Prior to juicing, I made my family a smoothie every morning for breakfast, or as part of our breakfast. After we got our juicer and my husband and I began drinking our morning green juice, the smoothie making died off. Until I discovered the JUICY SMOOTHIE!

*This post was originally from June, 2012. I love reading through these old snippets of our life years ago — now my picky eater is the one who was gobbling up my juice in this post!

Over this past weekend I read Jason Vale’s, “Juice Master: Keeping it Simple, Over 100 delicious juices and smoothies.” It’s basically a recipe book, but there are a lot of other good insights to juicing as well.

I had thought of juicing and making a smoothie from the juice, but hadn’t tried it yet. On Monday morning, I gave it a whirl. I decided to start out with mostly fruit juice to ease my 4 year old into it. She loves smoothies, but gets suspicious. My 2 year old LOVES my morning green juice and has frequently consumed half of it before I’ve gotten it all down. I wasn’t worried about her liking the smoothie.

The result was amazing. I don’t know why I didn’t try this before! When I am pregnant, it’s harder for me to get down the juice because it can be so strong (I don’t like to juice a lot of fruit, see this post, point #9). It’s been tough getting that super green juice down. This smoothie was a revelation for me. It was easy to drink, tasted delicious, and was some variation that I think I needed.

The process is simple: juice as normal and then blend with some frozen fruit, a banana, some chia seeds, and ice cubes if you want! It makes a perfectly COLD, slushy juice that is sweet. Play around with different variations. My favorite frozen fruit to add is pineapple – I love the combo of pineapple with a green juice. You can add kefir, hemp hearts, or any other smoothie add-in you use and love. This makes the smoothie so FRESH.

Jason Vale’s book contains a lot of recipes for juice smoothies. I feel great knowing that I’m not adding extra sugars with a store-bought fruit juice in my smoothies, and it tastes way better than anything I could buy anyway. This is a good way to ease into juicing, if you’re new.

Let me know if you find any combinations that work really well!