Today’s post is sponsored by Stonyfield Organics and Healthy Skoop. As always, all opinions are my own.
Banana splits for breakfast? Have I completely abdicated my responsibilities as a mother? Is this what happens when there are two weeks of school left and I am done? I mean, done.
Nah! My kids aren’t really having banana splits for breakfast. It’s a banana split smoothie. You know, a smoothie. A healthy breakfast drink with fruit and protein that only tastes like a banana split.
Getting Zuzu in particular to eat breakfast is difficult. She always claims not to be hungry in the morning plus, she wants to wake up as late as humanly possible and still get to school on time. (And that is pretty late because we literally live around the corner from her school.) I can usually tempt her with a smoothie, however. She can sip it as she walks around getting dressed and fixing her hair. She can even take it to go!
But I want Zuzu’s breakfast to energize her and sustain her until lunch. Thus, it’s really important to me that her morning smoothie contain protein, as well as ingredients to make it taste good. But so many protein powders give an otherwise delicious fruit smoothie a weird, vegetal taste. That is not helpful when trying to get a reluctant tween to eat breakfast.
Enter Healthy Skoop. Entirely plant-based, Healthy Skoop’s Super Skoop All-in-One Nutritional Shake has protein, antioxidants, probiotics, fiber, and omega-3s so it clearly adds significant nutrition to whatever you put it in. But it also has a delicious chocolate taste that blends well with other ingredients. Perfect for my chocoholic daughter.
Healthy Skoop shows that it takes nutrition seriously by donating 3% of every product purchase to Project Produce, which gives grants of $2,500 to help qualified schools put more fresh produce in lunch lines and encourage students to eat more fruits and vegetables. Project Produce has assisted 51 schools in 21 states and over 24,000 students have benefited from the program to date. That’s pretty impressive.
Together, Zuzu and I came up with this recipe for a banana split smoothie. The 100% Grass-Fed Vanilla Stonyfield yogurt stands in for the ice cream and the Healthy Skoop powder stands in for the hot fudge sauce! Add a banana, some frozen sweet cherries and a scoop of nut butter — we use pecan butter because pecans are the only nuts Zuzu can eat, but you can use your favorite nut butter or peanut butter — and you have a smoothie that tastes like dessert but hits above its weight nutritionally.
See? Although only two weeks of school remain, I haven’t given up quite yet.
Ingredients
- 1 banana
- 1 cup frozen sweet cherries
- 1/2 cup Stonyfield vanilla yogurt
- 1 TB nut or peanut butter
- 1 scoop Healthy Skoop All-in-One Nutritional Shake in chocolate
Instructions
- Combine all the ingredients in a high-speed blender.
- Blend at high speed until smooth, using a tamper or spatula as necessary to incorporate the ingredients.
- Serve in a tall glass with a straw.
