This summer has been insanely busy so far. I have Landon in a summer camp that is 40 minutes away and I’m driving back and forth half the day.
He also has tutoring and running camp, so we seem to spend an awful lot of time in the car.
It’s hard to keep up with our healthy lifestyle and eating habits when we’re always pressed for time and on the go.
Landon doesn’t drink milk, and he’s also not a big fan of yogurt. I worry that he’s not getting enough calcium, and just giving him kids vitamins isn’t the solution — I’d rather that he gets his vitamins and minerals from wholesome food.
He also doesn’t eat bananas or nuts. They would be the perfect snack to give him for camp, but he won’t eat them there.
So I wanted to come up with a healthy snack for both of us that is full of nutrition and portable. That’s where smoothies come in!
You can hide about anything in smoothies. Today I did an experiment: let’s see if I can make a yummy smoothie with all the things L doesn’t like.
I started with 2 cups of Silk Almondmilk Protein + Fiber.
It’s a new Silk milk that is now available in stores. It has 50% more calcium than dairy milk, and 5g of protein and 5g of fiber per cup.
After the Silk almond milk, I added 1 banana, 1/2 cup of kale, and just 1 tsp of a cookie-chocolate spread — that’s all. You could use Nutella as well, or a cocoa peanut butter spread.
I was surprised how rich this smoothie tastes because the almond milk only has 2.5g of fat per cup. It must be the banana that makes it so rich.
You can’t taste the kale, but you can definitely taste the chocolate flavor, so L was all over it. He’s also unaware that he’s having banana – win!
This is how I made the smoothies portable: I filled the mix into mason jars and added straw lids that you can get for just a few dollars, and we were ready to get in the car, both with a healthy on-the-go snack to keep us going.
If you wanted to make this for a hot day, you could add ice to the recipe.
So on-the-go nutrition can be very healthy and doesn’t have to take a lot of time, plus you could make a few extra smoothies for the next day. Adding any Silk milk to recipes makes it so easy to get extra nutrition.
What kind of healthy food are your kids not eating enough of? Could you put it into a smoothie?