Secret to Long-Lasting Smoothies

I've long been big on smoothies. When made with quality ingredients, they're such an enjoyable way of ensuring nutritional excellence for kids and adults alike.

Rich in nutrients and flavor, smoothies offer an easy way to deliver super food nutrients to our cells. We are lucky to live at a time when remarkable, health-enhancing food powders are available to enhance our health at any age, and smoothies make it easy to get these nutrients to our cells daily.

Until recently, frozen banana slices served as the foundation to just about all of our smoothies. But the one drawback to banana-based smoothies is that leftovers can't be stored - even in the refrigerator - for more than a few hours without the ingredients starting to separate. Banana-based smoothies are fine if you enjoy them straight out of the blender, but if you want to save some for later in the day or even the next day, the decline in enjoyment factor is pretty steep.

This summer, Margaret accidentally discovered an easy fix for this. She started adding frozen pineapple and mango chunks to our smoothies. She just happened to have leftovers of both sitting in the freezer and gave it a go for the flavor, shooting for something tropical. We quickly noticed that with frozen pineapples and mangoes as primary ingredients, our smoothies were just as good stored in the refrigerator for up to two days.

Here's a look at a fresh batch of smoothies made with a large handful of frozen pineapple chunks, a large handful of frozen mango chunks, two room temperature ripe bananas, and enough almond milk and orange juice to bring everything to a smoothie-like consistency:

Not wanting to mess up a winning combination, we haven't experimented using just the pineapple or just the mango to see if it's only one of these fruits that helps keep smoothies together. But we can vouch for this combo as an excellent foundation to add any number of super food powders to. Green food powders, acerola cherry powder, even raw chocolate powder all work quite well. Though with raw chocolate powder, I must say that my personal preference is to stick with bananas for a base, as illustrated in the following pictorial:

How to Make a Chocolate Vanilla Smoothie

Many food powders on the market contain dissolving agents like silicon dioxide, which makes pretty easy work of mixing such powders with water or juice. Because we strive to avoid dissolving agents because of their potential negative health effects, we have to work a little harder to fully incorporate our natural super food powders into our healthy beverages, and this is why we are a smoothie family.

With our children being five and three years of age, we also turn smoothie-making time into a fun opportunity to blend and create new colors. What better way to show how primary colors can be combined to create secondary colors, and how secondary colors can be mixed to create infinite grades of our favorite colors. With our mango-pineapple base, a stash of frozen wild blueberries, and our super green food powder, our next assignment is to see if we can conjure up some lovely teal. :) Will snap photos, successful or not.

For a look at some colorful smoothies that we blended up earlier this year, have a look here:

How to Make Healthy and Beautiful Smoothies

For a look at the super food powders that we use regularly to turn our smoothies into true elixirs of life, please feel free to check out any of the following:

Original Super Green Food Powder

5 Super Greens

Acerola Cherry Powder

Raw Organic Chocolate Powder

Raw Organic Hemp Protein Powder

Raw Organic Hemp, Chocolate, and Maca Powder

If you're in the market for a world class blender, one that I can highly recommend is the Vita-Mix. You can learn more about it here:

Vita-Mix Blender

Hope you give the frozen pineapple and mango solution a try. And if you have any smoothie-making ideas to share with the rest of our community, please use the comments section below. Thank you.