Vita-Mix Love :: Tropical & Berry Smoothies

After months of debate, we recently purchased a Vitamix 5200 - the ultimate food processor/blender and raw foodist's dream.  It will liquefy anything you put in it, whole fruits & whole veggies, nuts - just about anything.  So we decided to give it a chance and LOVE it so far.  Don't get me wrong, these smoothies aren't the only thing we eat, we're still always up for all of our old favorites :-) The idea if this machine is to make fresh food smoothies with tons of fruit, veggies and greens to fill you up and detoxify the body.  You can also make hot soups in it, no cooking required, just add of the raw veggies and spices and in 4 minutes you have a hot soup.  It's like something the Jetson's would have.

I've been exploring the idea of raw food for about a year (thanks to my dear friend and raw foodie Carmen Marshall) but it takes some getting used to.  It's not just about eating salad and raw fruits and veggies - it's about eating food in its most natural state as possible and keeping all of the naturally occurring enzymes in your food in tact. Heating food over 118 degrees F starts to kill those enzymes, so the idea is to keep things raw. Apparently those enzymes do us a lot of good health wise and they make us look better too. "Living Raw Food" by Sarma Melngailis is an excellent book if you want to read more about it.

The idea of raw smoothies was the reason we got this contraption, but now we just love it because of the way things taste. And it is so easy to clean, just put hot water in it, turn it on, dump it out and done.

Here are our favorites so far....

Tropical Smoothie

• 1 whole orange, outer peel cut away, white pith left on, cut in half
  
• 3 chunks fresh pineapple
  
• 1 peeled banana
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 2 cups fresh spinach
• 1 teaspoon coconut butter (aka coconut oil)
• 1/4 of an avocado
• 4 ice cubes
  

Berry Smoothie

• 1/2 cup frozen blueberries
• 1/2 cup frozen strawberries
• 1/2 of an apple, chopped in half
• 1 whole carrot, chopped in half
  
• 2 cups fresh spinach
  
• 5 kale leaves
• 6-8 Walnuts or Almonds
  
• 1/2 dropperful of vanilla stevia
• Juice of one lemon

You can also make these in a regular blender, just chop everything finely and it might be a little chunky :-)