Start Your Day With This Smoothie Bowl Recipe And Breeze Past Your Five-A-Day

Smoothie bowl featured in The Cycling Chef recipe book
(Image credit: Photograph: Clare Winfield. Food styling: Rebecca Woods)

If you’re looking to eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, and you absolutely should be looking to do that, then you need to start things off on the right foot. All too many of us opt for cereal and a coffee, or a couple of slices of toast, and leave our five-a-day tally stuck at zero until lunch, forcing you to play catch-up later in the day.

A glass of orange juice is a good place to start, plus a handful of raisins in your cereal. Or you can really go for it and make this smoothie bowl recipe from The Cycling Chef by Alan Murchison. The Cycling Chef contains 65 healthy for meals and snacks designed to fuel a keen cyclist, and all its recipes are easy to prepare and use ingredients you can find in a standard supermarket. Murchison was also good enough to share advice on how to fuel for a 100-mile sportive.

It’s not only cyclists who can benefit from these easy, healthy recipes either. This smoothie bowl recipe is packed full of berries and other fruit, and some spinach even gets thrown into the mix too. The best part is that once you’ve blended your mix, the bowl is topped off with more fresh, whole fruit, because we all (hopefully) know that you can only count a smoothie as one of your five-a-day no matter how much you consume. 

For more ideas for what to stick in your blender, try these smoothie recipes and this açai berry bowl recipe.

Method

  1. Blend together the almond milk, frozen berries, banana and spinach in a food processor.
  2. Stir in the oats, chia seeds, Greek yogurt and mixed seeds. Transfer to a bowl and leave to set in the fridge for 30 minutes.
  3. Serve with fresh berries, banana slices, pumpkin seeds, almonds and honey to taste.

Ingredients (one serving)

  • 50ml almond milk
  • 100g frozen berries such as blueberries or raspberries (or most supermarkets stock a smoothie mix of mixed fruits)
  • 1 banana, peeled
  • Handful of spinach leaves
  • 1tbsp rolled oats
  • 20g chia seeds
  • 100g low-fat Greek yogurt
  • 1tbsp mixed seeds such as sunflower or pumpkin seeds
  • To serve: fresh berries (halved strawberries, whole raspberries), banana slices, pumpkin seeds, almonds (whole, skin on) and honey

Nutritional info (per serving)

Calories 399
Carbohydrate 56g
-Sugars 24g
Fat 11g
Protein 21g
Sodium 56mg

Nick Harris-Fry
Senior writer

Nick Harris-Fry is a journalist who has been covering health and fitness since 2015. Nick is an avid runner, covering 70-110km a week, which gives him ample opportunity to test a wide range of running shoes and running gear. He is also the chief tester for fitness trackers and running watches, treadmills and exercise bikes, and workout headphones.