Green smoothies are all the rage lately. I first tried one a couple of years ago and was pleasantly surprised that everyone was telling the truth…you can’t taste the spinach at all!
The problem for me was that I wasn’t drinking them often enough and my spinach would go bad before I could eat it all.
Seeing as I can’t be the only one with this problem, I present to you the solution to that! This isn’t anything new and it certainly wasn’t my grand idea. I first saw it on Pinterest, but their spinach cups had a bunch of other veggie juices in them and for now I just wanted spinach. I looked up a few other recipes, but none were what I was looking for and for whatever reason, I just decided to drop it. Fast forward to a month ago when I ran across this BodyBuilding.com recipe by Natalie Hodson. Score!!! Just spinach and water! Duh. So simple I should have thought of it on my own, but…..I didn’t. The only thing I did different was add flaxseed meal b/c that stuff goes rancid quick once it’s ground and it’s usually a step I would skip since it was a pain.
I used…
- one bag of spinach (about 6 cups)
- 6tbsp of flaxseed meal
- approximately 1 cup of water
I filled the blender to the top with spinach and added some of the water
I kept adding spinach and water as needed until I finished the bag. Once I was on my last bit of spinach, I added the flaxseed meal.
All mixed!
A lot of recipes I saw, put them into a regular muffin tin to freeze, but I liked the idea of putting them into a mini muffin pan. It takes less time to freeze and it’s easier on your blender! It made 25 cups exactly (I used a small container to hold the 25th cup :)).
Annnnd, here they are frozen. Aren’t they cute?
(Please ignore the frostbite. I didn’t take the after pics for a few days.)
Nutrition info: each frozen spinach cup has approximately 10 calories
It’s so easy to pop them into a smoothie! I haven’t had a protein shake without spinach since I made these. I usually add about 3-4 ice cubes to my shakes, but since these are pretty much like spinach ice cubes, I just throw in 3 of them instead of the ice cubes.
My go-to protein shake recipe…
- 1/2-2/3 frozen banana (I weigh it and add about 65g)
- 1 cup almond milk
- 1 scoop vanilla protein powder (Jay Robb is my fave!)
- 1 tbsp of peanut butter
- 3 frozen spinach cups
- dash of vanilla extract
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