3 Easy Ways to Pack Nutrition into Kids, Part 1

1. Smoothie
2.Bread
3. Whole Grain Cereal

Smoothies are my favorite way. You can hide healthy things in smoothies. If you add bananas you won't need to add any other sweetener. I buy bags of brown bananas, peel them and put them in freezer bags. They turn dark in the freezer but it really doesn't matter.

A few years ago I caught on that Smoothies were a wonderfully easy way to get healthy foods into my children and I started serving them for breakfast. They loved them and we quickly started having them for lunch and snacks too. This is how we make them.

Plain Yogurt (usually homemade) or Kefir for all the good bacteria we need in our gut Raw Eggs for protein (from our chickens or another free range flock) Coconut Oil for all of its health properties Vitamin C powder, again, for our health Frozen Bananas for sweetening and because they're so healthy Frozen Berries or Pineapple for our health and palate

It is fast and easy. Throw all that in and blend away!

The amounts are going to depend on how big your blender is and how many you are serving. If you like it sweeter, then add more bananas. I figure 1 c of yogurt, 1 egg, 1 T of coconut oil, and 1/3 t of Vit. C powder per person. This is approximate because of course the Littles don't eat much and the Bigs go around slurping up all the leftovers.

When we're out of yogurt we use milk or buttermilk.

We have a cow and chickens so I can easily and economically take care of the milk and eggs.

Coconut oil I have to bring from afar. I have bought excellent coconut oil from Tropical Traditions and Wilderness Family Naturals. I have had really bad coconut oil from Spectrum.

Vitamin C powder I buy but I suppose in desperate times I could collect rose hips and pulverize them. ; )

Bananas and pineapple are things I can't grow in Iowa. boo hoo

But I can and do add honey if we are out of bananas. I have been buying honey but God sent a bee swarm to our orchard last year and we caught it! I did not harvest the honey last fall in September because I did not know what I was doing. I still don't but I'm learning! Our bees are alive in spite of the bad location we put them. This year, I intend to get bee keeping right and not buy any honey. By the way, honey is on the healthy food list.

Berries are on every single super food list. I have been working on planting different berries around our place. Raspberries I can do easily. The absolutely most important thing to do right with raspberries, in my experience, is to keep them weed free.

Blueberries, I am still working on perfecting their cultivation. They need acidic soil which I do not have but can amend. One key thing I learned from a local expert is that they need a sandy soil. As I have said before, my excellent soil is rich and heavy. Last fall my boys put sand around all of my berries and early this spring I am supposed to put fertilizer on top of the sand. There is a particular type he recommends but I wonder if the copious amounts of manure around here would suffice? Then, on top of the fertilizer, mulch with pine boughs. That is easy to do in the spring. When we clean yard, we put all the little pine branchs around the blueberries, raspberries, and hydrangea (not a fruit but it like acidic soil).

I buy berries or fruit trees every year, slowly growing the amount and variety that we have here. Last year I bought from Raintree Nursery and was very happy with what they sent us. They have a huge and excellent variety of small fruits. We bought several variety of cider apple trees last year.

My goal for next season is to not buy any berries but to harvest and freeze a year's supply. I'll have to do some math to figure that number out.

1/4 cup per person per day

11 people x 1/4 = 11/4 = almost 3 cups daily

365 x 3 = 109,995 cups = 54,997 pint freezer bags of berries

Wow! That's a lot of berries! Did I do that math right?

I'll just freeze as much as I can and then ration it from there. Reality...