How to Energize Your Bleary Eyed Morning {chocolate-hazelnut smoothie}

The day started early. Too early. 5:45 early. Landon woke up. Normally I can go in is room, rock him back to sleep, while staying half asleep myself. However, because our PODS are coming tomorrow and all the other details that I need to address started running marathons in my head, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

After cursing my angst for 45 minutes, I decided it was time to drag myself out of bed. I knew the usual breakfast routine wouldn’t work for me today, so I decided to make my Hazelnut-Cacao Energizer Smoothie. This is the real deal. The zing-you-back-to-life-when-you-feel-like-you’ve-been-run-over-by-a-herd-of-wild-mustangs deal.

Ingredients are as follows:
1 banana
1-2 tbsp chia seeds
5-6 pitted medjool dates
2 tbsp flax seeds (or flax seed meal)
1/4 cup shredded, unsweetened coconut,
1/4 cup raw hazelnuts
1 tbsp raw, unfiltered coconut oil
2 tbsp Cacao nibs
1 tbsp raw cacao powder
2 tsp maca powder.
3-4 cups filtered water (depending on how thick you want this beast)

You can’t just throw all this into the blender at once. Here’s the process:
1. Pour water and dates into blender, blend until smooth.
2. Add hazelnuts. (If you don’t have a high speed blender you may need to pulverize these, and the flax seeds, in a food processor or coffee grinder).
3. THEN add the rest of your ingredients.

*Add agave or stevia if you would like it sweeter–I find the dates are plenty sweet for me.

This smoothie is high in fiber, high in protein, and high in omega-3′s. Which is basically brain food, muscle food, and colon food–the holy trinity of nutrition according to me.

This makes a solid quart, which will feed between 2-4 people. I can barely drink more than 8-12 oz of this myself because it is so rich and filling. I was able to sally-forth through the most brutal power yoga class this morning fueled by this smoothie (+ loads of water). I’ll probably finish the rest as an afternoon snack.

—-
A few scenes from the morning.
I peeked in Landon’s door and saw this going on…
Landon is in a VERY independent phase. He doesn’t want me to sit by him or read him a story, but he wants me to just stand quietly in the corner and watch him do whatever he thinks is important. When I try to move I get a very loud, very offended grunt followed by a big, puckery bottom lip from the boss. As you can imagine, this can be a very frustrating scene when I have a 90 mile to-do list. He usually wins.


He’s also obsessed with this super-old “Life of Moses” book that my mom brought to him. (It used to be mine).It USED to be a pop-up book. Now it’s just a bunch of scraps hanging loosely out of a book-like object. I always smile when I hear him ask for the truck book and whine really impatiently for “Moses.”
He also demanded that he drink my smoothie. Pointing to it and saying, “Mine!” (We’re working on that whole “asking nicely” and “sharing”stuff right now…any tips would be gladly taken). He had to hold it by himself, of course. (There is that independence creeping up again…)
And this is him mid “Thank you.” As I said, we’re working on it…

Hope you enjoy the smoothie! (and Landon does too).