I hope everyone is healthy and enjoying their smoothies 😁
First of all, thank you so much, 
You can learn about this contest here 🍹 I hope you can participate; it's definitely easy, and you'll love it. I hope my friend 
Today I feel lucky that I can finally enjoy a short vacation and it's such a simple but divine pleasure to start it off with an energizing and delicious smoothie.
The last week of the semester is madness; I have lots of papers to check, last minute requests to take care of, and files to put in order, besides working a second job and trying to live life decently. Yesterday, I was finally able to resume my bike rides around the city; and before charging myself with the radiant sunshine and the good energy of this sky above us in Cumaná, I went for my first battery charger, this smoothie of cocoa, "topocho" banana, and roasted peanuts, with vegetable milks, aromatic spices, and only a little cane sugar.
This smoothie is a vegan bomb! And it tastes great with stevia if it's your choice. It's great for everybody--who's not allergic to peanuts--, children and adults, and so delicious.
Now, please allow me to share a bit of relevant information about the main ingredients of this smoothie: cocoa, ripe "topocho" bananas, and peanuts. Surely many of you will know more than I do 🤣
A kilo of good quality cocoa powder costs between 12 and 20 USD in my city. The brand I'm using today has an intermediate cost but its quality is among the best: Savoy cocoa powder has no added sugar and is 100% cocoa.
Cocoa is good for our overall health. It's good for our heart, liver, emotions, and mood. Like magic, huh! I've read that if you eat some cocoa every day (without sugar), it helps our system lower blood pressure and improve blood flow--an issue I have to deal with--, while increasing good cholesterol and helping us feel good: alert and happy. What I like the most is that personally, cocoa helps me reduce anxiety and the urge to eat things I shouldn't, e.g. things with gluten.
Some of you who have been so kind to read other posts I've shared here on Hive may remember that I get a lot of these every other month because my comadre grows them in her backyard. I use them still unripe for some recipes, like bread and soups; then they ripen and become good to eat them as common fruit or for other recipes, such as cakes and smoothies. These I got for free, but if you go to the Public Market in my city, you can buy them at very low cost: probably 15-20 units for 1 USD.
This variety of banana is popular in my country. It's a potent source of antioxidants and helps protect our skin from the sun. In Cumaná,my hometown, this is an excellent food to consume daily, since here the shining sun that looks so beautiful from the distance and is said to keep sadness away, is also truly harmful when it comes to the intense incidence of UV rays on our skin, which not only accelerates the aging of our skin, but can also lead to skin cancer (which can soon spread to other parts of our body).
Eating topochos regularly will provide you with a good deal of vitamins B6 and C, good for our tissues and to help our skin withstand the intense sun. Eating topochos regularly will also help your bones and muscles, because besides iron (good for producing hemoglobin) and potassium (good for kidney and heart function), it has several important minerals: calcium, phosphorus, zinc and magnesium.
If, like me, you are lucky enough not to be allergic to peanuts, you've probably eaten them many times as a healthy snack, probably salted, or in candy form: caramelized or in brittles.
More rarely in my country, you'll see peanuts in salads, rice dishes and other (mostly gourmet) foods. It turns out that peanuts are amazing in smoothies and shakes,too, as they help make them creamy and nutritious.
Many things are said about peanuts in my hometown, such as that they improve digestion and that if you eat them frequently, you will live longer and healthier; this makes sense to me, as I have read that eating half a handful of peanuts once or twice a week improves digestion and heart function, while reducing the risk of Alzheimer's disease. Our stomach is our second brain and moderate peanut intake helps keep it healthier.
The price of peanuts varies a lot in my city, depending on whether they come raw or roasted, shelled or unshelled. I've used them today for the blend of my smoothie and also to decorate it in the jars, along with unsweetened dark chocolate chips; I took them out of the freezer, where they have been for months; I keep them in a double bag, unsalted, raw and shelled, but still with the seed coat that comes attached to the cotyledon.
These peanuts were a gift (3 kilos). But if you go to the super, you'll have to pay 7-12$ per kilo (shelled), and they'll probably be roasted already and without the protective layer of the cotyledon (seed coat), which will cause them to be damaged faster.
According to the rules of this contest, we must use at least 7 ingredients. I've used the following:
1- Ideally, use frozen fruit to add the least amount of ice (water) to our smoothie. This way it'll be creamier and with a more intense flavor. So freeze the sliced bananas the night before, or at least a couple of hours before.
2- Roast the peanuts in advance and let them cool. I baked them in my small electric oven, with heat up and down, at 250 °F x 20 minutes. The crunchier the peanuts, the creamier the smoothie.
3- Mix the ingredients:
@hindavi used for hers--. I'd thought about using my Oster Blend 'N Go that comes with a lid and wide reusable straw, but I wouldn't have been able to make a nice looking smoothie. Today I've decided to serve our drinks in reused jars, which will allow me to put something decorative on top, usual when it comes to smoothies. So I used my cheap but special smoothie blender (Hamilton Beach) instead of the Oster bullet blender; my smoothie blender has a special system called Wave~Action® which continuously pulls the mixture down into the blades to avoid ice chunks, so it blends like silk.As you can see, I've also added the cocoa powder, sugar, cinnamon,vanilla essence, nutmeg, and salt (not in the pics).
4- Blend this first mix well.
5- With the help of a silicone pastry spoon, bring the little peanut chunks back into the mixture and add the frozen banana. Let the blender do its job until the blend looks creamy.
6- Serve your smoothies as soon as the blender is done.
7- Decorate.
I've used unsweetened dark chocolate chips and roasted peanuts.
I think it turned out really well. I like simple, edible, provocative decorations.
One of the jars has a sticker on it. It says, La vida empieza a los 40 ("Life begins at 40"). How do you like that? Personally, I think I need my glasses to lie to me like this every incoming decade 😂 It's silly motivational.
An hour after my super smoothie, I was ready to go biking around my sunny city.
It was 5:45 p.m. and I was full of energy.
