Chef Amy Riolo: Hi! I am Chef Amy Riolo with Harris Teeter and today we're making a Strawberry Beauty Smoothie. The ingredients which we'll need are one ripe banana, sliced, one cup ice, one cup plain non-fat yogurt, two tablespoons natural honey, one teaspoon vanilla extract, one half cup frozen strawberries, thawed, one half cup frozen blueberries, thawed, and two tablespoons ground flaxseeds.

We'll start by putting our ice into a blender or a smoothie maker. This is just one cup of ice and we'll go ahead and we'll mix that together with our strawberries. These are frozen that I have then defrosted, you can go ahead and put the lid on and mix.

Once the ice is pretty well-crushed, we can go ahead and add in our other ingredients. The first thing we're going to need is our banana, and it's really good to slice the banana just right where you're using it, because if not, they'll discolor. But the great thing about the smoothie is that you can make it in large quantities, and then go ahead and keep it in your refrigerator, and it's good everyday during the week. If you are a kind of person who doesn't have a lot of time to make breakfast, you'll really like the smoothie. It's also a great snack and kids love it. And then we'll add in our yogurt. This is just a plain yogurt, if you wanted to add vanilla, you could do that as well. We've got a cup of our frozen blueberries that have been thawed. I'm also going to add in a teaspoon of vanilla extract, but you can add in other extracts or you can leave this out if you like. You could also do lemon juice that will be really delicious in this recipe. I'm also going to add some honey as a sweetener. This is a few tablespoons, but you can add it to taste as much as you need. You might need a little bit more or a little bit less.

Another great sweetener that you could use in place of honey, specially if you are diabetic, is agave nectar, because agave nectar comes from a cactus and it does not cause an alteration in your body's blood sugar level. So that's a really nice one.

Now this is ground flaxseed; here we have whole flaxseeds that have been roasted and here we have some ground flaxseeds. Flaxseeds are wonderful for you, but it's really nice to get the ground ones, because if they're already ground up or if you grind them yourself, then our bodies can absorb the nutrients a little bit more. So you can buy them this way, it's wonderful. They store for a long time. Just go ahead and grind them up in a food processor, if you have a large quantity or in a spice blender or a coffee grinder.

If you don't want to do that, you can buy them already pre-ground. So I'm going to add the pre-ground ones right in, and then we'll go ahead and blend this together one more time.

So here we have our Strawberry Beauty Smoothies and we can go ahead and serve these. This actually makes two large glasses like this. So if you wanted to serve four people in smaller glasses, you could definitely do that, but if you wanted to have the larger size, they are really delicious. I don't think you will be sorry for having a large size.

So here is our Strawberry Beauty Smoothie.

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