May 6 - May 12, 2024 is Teacher Appreciation Week! Shamari Reid, the author of the recently released Humans Who Teach, shows us one small way we can nurture our physical well-being with a nutritious smoothie recipe.
I really don't get enough fruits and veggies. That's a really hard thing for me to incorporate throughout my day and so I started making these morning smoothies and I want to show you how. So here's what I do, I take a little bit of orange juice or grapefruit juice and I do the orange juice 'cause it's really good for vitamin C and grapefruit juice is grape for digestion. After that, I'll do a handful of oatmeal, oatmeal's really good for fiber.
Bananas here for potassium, but the trick for bananas, they're also really good for when you wanna make things sweet and you don't want to use sugar or honey or agave. I have carrots, which they remind me of my grandmother, so growing up, my grandmother always threw carrots in everything and so when I think about her, I think about carrots! Spinach here, which we know is a great super food, handful of that. And as you can see, the order of the fruits and veggies don't matter, only the liquid.
Then you want to go in, you want to add your avocado. This is a really big smoothie, 'cause I'm gonna share it with some really cool people, but if you're at home, maybe you don't need to add so much. I typically only do half an avocado when I'm making this for myself and then I have here, avocado, by the way, is really good, healthy fat, which we really do need. And then we have berries, I have strawberries and blueberries, antioxidants, I'm gonna add some of those, yay!
And then finally, I talked about the order not mattering except for the liquids. Orange juice or whatever juice at the bottom and at the top you do want your yogurt, it helps everything mix better. I have tried to switch this up and sometimes my berries don't fully mix or the banana doesn't fully mix and so I now sort of couch the veggies in between the liquid. And so I have some yogurt here, yogurt's really, really good, it's probiotic and it's really good for the gut.
And then you're gonna mix it, this is the really fun part. Put the top on there and then press your little button. (appliance whirring) And so when you're done, what you're looking for is something like this. And so I look at it and if it's not smooth enough, I'll add more yogurt, if it's too lumpy, I'll keep mixing, too much liquid, I'll add more fruits and veggies.
Really, you can do it sort of to your own taste around smoothness and consistency, this is kind of about how I do it. If I make it thicker, I find myself not wanting to drink it and I don't want to eat it. And so I like it to be kinda like this, really fluid, really liquid-ey and now we're gonna serve it.
Watch the virtual celebratory book launch event here!
Listen to Shamari Reid and Liz Prather discuss Writing as Healing on the Heinemann podcast.
Humans Who Teach: A Guide for Centering Love, Justice, and Liberation in Schools is available now!
Shamari Reid (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU. He has taught Spanish, English as a new language, and ELA at the elementary, secondary, and post secondary levels in Oklahoma, New York, Uruguay, and Spain. As a scholar-educator, Shamari’s work centers love as a moral imperative in social justice education, and as a path toward culturally sustaining school communities.
