From breakfast to dessert, smoothies are a quick, please-everyone solution; they require little prep (just toss everything in a blender and press a button) and are completely customizable. To make smoothie prep even easier, keep your freezer stocked with frozen fruit.

Smoothie Smarts
These deliciously frosty drinks can be sipped for a snack or a meal. Pay attention to portion sizes and higher-calorie ingredients (like frozen yogurt or nut butter) to make sure you don’t overdo it. A snack-sized smoothie should be about 150-200 calories, and to make your smoothie a healthful meal, shoot for more protein and 350-450 calories (and less sugary ingredients).

See Healthy Swaps for smoothies

Breakfast
Start the day with any of these fruit-filled drinks.

Orange-Banana Smoothie (above)
Honeydew-Almond Smoothie
Ginger-Peach Green Tea Smoothie
Melon Smoothies
Pineapple Mama Smoothie
Blueberry Blast Smoothie

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Use a hand blender in recipes that call for a standard blender.

We’re teaming up with fellow food bloggers and healthy eating advocates to host a Healthy Every Week Challenge, a month-long initiative to develop healthy eating habits. The plan an is to develop a manageable healthy habit each week that will carry through the new year. Join us here and share what you’re eating on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #gethealthy.

One tool that no healthy home kitchen should be without is a hand blender (also called an immersion blender). This svelte little tool goes right into your soup, sauce or smoothie, allowing you to blend up something creamy, without transferring liquids from pot to blender. And with one of these, you’ll never deal with a soup-blender explosion again. When you close the lid on hot liquids and then blend, the steam can build up and cause the lid to blow off, sending hot soup flying all around your kitchen. When you bring the blender to the soup, that won’t happen.

You can even use this blender to mix up pancake or crepe batter in seconds.

Use a hand blender to make these recipes:

Mushroom-Hummus Soup

Nutty Sweet Potato Soup

Orange-Banana Smoothie

Lentil Soup

Butternut Squash Soup

Chicken Sate With Spicy Peanut Dipping Sauce

Souffle Pancake With Apple-Pear Compote

You can buy this Cuisinart hand blender for $29.99 at the Food Network Store, and if you join us tonight on Twitter at 8:30pm for a chat about healthy cooking at home (#gethealthy), we’re giving away two of these hand blenders at the end of the chat.

Tell us: Do you own a hand blender? How do you use yours?

Photo courtesy of Food Network Magazine, from 50 Smoothies

We’re teaming up with fellow food bloggers and healthy eating advocates to host a Healthy Every Week Challenge, a month-long initiative to develop healthy eating habits. The plan an is to develop a manageable healthy habit each week that will carry through the new year. Join us here and share what you’re eating on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #gethealthy.

Week one of our Healthy Every Week Challenge is breakfast week and we’re all trying to eat breakfast daily (if you’re not involved in our challenge you should be eating breakfast too!). Smoothies are one favorite, fast, healthy breakfast and since they come in so many varieties and flavors, we asked our pals on Facebook and Twitter for their best smoothie combinations. Your ideas were creative and fun and it seems that many of you like to mix vegetables in with your fruit smoothies — a great way to get in a serving of vegetables at breakfast!

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I tell my younger clients to eat three meals and two to three small, healthy snacks a day. They often look at me with a puzzled face and say, “I’m supposed to snack?” Yes, of course, but it’s all about picking wisely.

Kids should get 25% of their daily calories from snacks, so these mini-meals should be full of vitamins and minerals to help them grow. But the question is: What’s a healthy snack that your kid (and you, too) will want to eat?

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The word “healthy” can get tricky. Lots of foods get labeled good-for-you or may seem low-cal, but they’re anything but. Here are 9 of the biggest offenders.

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