Green Power Smoothie

I will be going GREEN today!! Yup, I am going to be drinking this instead of eating my kids Halloween candy! 

Smoothies are a great way for me to get a huge amount of nutrients quickly! I have really been trying to eat more Kale but it seems to go bad so fast before I can finish it, so I decided to try something else. Now when I buy Kale, I de-stem it and divide it up by approximately 2 cups per bag and put it in ziploc freezer bags and pop it in the freezer! Its not only great for making green power smoothies, but a great easy way to add to dishes and recipes.  You can also roll it with a pin roller after its frozen to break it up and then sprinkle on top of whatever dish your making. (Hint: Its way easier than chopping it up!)

Okay, so before you decide that candy sounds way better than this green stuff looks, here are some hints to making it better! I don't know why but I've tried this smoothie both ways (frozen and non frozen fruits and veggies). For some reason its way better to me when I use frozen produce. If you can't freeze everything at least freeze the kale. 

The other tip is to add another apple or pear if its still to earthy to drink. Or you can add a couple drops of liquid stevia to sweeten it a bit. You should always try it before you add anything additional!

Here are some nutritional and health facts to help you gulp this down!

Kale is very high in vitamins and nutrients, including vitamin K, C and A! Its also high in fiber and sulfur which makes it great for keeping your liver healthy and detoxifying your system! The list could go on as to why you should boost your intake of this leafy green antioxidant vegetable. Fresh lemon and lime juice are known to be anti-inflammatories and can help improve digestion! Raw cranberry juice is full of antioxidants that help fight free radicals in your system. Of course bananas are a great source of potassium and can also help curb overeating. Apples are high in fiber, which fills you up with out the calories! (If you are watching calories eat an apple and forgo the smoothie!) And last but not least flaxseed is very high in fiber and omega-3 fatty acids helping reduce bad cholesterol levels.

So there you have it in a nutshell! Go GREEN this Halloween! It's pretty simple and easy! If you have produce about to go bad, cut it up and freeze it into smoothie size measurements to use later! You can use pretty much anything in your smoothies, just google that fruit or veggie to get some great recipes! Don't waste your produce, freeze it and then smoothie it! My girls are loving my smoothie creations too and its a great way to get them eating fruits and veggies they may not choose to eat from their plate!

Happy GREEN Halloween!

Products I use:

R.W. Knudsen Just Cranberry Juice

Eat Clean Whole Wheat Banana Bread

It's a rainy day out here on the East Coast as we all brace against Hurricane Sandy this weekend. This is the first hurricane season I've been through, ever in my life! It's a weird season in both life and weather that I am not used to. To take my mind off things and well the news, I decided to use up some of my frozen banana's to make some lovely banana bread!

Wasting food just makes me cringe, so I freeze everything I can before it goes bad and bananas are one of these items! I am one of those individuals that has such bad gag reflexes that when any brown on my bananas appear, it puts me over the edge. My family loves to eat them perfectly yellow too, so we buy them  every time we go grocery shopping and I just pop them in the freezer when they are good and ripe! (Sometimes I want to gag putting them in the freezer, yup its that bad!) It's so nice to have them on hand on days like this!

My mom always made banana bread growing up, so its become a staple in my house especially in the colder months. However, as I continue to eat cleaner and healthier, I still love to bake yummy goodies!  So I've been in the process of trying out different ingredients to get my perfect loaf of Eat Clean Banana Bread! Baking makes it a bit harder for me to steer away from "the bad" and replace with "the good", but every time I bake I at least try!  I fell off the clean wagon a couple days ago as I found a yummy recipe in my parenting magazine for chocolate chip pumpkin cookie recipe with cream cheese frosting! I set off to make it "cleaner" but it didn't happen that way! Maybe next time, but my family was excited, especially my girls to get frosted cookies!

Back to the banana bread! I have found a couple different versions that I like and will probably always be experimenting for that perfect loaf, but here is the recipe that won the test today!

Here are the ingredients you will need:

Recipe adapted and modified from Tosca Reno's Eat Clean Cookbook.

These are some of the products I use when baking eat clean items:

October in the Southeast

Our family is celebrating our first fall season in the southeast this year! I am excited to experience a different season somewhere that is so far away from home and so opposite in climate than where I am from. (Example: Where I live now it was 88 yesterday with extremely high humidity and back home it was 36 and snowing!)

Even though I complained about the snow back home and how the long winters are I think I might miss it! Its like my body is so used to that cold weather this time of year, I find myself putting on pants and sweaters and then arriving outside my house to find that its still HOT where I live now! The locals say it gets cooler, but I haven't felt too chilly more than maybe one evening so far. And that chilly was like a cool summer evening back home in July!

This experience of living so far from home has definitely been exciting and challenging all at the same time. I miss so much about home and more than anything the people, my friends, my safety net of connections, knowing someone that knows someone that is related to so and so. I miss that. Its funny how much you take for granted when your in that place (or job or ___fill in the blank). It makes you appreciate the mundane and common things that you didn't think were too important. The list could go on for me about what I miss.....but I am embracing the new things I am experiencing out here, the connections that are starting to form, my routine and my new normal (as one of my friends told me would start to happen).

We want to make the most of our time here, so for fun last weekend we took the girls to the October festivities that were happening at the local Farm down the road. The girls enjoyed playing in the corn fields and taking a hay ride through the farm to pick pumpkins! A new season brings change, it brings a sense of excitement for a new refreshing start in the next chapter to be written in this life. This is what I love about the change of seasons...even if the seasons feel much warmer or so different.

Of course I had my camera along with me and was able to capture our memories of our first fall experience in the southeast! I absolutely love black and whites, but love the golden colors that came out of the gorgeous fall sunlight on the colored photos too! I had to share both color and black and whites!

Building my business out here is taking time, but its allowing me time to enjoy being a "hobby" photographer. And I have so much yet to learn about photography, so every outing is not only an exploring experience for us, its a time to really slow down with my camera and take in what my children are seeing through my lens. 

The picture above captures her personality so well! She had to be tough and heave that pumpkin all the way back to the wagon. We offered to help, but the age of "I can do it myself" is very present right now! It was a really heavy pumpkin too!

The end to a perfect day! 

Thank you Morris Farms for a great fall experience in the southeast!

©Mariah Allen Photography

www.mariahallenphotography.com