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| Blueberry Ginger Superfood Smoothie |
This is a smoothie with a deep, dark secret. A few of them in fact.
Since I’ve just published an article about making your own Oat Milk, and raved about how much I love it in smoothies, I thought it’d be timely to share with you one of my favorite smoothie recipes as well.
Smoothies are the perfect breakfast: they are quick to toss together in the morning, taste cold, crisp and refreshing, and with the right ingredients, keep you full until lunch. They are also a prime opportunity to use ingredients you may not otherwise bother with for breakfast – as in the case of this smoothie: ginger or chia seed or flax seed or dates. And then there is the darkest secret of all lurking in the depths of this benign-looking beverage: a wild food, dried stinging nettle.
Stinging Nettle is extremely good for you and high in iron, along with a long list of other health benefits, but not something you are likely to sprinkle over your breakfast cereal. I’ve used nettle combined with mint for a tea; tossed into a mushroom pie; added to soups and pilafs, but this was the first time I’d used it for breakfast. I didn’t notice the flavor of the nettle as distinct or separate note; rather it simply combines seamlessly with the other flavors to make a deeply satisfying super food breakfast.
But once you have these ingredients combined into a smoothie, filling your breakfast glass with something cold and satisfying, you aren’t thinking about the annoying sting of the nettles or the gloopy texture of soaked chia or flax seed – you are simply enjoying a healthy breakfast.
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| Blueberry Ginger Superfood Smoothie |
Bilberries or blueberries are what I most commonly use in a smoothie; specifically bilberries for me as I can pick big bucketfuls every summer out of the Finnish Forests. I use “blueberry” in the title as my guess it is more universally available. Ginger adds a special zing that suits the blueberry flavor’s mildness, and the other ingredients act as fillers, including the oat milk which rounds everything out.
Feel free to leave out the chia and flax seed and/or nettles – it won’t ruin the smoothie, but it won’t have quite the superfood power punch. On a second thought go ahead, leave them in – you’ll be surprised at how good this is!
And then once you’ve tried Nettles and learn how delicious they are, you might want to head over and try the Dried Nettle Pasta from Hunger and Thirst or pick some fresh ones as soon as they poke their heads out of the ground this Spring (wear gloves! use scissors!) and make this Stinging Nettle Savory Bread Pudding.
Enjoy!
Blueberry/Bilberry Ginger Superfood Smoothie
2 cups oat milk
1 cup frozen blueberries
6 dates, pit removed
1/3 cup crumbled, dried nettles
1 tablespoon chia seeds
1 tablespoon ground flax seed
1/2″ ginger root, grated
Blend in a blender, food processor or with an immersion blender until smooth, about 3 minutes. Divide between two glasses, and Enjoy.
Serves 2.
Note: For those of you in Finland, you can find Chia seeds at Ruohojuuri, where they sell them under the Cocovi brand, or you can order them directly from the Cocovi website.