Spearmint Smoothie

I am obsessed with fruit smoothies. Or slushies, maybe. Is it still called a smoothie if it doesn't have any yogurt? Either way, I love them. I really don't like eating fruit. It's not that I don't like the taste of fruit, it's just that I don't really get excited about it. I want to eat it because having a healthy diet is important to me, but I guess I'm just more of a vegetable person. However, itt turns out I actually enjoy eating fruit when it's in this blended, icy form!

When we were in Guatemala in March to visit my mother-in-law, we went to a little restaurant that specialized in fresh smoothies and sandwiches. My sister and I became obsessed with the smoothies. We would order different drinks and analyze them to figure out which ingredient made them so freaking delicious so that we could learn to re-create them at home. Our studies indicated that the pineapple, passion fruit, and spearmint were most often the key ingredients.

I started having smoothies every morning since we returned from our trip. I thought it would be awesome to be able to make my own smoothies at home using "local and organic" ingredients. It is pretty awesome. We already have a bunch of pineapple plants at our house, but it grows slowly (and only bears one fruit per plant) so I often have to substitute with store bought or frozen. Spearmint from the store usually goes bad before I get to use it all, so I made sure to plant some in our garden. It's going wild! I'm never going to run out.

Today was the first time I used the spearmint from the garden and hot damn this smoothie turned out fantastic. I don't use official recipes so my smoothies don't have names. We'll call this one Citrus Spearmint Smoothie. It is seriously delicious. The spearmint flavor is unreal.

Citrus Spearmint Smoothie

Citrus Spearmint Smoothie

2 cups ice

6-8 oz. of juice or water (any kind - I used grapefruit today)

1/4 to 1/3 cup pineapple 

1/4 cup blueberries

1/3 cup peaches

1 orange

10 spearmint leaves

You can use fresh or frozen fruits. Put all of the ingredients into a blender and blend until nice and smooth. If it's too thick, you can just add more juice or water.

This recipe made about 2-3 cups of smoothie. Normally, I would drink the whole thing myself but Seth wanted to try our homegrown spearmint so I shared it. It has about 2-3 servings of fruit which I think it pretty good considering I used to eat only 2-3 servings of fruit per week! And did I mention that it's really delicious?