. And often you’ll find organic products and things like that that are sweetened with apricots or dates. And the fiber is really great here, too. One word to the wise though, don’t eat these plain, like a bunch of them, because you’ll be having, let’s say, digestive problems. These things are really powerful as far as fiber goes. The next thing you want is a whole banana so I’m just gonna peel this guy and put the pieces in there. And the last thing that we’re gonna have is some frozen berries. Now the thing about frozen berries is that they’re great for smoothies because they make it cold, it’s great to have berries in there ‘cause there’s tons of antioxidants and things like that. But there’s tons of seeds so if you’re not a seed person, maybe you wanna try a different kind of fruit. Maybe some pineapple or some melon or something like that. I’m just gonna get my frozen berries out. Nope, those are meatballs, okay. Here’s the berries. I guess I could put meatballs in there. That would be some more protein, yeah? You could, that’s another thing, I mean, don’t put meatballs in your smoothie, but you could always throw some protein powder in too to add a little bit of that in there. This calls for a half a cup so I’m just gonna sort of eyeball it, and I’ll put more in because I love these guys. That’s it. So. What we’re gonna do now is blend this up, and we’ll see if we can actually get it to blend cause it’s a pretty thick mix. Here we go.

Awesome. Alright, this is thick and delicious. Let’s take a closer look at this. Let me show you. I don’t know if you can see that. It’s delicious. It looks really good, it looks like berries. It smells like fruit and actually it smells a little bit like vegetables but don’t let that scare you. The smell will go away as it mixes. Here it is. Deliciousness. Yum.

So I’m gonna grab a big glass here. A big, tall beer glass. Don’t tell my husband I’m using his glasses. Take the shake, pour it in. Look how thick that is. Yum. Okay I’m sharing this recipe with you because it’s super healthy and you don’t even taste the healthy part. That’s the, that’s the nice part about this one. I was really worried the first time I tried this one, ‘cause I was like, “Oh god is it gonna taste like kale??” Cause I’m not a huge kale fan as far as having it raw and things like that. I have great recipes for kale but I always have to sort of, you know, dress it up to wanna eat it. But when you put it in here, it tastes awesome.

I’m just gonna give it a little taste here. Mm hmm. Yeah. It’s great. You can’t taste any of the vegetables. And if you chew down, you can feel the spinach and the kale kind of a thing, but as long as you just suck this thing down, you’re gonna be good.

One word to the wise though, so you don’t look like a fool. After you’re done drinking this, go to the bathroom and check your teeth. Because you are gonna have so many little pieces of kale and berry seeds and things like that. So make sure you do that, that’s the only word of caution I give with this smoothie.

So try this at home. It’s an awesome way to have a full breakfast in just a couple of minutes with tons of nutrition. So thank you for stopping by Nourish Your Lifestyle and I hope you come back soon and I hope you have a great day! Bye!