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Frugal Friday - Freezing Fruit and Fool Proof Ways to Feed it to Your Kids!

If your kids are anything like my toddler, he may devour an entire case of raspberries without asking on Monday and then not want to touch them again for a week, which makes it a little hard to grocery plan for exactly what we need. Most weeks, by the time we get to the weekend I've got some fruit that is just past the point of being tasty eaten fresh and I know that if I don't do something fast, it's going to go to waste.

At the same time, I sometimes struggle with feeling like Cade is getting enough healthy fruits and vegetables so I'm always trying to sneak some in him and have gotten pretty creative (veggies in pasta? I'm not above it. Fruit-packed smoothies masquerading as chocolate "shakes"? Nightly staple.).

One of my favorite things to do is to salvage the fruit before it's too ripe and freeze it for later use - almost always in the form of smoothies. Cade loves bananas and berries, which is usually what we have leftover and on-hand. I typically gravitate to the produce that is on sale, so we stock up on strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries when they are 3 cases for the price of 1 and I almost never need to buy frozen fruit - and it's way cheaper.

This is what I find to be the "sweet spot" when it comes to fruit - the bananas aren't brown but spotting which makes them perfect as a thickener and natural sweetener in a smoothie, and the strawberries still look pretty good but have some funny spots that I'll cut off.




I like to freeze my fruit separately so that I can make a variety of smoothies adding and omitting whatever I want. You can also freeze fresh spinach if you're wanting to get real sneaky - my family has never been able to tell when I throw some in and I always end up feeling like a rockstar.

Below is our current favorite smoothie recipe - it tastes just like a chocolate shake, but is sooo much healthier! We give this to our toddler about an hour before bedtime and it has helped tremendously with him waking up hungry in the middle of the night.




 Peanut Butter Chocolate Fruit Smoothie
(Serves one adult - or two kids)


  • 1 Frozen banana, broken into chunks
  • 3-4 frozen strawberries
  • 1-2 Tbsp. peanut butter (go sugar-free and natural here - the bananas are plenty sweet enough!)
  • 1-2 Tsp. cocoa powder
  • 1 Tsp. vanilla (optional)
  • 3/4-1 C. milk (can be dairy, nut, rice, soy, etc. I prefer dairy since my son otherwise doesn't drink milk).
Put the fruit into the blender FIRST, then peanut butter, vanilla, cocoa powder and milk. Blend 1-2 minutes on high speed and add milk to desired consistency (we like it pretty thick and creamy in these parts). Serve immediately and come back and tell me if your kids could even tell it was full of fruit. I've also added blueberries other times and while it changes the taste a bit, it's not bad.











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