I love smoothies. I really started getting into them when I was pregnant with my daughter, because I’m not in love with swallowing pills and it was a great way to down all the vitamins and supplements I was taking.
The nice thing about smoothies is they don’t have to be expensive or fattening. I don’t use ice cream or yogurt and I don’t use a great lot of expensive berries. I never really follow a recipe, but here’s my basic formula.
You start with whatever kind of fresh fruit is cheap: apples, oranges, pears, bananas (I’m not a fan of bananas, but they’re usually pretty cheap if you like them). You’ll do about 2 of that fruit. Chop it up and toss it in the blender with a little non-dairy milk or just plain water – or some juice concentrate if you want it to be a little sweeter.
For pizzazz then you can add in some frozen berries or fruit. You don’t have to use that much, maybe a cup or two at most, depending how frosty you want the smoothie.
Then you drink it. Sometimes I stir it up in a bowl with raw oats or unsweetened cocoanut for a light supper. It’s fantastic. It’s easy. Kids love it.
Too Cheap for Pine Nuts 
Okay, so I’ve been reading several posts but haven’t commented yet. Thought I’d start at the beginning, since your blog is less than a year old and you only have a few posts each month. 🙂
Anyhow, I also recently started doing really fancy smoothies. Not as cheap as this one, but more suited to breakfast. I start with your basic smoothie (but I include banana), add some fresh or frozen greens (spinach, beet tops, swiss chard, etc), nuts, flax seed oil (I don’t like the taste of it, but I can’t taste it in a smoothie), wheat grass or some other powdered greens supplement, if I want, and blend in my Vitamix until smooth. That over granola is not only delicious, but very filling. Even by itself it’s filling, but the granola makes it last 5-6 hours. 🙂
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I occasionally throw in a banana, but anything more than about an inch slice overpowers the flavours of anything else in the smoothie for me (and I’m not overly fond of banana, so…) If the other fruits I’m using are tropical like oranges I don’t mind the banana flavour as much.
Granola is great in smoothies too! For a long time we didn’t really have granola because our gas oven simply took too long to make it economical, but we recently found a good-priced bulk granola at Thriftway we’ve been buying and enjoying a lot. Older Girl likes granola anyway but in a smoothie it was even better!
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