Hi, I'm Dr. Josh Axe and welcome to my kitchen.
I just got done with my morning run and now it's time to refuel, and so what I'm going
to share with you guys this morning is one of my favorite recipes, which is the coconut
berry smoothie.
The coconut berry smoothie is great during all times of the day.
It's great for breakfast, it's great as an after-workout snack, or it's great even for
doing dessert.
Again, you can do a berry smoothie, and there's all different ways to mix this recipe up.
The main ingredients in the coconut berry smoothie are what I've already said.
It's coconut milk and berries.
What you need to do is get coconut milk.
You can get that in the Asian or ethnic food section of any store, and then go out and
grab some frozen berries.
I typically go with organic berries as much as possible.
What we're going to start off doing, basically all you need at home is a blender.
Any kind of blender works for this.
What I'm going to do is go ahead and grab some coconut milk and that's the first ingredient
we're going to pour in.
So you're simply going to pour coconut milk into the blender like so.
After that, we've got some frozen strawberries here and other berries.
We've got blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries.
We'll just take the berries here, dump those in, and that's for starters.
And really, these are the main ingredients.
You could just go ahead and blend this up the way it is.
I personally like to add in a few more things to add some flavor.
The next ingredient I'm going to add in is stevia.
Stevia is a no-calorie natural sweetener, so it's not going to have all the side effects
that sugar will.
It's going to have all the benefits of not having sugar.
And then the other thing you're going to see that's great about stevia, again, it's totally
natural.
It's not going to have the side effects that aspartame or Splenda will.
It is all natural.
It actually comes from the herb of a flower.
So the next thing I'm going to do is just open this pack of stevia and just go ahead
and dump that in right on top of there.
The other things I like to do to add flavor is I like add in some vanilla extract.
So you can take a little bit of vanilla extract and pour about a
capful in, and that's it for the vanilla.
The other thing I love to add is cinnamon.
So we'll just take some cinnamon, and I usually just go ahead and eyeball it and just add
in a little bit like that.
Then we are good to go.
Depending on how much you put in here, usually we go with about a cup to two cups of berries
and about a third of a can of coconut milk is typical.
But the other thing you'll often want to do is add a little bit of water depending on
the sort of texture you want.
So I'll add in about half a cup of water there.
We'll place this blender here.
This is actually a Vitamix.
It's a more powerful blender.
We're going to go ahead and start with the berry smoothie, start getting it mixed up.
One other variation to the berry smoothie is adding in some vegetables.
A lot of times you think, "Well, vegetables in a berry smoothie?
How would that work?"
Well, I'll tell you, the berries cover up most of the flavor, so if you're a person
who doesn't get enough vegetables in your diet, a great thing to do is add some green
leafy vegetables.
By the way, kids will love this berry smoothie recipe.
If you have kids at home where you know they're not getting enough vegetables, this is the
best place to sneak in some extra vegetables in the smoothie.
So what you're going to do, one of my favorite foods to add in is kale.
Kale is actually one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet.
It's full of phytonutrients, antioxidants, magnesium, calcium, and it's actually one
of the highest forms of calcium available today.
So what you're going to do, take the berry smoothie, a similar thing, at the end you're
basically going to take some kale, add it right in there, and go ahead and we'll start
blending again.
The final step is drinking the berry smoothie.
This is just something you can throw in a cup.
You can drink it at home or if you are on the go, throw it in a cup and bring it in
the car on your way to work, soccer practice, wherever it is you're going.
So again, the final step, we're just taking off the lid here, taking the berry smoothie,
pouring it here into the cup.
All right, and you have a great-tasting smoothie with berries, coconut, cinnamon, vanilla,
stevia and, in this variation, kale.
Tastes great.