Smoothie, Anyone?

Aaah! I love when Spring & Summer roll around and fruits and veggies are plentiful and lower priced.  During this time of year, I am trying to allocate about 30% of our grocery budget to buying fresh fruits and veggies.

One of our favorite things to use fruit for are smoothies.  Super refreshing and full of healthy vitamins! I've tried several different methods and recipes for making smoothies, and I've finally settled on a method that works well for me.

The first step is to get your hands on fresh fruit.  Keep an eye out for sales and stock up when you can.  For example, this week blackberries were on sale for 99 cents at Aldi.  Since the normal price is around $3.00, I obviously stocked up!

Sometimes, if I'm not able to get decently priced fruit, I'll also check the frozen fruit selection.  A lot of times you can get your hands on reasonably priced frozen strawberries and raspberries.  However, my experience has been that it is usually cheaper to buy them fresh when they are on sale and freeze them yourself.

After rinsing the fruit and slicing the strawberries, I package them in freezer bags.  Normally, I'll divide each of the strawberries packages into two separate bags.  If you use freezer bags to store your fruit, make sure to remove as much air as you can to prevent freezer burning.

Now, whenever we feel like having a smoothie, I have my fruit all prepped!

To make a smoothie for two, I grab one of my fruit bags straight from the freezer and pop it into out awesome ninja blender.

Next, I blend the fruit by itself for a few seconds to break it down.

I add a couple tablespoons of sugar to the fruit, but any sweetener or honey would work as well.  Finally, add about 2 cups of milk and blend...

If the smoothie is too thick, add more milk until it's the consistency that you like.

And that's all! Serve and enjoy...

It's like drinking ice cream! What kind of smoothies do you like?