Ginger Pear Green Smoothie: A nod to Thanksgiving (Recipe )

Making your own cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving is easy and fun. You can make it now and can it for Thanksgiving or just make it at Thanksgiving and make this smoothie to recover from the feast after.

The advantage of making your own us that it tastes amazing, you can siphon off some of he syrup for cocktails (Bon Appetit Magazine has a great cranberry margarita recipe in this month’s issue) or use some of the berries in this smoothie recipe. You can also use store bought if you like. I’m flexible with my recipes .

Ingredients

1/4 cup of cranberry sauce

1/2 cup if apple cider or water

2 small pears- I used Bosc pears from my apple share

juice of an orange or water is ok too

3 kale leaves, greens pulled off the stem

a 1/4 inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced

My cranberry sauce is well seasoned with cloves and Port (I actually need to restock my Port so I used Apple Jack – Laird’s Apple Brandy this time) so I did not use any extra spices. You can add cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, chai masala spices, Chinese five spice, or Soluna Garden Farms’ really interesting Ras el Hanout for coffee. As for sweetness, even though I like my cranberry sauce tart it is also sweet so I added no additional sweetness to my smoothie.