Cherries again…so soon? Even after two great smoothies, I’m not sure I’m ready for cherry…. but then, Lexie’s Kitchen offered up the Cheery Cherry Detox smoothie and while I love the idea of it, I know it’s going to need some adjusting. It’s made to serve up 4 cups (32 oz), there’s no banana and I also know I have to tone down the cherries. While I bought the Emergen-C powder, I didn’t include it.
I couldn’t find frozen cherries anywhere locally so I went with fresh. This is also the first smoothie I’ve made with greens, and I’m starting big and bold with kale.
I whirled everything in the blender and it came out a dark reddish-brown (the second photo shows the texture and a better representation of the final colour) — not nearly the bright red I had been hoping for. I took a sip and made a face at the tartness then looked at the ingredients again and realized I’d missed two things from the original list: lemon juice and liquid stevia. While we had both, I knew the lemon juice was not going to help the tartness and decided instead to go with honey.
I returned it to the blender and added a tablespoon of honey. It was better, still a bit tart, and anyone who says “You’d never know there was kale in there!” is lying. That said, it’s far better than Friday’s lumpy cherry mess but this is not the smoothie that won me over to including greens.
My recipe:
1/3 cup cherries (halved and pitted)
1/2 cup frozen raspberries
fresh kale (handful in this case was foue leaves of a russian kale)
3/4 cup non-dairy milk (I used coconut dream)
2 Tbsp ground chia seeds
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp honey
splash of sour cherry syrup*
* We recently found Kemal Kükrer sour cherry syrup and pomegranate syrup at Seven Valleys, a local Mediterranean import store. It’s very tasty stuff and adds a good dash of flavour but I try to use it sparingly as it does contain both natural and artificial sweeteners.