How to make a delicious five-a-day fruit and vegetable smoothie

Struggling to get your daily vegetables? Get 8 servings in a tasty berry smoothie!

Most people are familiar with the “5-a-day” campaign, encouraging people to eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Most people fall far short of that, and even those who try don’t realize that:

• an entire bag of salad from the supermarket is only about 1.5 servings of vegetables
• you should really be eating closer to 9 servings a day

That’s a lot of veggies! Trying to eat healthier, my roommate and I were intimidated until we realized we could blend an entire bag of spinach into one of our berry smoothies without even changing the taste. After that, the sky was the limit. There have been some near disasters, but nothing undrinkable. We’re still experimenting, but for now I present to you our baseline smoothie. It’s got eight – that’s right, eight – servings of fruits and vegetables and tastes better than anything you can get at Jamba Juice.

We get our frozen berries from Trader Joe’s and the frozen cooked squash from Safeway.

Niels and Craig’s Five-a-Day Smoothie

• 2 servings frozen spinach (1/3 bag)
• 2 servings frozen cooked squash (1/2 package)
• 2 overripe bananas (ideally frozen)
• 1 serving frozen mixed berries – we use strawberry, raspberry, blackberry (1/3 bag)
• Orange juice (just enough so your blender can function)

Blend spinach and orange juice. Liquefy. If your bananas are unfrozen, add them. Blend. Microwave the squash for 15 seconds so you can break the frozen block up into ice-cube sized pieces by hand. (You can skip this if you’ve got a better blender, but our $150 blender is pretty good and we still have to break up the squash.) Add all remaining ingredients. Blend.

Fills two glasses with a little left over. Whether this serves one or two is up to you.