Making and Freezing Fruit Smoothie and Green Drink Base - Fast and Easy

If you read yesterday's post (click here for that if you didn't read it) then you will know that I brought home a TRUNK full of meat from the food bank. With that, I had to find a place in my freezer for all that meat.

When the food bank freezer compressor went out  a few months back, I helped distribute thousands of pounds of meat but didn't think to clean out my own freezer and keep some. I kept a few turkeys and a ham I think.

After all the stress trying to save all the meat, it just didn't occur to me to get rid of the bread, veggies and fruit that I had in there and get some meat. So, this time, when they had overages at the food bank, I did think to keep some for myself. It was an answer to a prayer for sure as you can see in yesterday's post I have been craving protein.

That meant cleaning out the two chest freezers. The two upper fridge freezers are always getting rotated as I keep the new stuff in those but I had about six bags of blueberries from the food bank at different times, peaches and nectarines from my tree, plums from my tree, pineapple from the food bank, bananas from the food bank and a few other weird things like fruit pulp from juicing apples and some watermelon I froze when we had to leave town and I didn't want to waste it and figured we could use it in a smoothie. I also had many bags of frozen grapes that were wonderfully sweet we also got from the food bank when they had pallets of grapes one time.

So, I had a full plastic bin and a smaller box of frozen fruits and yogurts. The yogurts came from the food bank and I froze some to eat as frozen yogurt but they got buried in the chest freezer so they just didn't get eaten. I would rather have the meat so I pulled it all out of the freezers and filled them with meat.

I didn't want the fruit and yogurt to go to waste so I gave a box to a friend and then decided I would make smoothies and freeze them made already and then take them out and thaw them or actually defrost them in the microwave on defrost and drink them that way.

I would throw a few bags of stuff into the VitaMix blender and blend it up with some water. I would then throw in a frozen yogurt to give it a creamy taste and I poured that into a large bowl and repeated that process until the bowl was full.

I would then mix the several blenders full together and double bag quart sized freezer bags and fill them by folding down the outer edge so I could keep the zipper part clean. I then got all the air out and sealed it. I saved some space in the two upper freezers and laid the bags out flat to freeze. I went from a full bin plus to about 20 containers of smoothie. I thought it was so good I kept sneaking tastes as I bagged it. I also dehydrated some for fruit leather which I will post about tomorrow.

This is a wonderful way to have a fruit base for a green drink or just to have a quick and easy smoothie. I just put a bag into the microwave on defrost typing in 1 pound of meat and by the time it beeped, it had thawed enough to get it into the blender to mix. Or, I just put it on for another few minutes on defrost and then mushed it with my hands and it was the perfect smoothie, it still had slushy texture but didn't require any blending. Also, I did this for another few fruit leather trays and the microwave technique worked great. You could have your green drink or smoothie made up in about five minutes with just seconds of work as most of that time is the microwave doing the work. Or, if you don't like microwaves, you could fill a clean bowl with hot water and let it soak for a few minutes to defrost if you are in a hurry. Otherwise, you could just leave it in a bowl on the counter for a few hours and it will be nice and thawed.

I LOVED that it went from large amounts of freezer space and somewhat unusable bags of harder frozen bananas, peaches etc to easy to take flat bags or containers that took up the bottom shelf of the upper freezer! I will choose these over eating a bowl of ice cream or other frozen treat as I thought they tasted great. I actually saved some out of the microwave fruit leather bag just to eat.

If you are going out of town, just put one of these in a small cooler and take it with, when it melts, it is still "slushy" texture and is quite good. This could be a way to have a frozen treat with the kids on a long trip without the expense and time for stopping at a smoothie or ice cream place.

I wish I had thought to take a picture of the bin and box full of fruit but as usually happens with my blog posts, it is just stuff I am doing already and I don't think about making it into a blog post until I am halfway through the project.


I just thought I would share that information as I was so happy with it. I like that Princess Five can just pull a bag out and have a smoothie anytime without me having to clean up any messes or having to dig in the freezer for items. This is one brilliant idea in my book!