Simple Breakfast Green Smoothie

Lazy weekends are the perfect time for lingering over breakfast or brunch, but weekday mornings are often a bit too hectic for baking breakfast casseroles or whipping up a batch of buttermilk biscuits. Thanks to your convenient blender, you can still make a healthy and tasty breakfast, even if you are running late and need a quick grab-and-go-breakfast. Smoothies aren't just an after-exercise pick-me-up. This colorful green smoothie is a hard- working multi-tasker, tasting both healthy and sweet. You get sweetness from the coconut water, banana, and vanilla yogurt, which is more than enough to mask any over-powering vegetal spinach taste. A serving of this recipe is a great way to pack some green vegetables into your daily diet in a hurry. On the nutrition side, this smoothie is full of potassium from the banana and coconut water and healthy fats from the avocado. The gut-friendly probiotics found in the yogurt and spinach is also nutrient dense. We all know that sweet ripe bananas are key to baking a fabulous loaf of banana bread, but they also work best for this smoothie. Unripe bananas are not sweet enough and they get too pasty when blended. We recommend using whole milk yogurt, as low fat or nonfat yogurt gets chalky in the blender. Using presweetened flavored yogurt means you don't have to add a sweetener. Avocados can quickly turn an unappealing brown color once you cut them. Since you only need half of an avocado for this recipe, here is a tip on saving the other half for a smoothie the next day: Sprinkle the cut avocado with a little lemon or lime juice and cover tightly with clear plastic wrap. Store in your refrigerator for up to one day. You can also try our Orange-Carrot Smoothie and Strawberry-Banana-Peanut Butter Smoothie for different days of the week.

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Southern Living Test Kitchen

Southern Living Test Kitchen

The Southern Living Test Kitchen has been publishing recipes since 1970, four years after the first issue of Southern Living Magazine appeared on newsstands. The Southern Living Test Kitchen team includes a team of professionals with deep expertise in recipe development, from pastry chefs and grilling experts to nutritionists and dietitians. Together, the team tests and retests, produces, styles, and photographs thousands of recipes each year in the state-of-the-art test kitchen facility located in Birmingham, Alabama.

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Published on April 14, 2020

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