Lavender Purple Sweet Potato Anti-Stress Smoothie.
Would you like to calm down?
I offer you this purple beauty! Easy to make with three plant-based ingredients hopefully you can find at your grocery store.
Not only does the color capture your purple-loving soul, but the nutritional benefits here are numerous. This smoothie is super high in disease-fighting, cleansing anti-oxidants, supportive of appetite control by being high and fiber and making you feel full, and calming with an herb we all know and love.
Let’s get down to detail here and explore this smoothie further.
Well, the purple comes from purple sweet potatoes, but if you can’t find purple, any color sweet potato will do because this beautiful color also comes from a sneaky hidden fruit…
Wait a minute, did you see how I turned the tables on you?
How, you say? Well, normally we see recipes with sneaky hidden veggies.
This time I am totally transparent about the veggie, but hiding the fruit!
Ha! No one can say I am boring!
(well, they can actually, since I get so excited about purple smoothies, hahaha).
Annywaaaay….
Blueberries! THAT’s the sneaky fruit that can carry the purple responsibility if you can’t get your hands on glorious purple sweet potatoes. If you can’t, substitute the purple sweet potato for another color sweet potato or even peeled raw zucchini. Totally works. But I hope you do find the PSP.
You can try orange sweet potato but I will not guess what color you will get, mixing blueberries and orange. Still, all sweet potatoes carry lots of nutrition, vitamins, coppery, fiber, potassium and iron so the nutritious palate would stay the same with any color sweet potato.
Back to the other ingredients in this smoothie, the de-stress aspect of course comes from lavender.
For centuries lavender has been known to evoke a sense of calm and relaxation with just the smell, if not ingesting it.
Now, what’s interesting here is how I added the lavender.
I didn’t use fresh, oil or even dried.
I thought with this lavender recipe, I’d make the calming herb very accessible.
Buying dried or oil requires an online purchase probably, unless you have it in your pantry.
And finding fresh is super hard, unless you are lucky enough to have it in your garden.
We often spend a good bit of our summer on an island off the East Coast, and it is awash in beautiful straight-up lavender, the hugest beds being in the yard of the local library.
So we often sit and read on the library steps, smelling the delicious aroma of lavender, feeling more relaxed with every page we turn.
But I’m not there now, and so I went with tea.
Lavender tea is even more convenient to blend in a smoothie being a liquid. I would suggest you steep twice the amount you would for an ordinary drinking cup of tea to increase the presence of lavender in your smoothie.
I added a touch of sweet (maple syrup) but drop it if your blueberries carry the flavor, and plant milk to make things creamy!
Enjoy this smoothie for two!
Ingredients
- 1 cup purple sweet potato 1 large one boiled & peeled, cool
- 1 cup frozen blueberries
- 1/4 cup lavender tea (I use this brand)
- 1-2 tbsp maple syrup
- 2-4 tbsp plant milk
Instructions
Make the Lavender Tea
- Boil 1/4 cup of water, pour into a measuring cup, and add 2 tea bags or 2 tsp loose tea, swirl with a spoon, and allow to steep 10 minutes. If you used loose tea, strain out the solids, and allow the remaining lavender tea to cool. If you want to make more, you could freeze it in ice cube trays for use in the next lavender smoothie.
Make the Sweet Potato Lavender Smoothie
- Boil purple sweet potatoes about 20 minutes, let them cool, peel off skin, and measure out one cup of sweet potato and put it into the blender.
- Add the blueberries, lavender tea, and syrup to taste, and blend until combined.
- Add plant milk in increments of 1 tbsp to help your blend reach a smoothie consistency - if you want it spoonable like soft-serve, 2 tbsp will probably be enough. If you want it straw-sippable, at 4- tbsp.
- Pop it into a jar, swirl in some yogurt. I topped mine with hemp seeds, and a bit of mango puree.
- Enjoy chilled!
Dee Dine is founder of Green Smoothie Gourmet, a plant based recipe blog, and author of the recent cookbook, Crazy Healthy with 4 Ingredients . On this blog you’ll find incredibly easy recipes with hidden veggies for anyone wanting to eat healthier, regardless of diet. Dee has graduate degrees in immunological nutritional studies and journalism. More about Dee Dine here.
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