Strawberry Swiss Chard Smoothie Goodness!

I've been reading Dr. Joel Fuhrman's Eat to Live and am pretty amazed that although I've always eaten lots of vegetables, that my diet still can improve in so many ways.  Also, learning about the nutritional content of different vegetables has been an eye opening experience.  One of the points that Dr. Fuhrman stresses is that of eating LOTS of raw vegetables.  I'm not a huge salad person.  I enjoy a salad as part of a meal or during the summer as my whole meal, but I am picky.  I like a lot of stuff tossed into my salad.  Many times I add cheese, which is a source of saturated fats (bad) and dressing, which contains either evil amounts of fats or evil amounts of sugars.  

When I told my mom about the book, she got excited, started reading it, ordered a blender, and then bought a book that promotes the consumption of green smoothies.  I'd heard of green smoothies before, and even stuck a recipe or two on my Pinterest boards, but had never actually made one.  

I got home today late, exhausted from a long day of driving and doctor visits and shopping.  The last thing I felt like doing was to start cooking, even if the reward would be a plateful of delicious greens.  I took a leap and decided to try out this green smoothie thing and here is the result: a delicious green sweet, slightly grassy/earthy concoction.  See for yourself below.

This is a pretty accurate version of the color.

 

This recipe made a whole blender's worth of smoothie.

So, curious to make one for yourself, yet?  If so, read on.  I adapted the recipe from Green Lemonade's blog, which you can see here.

Swiss Chard and Strawberry Smoothie

Ingredients: 

• 4-5 leaves and stalks of swiss chard
• 3 cups frozen strawberries with tops (I used some that I had previously frozen to prevent from spoiling)
• 3/4 cup - 1 cup vanilla almond milk
• Drizzle of agave nectar

I don't have a special blender, so I put half the leaves in first, then the milk and then half of the strawberries, which I cut in half or quarters first (depending on the original size).  The only reason why I started with half is that it was all that would fit.


I stuck it on the high liquefy setting until it all looked liquid and then added the rest of the leaves and strawberries through the hole in the lid. 


Once it was finished I tasted it and decided it needed to be just a tiny bit sweeter, so I then added a small drizzle of agave nectar.


De-li-cious!


Feel free to change up ingredients according to your taste.  Please let me know if you tried it and what you like to put into your green smoothies in the comments!


Next up, I'll be posting about red velvet and raspberry/chocolate macarons!