I make fruit smoothies just about every day. Honestly, I never follow a recipe. I just put a somewhat random combination of fruit in a blender, add water and chia seeds, and blend. But in case you don’t have the confidence to do that, I measured what I put into the blender this morning, so that I could teach you how to do it. When my kids were little, I routinely made a concoction I called “yogurt shakes,” where I put a banana and berries in a blender with plain yogurt, honey, and ice cubes, and then tossed in a little wheat germ to secretly make it even more nutritious. I fed it to my kids as a regular snack. More recently, my son has wanted smoothies without yogurt for both breakfast and lunch. It was his idea to add the chia seeds. He learned about chia seeds from a book he read, Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall, which is about the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico, whose people run as a core part of their culture. The chia seeds they eat give them energy for their running. He feels a higher energy level when he adds them to drinks. So we put them in his smoothies. I buy chia seeds at the health food store. The package says that they have omega-3 and fiber, and that they are higher in antioxidant activity than blueberries. They are easy to digest and don’t taste like anything.
I encourage you to use local fruit if it is in season. Right now, where I live, there is no fruit in season, so I buy frozen fruit (except for bananas), which I find less expensive than fresh. I buy organic when possible, since I don’t know how well they wash the pesticides off fruit before they freeze it.
