Make Ahead Smoothie Bags

What do you do when you have 5 lbs of fresh picked strawberries and not enough time to eat them before they go bad?

Make smoothie bags, of course!

Start out by flash freezing all of your fruit. Better Homes and Gardens has a great tutorial on Flash Freezing if you've never done it before.

We used Strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and per Corbin's request, some bananas and oranges.

If you want, you can freeze yogurt in ice cube trays to throw in your bags as well. I use a large tub of Vanilla Greek yogurt, but use whatever type of yogurt you want. I apparantely don't have plain ice cube trays, so I got to use fun shaped cubes. Yay!

Next comes the fun part. Assembly! It's easy but gets insanely repetitive and I loathe repetitive. Luckily David was forced willing to help me and it went a bit quicker. 

In a freezer ziplock bag, I put about 1 to 1 1/2 cups of fruit (I don't use an exact ratio of fruits, I add what looks good), 2-3 cubes of yogurt and sealed it up. Easy peasy. 

We started out with about 5 lbs of strawberries, 1 lb blueberries, 1 lb raspberries, 2 large oranges, 2 bananas and a large tub of yogurt. With all of those ingredients we ended up with about 3 dozen bags of smoothie ingredients.

When you are ready to make your smoothie, dump the ingredients in a blender, add a little bit of juice and blend it up. 

A few things that we do to make them easier or to jazz them up...

• My blender hates anything that is solid frozen, so I flash thaw my bags in hot water for about 5 minutes to make them easier to blend. 
• If I have them, I add a banana (not frozen) to my mixture before I blend.
• The boys love when I add 1-2 tablespoons of oats to their smoothies before blending. 
• I add 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed to my smoothies before blending.

 

The boys love smoothies, so they are very excited to have these for breakfasts! 

What is your favorite smoothie recipe?