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Adventures in Food, Wine, Art & Travel

Stop the presses!  Add to those New Year’s resolutions your goal of putting money in your pocket and not the till of coffee shops, juice bars, and markets such as Whole Foods.

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Sous Chef and I have resolved to develop some healthy breakfast alternatives to the expensive, often high calorie coffee or fruit drink and muffin we grab each morning.    Even if some of these breakfast treats are relatively healthy, such as juices and certain smoothies, the habit can be quite costly.

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Sous Chef challenged me to create breakfast drinks using our Nutri-Ninja IQ Blender.  I’m always game for a challenge and liked the idea of saving some money, time, and calories each morning.  The Nutri-Ninja IQ Blender made this challenge a breeze with an intelligent, one touch button system that makes a smoothie in about one minute and has a perfectly-sized blender container to use and take if you are headed to the office, gym, or shopping.

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Two of my favorite smoothies from Whole Foods are the No Dairy Berry and the Vitalizer, so I used those for my inspiration. The Desert Sunrise smoothie uses Driscoll’s high-quality strawberries and raspberries as its base.  To the berry base, I add pineapple, orange, ginger, and coconut milk.  The end result is a tasty, fruit based smoothie whose appearance reminds me of a splendid desert sunrise, with beautiful shades of pink and mauve.

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For those mornings when you need a kick-start, a healthy Verdacious smoothie will do the trick.    It is chock full of nutrients and consists of spinach, kale, green apple, pineapple, ginger, lemon juice, and coconut milk.  The ginger and lemon juice give a nice zing to the greens.  I think even Popeye would approve of this smoothie.

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What are you waiting for?  Get started on those New Year’s Resolutions now!

Happy New Year.

 

5.0 from 2 reviews
Desert Sunrise Smoothie
 
Prep time
Total time
 
Author:
Recipe type: Breakfast, Snack
Serves: 1-2
Ingredients
  • 1 orange peeled, or two clementine oranges
  • 1 cup chopped strawberries
  • ½ cup raspberries
  • 1 cup pineapple
  • 1 teaspoon freshly diced ginger
  • ½ to 1 cup of unsweetened coconut milk (depending on how thick you desire smoothie)
Instructions
  1. Place oranges, strawberries, raspberries, pineapple and ginger in blender. Add coconut milk. Blend and serve.
  2. (note: The Nutri-Ninja Auto IQ is one touch and your smoothie is ready in one minute)

5.0 from 2 reviews
Verdacious Smoothie
 
Prep time
Total time
 
Author:
Recipe type: Breakfast, Snack
Serves: 1-2
Ingredients
  • 1½ cups firmly packed spinach (I prefer baby spinach)
  • 2 kale leafs (separated from kale rib)
  • 5-7 fresh mint leaves
  • 1 green apple chopped
  • 1 cup pineapple
  • 1 teaspoon of freshly sliced ginger
  • juice from one lemon
  • ½ to 1 cup unsweetened coconut milk
Instructions
  1. Place spinach, kale, green apple, pineapple, ginger, juice of lemon in blender. Add coconut milk. Blend and serve.

 

WRITTEN BY

Christy Majors

Food enthusiast, wine aficionado, BBC Food fanatic, and cookbook bibliomaniac, who suffers from an incurable case of culinary wanderlust. Creator of Culinary Diva (TM) where experiences in food, travel and wine are broken down for the home cook and traveler. Banker by day.
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4 Comments

  1. I’ve been making smoothies regularly which I tweet about. Most smoothies are fruit based but, I used a cucumber two weeks ago in a smoothie for the first time. I like using maple syrup for fruit smoothies, demerara for green tea and gula jawa for the chocolate-banana or just the banana smoothie. Each sugar sweetens and brings out the flavours of the fruit or ingredients. Mostly blended with almond or soy milk. I haven’t tried coconut milk as I tend to use them for main courses or ice cream. Thank you for posting a recipe with it!

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