Question about preparing Green Smoothies

by Jen Erdmann
(Centennial, Co)

How do you prepare your fruits for smoothie? I assume to leave the skin on the apple but not the orange? Remove the seeds from the apple? (I think I remembered in my juicing research that the seeds contain cyanide). Also is it possible to use my juicer if my blender doesn't cut it? Would I still add the water?
Thanks for any insight!

Answer You are right about leaving the skin on your apples and removing the core and seeds. I chop out the middle then toss the apple quarters into the blender. I peel my oranges then slice across the middle of the segments to pop out any seeds, then drop the chunks in the blender. The seeds will make your smoothie taste bitter. You can do the same with lemons, but I prefer to juice them with a simple hand-held citrus juicer and pour the juice in. If you prefer, you can do that with oranges too, but the fiber is good to include.

Your blender is the only way to make green smoothies, so if yours doesn't work, hopefully you can invest in a high-powered Vita-Mix blender for ultimate results.

If you want to use your juicer, follow our directions on juicing. This is another very healthy alternative but a different approach than smoothies, and harder to get all the goodness of your greens. Smoothies give you all the excellent fiber and are more economical because they use the entire fruit and vegetable.

Juicing extracts all the vitamins for potent nutrition but without the fiber, and you need more vegetables. It's also more work to clean up from juicing whereas we find smoothies to be quick and easy with minimal mess.

Happy Blending! Cindy