Peach smoothie is one that is delicious and creamy. And full of protein.
Plus peaches and cottage cheese are delicious (and one of my favorite combos). With a honey swirl like this, it’s something you can be mesmerized with and sip on to quench your thirst.
Because peaches are about 90% water, and a close second to watermelon.
Both fruit flavors taste good in coffee if flavored coffee is your vibe. And cold brew coffee makes for a refreshing drink.
And for another creamy tasting profile for this peach cottage cheese smoothie, add peanut butter and milk. Or a ripe avocado for more healthy fat food ingredients that support anti-inflammation and helps lower cholesterol.
Oh, and if you want the peaches and cream look, then an added banana makes for an elevated experience (and another good look!).
…You gotta love smoothies for all the refreshing healthy ingredients variety options, that you can put together this week.
Add remaining ingredients. If using fresh peaches, cook to soften or freeze and bring out next day for a softer/mushy peach for smoothie. If using canned peaches, strain peaches from liquid in can.
Ricotta cheese cake is a protein dense dessert that is delicious with curd in a bowl, plus egg protein. So that’s 2xx protein. Then bake, twice (also 2x) with steps below for an elevated dessert taste experience.
…Where this can also be a protein breakfast (or weekend brunch) dessert that’s healthy and fairly easy to make and simple to bake twice.
First, you make the curd in a small bowl (or you can even use a mug). You make the curd a few hours or day ahead.
You can make this with or without butter if you like. With fat or butter (for taste), you’ll want to add a plastic cover so it doesn’t form a fat layer at the top. For more step instruction on curd, you can see the inspired canele pastry muffin recipe. 🥮
You can make a curd in any flavor you like, such as vanilla and lemon are delicious pairings. And then added berries give another layer of healthy flavors. Let it rest in the fridge.
Then for the ricotta cheese cake, whisk or break up the egg, and add your preferred flavorings/extract and honey, if using. Add a little milk or not (if you want a denser cheesecake).
Mix with ricotta. Add to a baking vessel that can withstand hotter (broil) temperatures. This can be a heat-safe ceramic vessel or a springform pan. Usually the packaging on your tools indicate whether it’s meant for 500°F or higher temps.
Start by baking the ricotta cheese cake on the bottom rack at 350°Ff/180°C for about 15 minutes until cheesecake is set (or solid at the top).
And then step two in the oven: move the cheesecake to the top or near top oven rack (about 5-6 inches from the top of the oven). Close the oven door, and turn the broil setting on for 3-4 minutes until browning occurs.
Turn the oven off and let it cool down for 30 seconds or so.
Use your oven safe gear and pull the cheese cake out of the oven.
Let it cool on the oven counter top or a heat-safe plate, and remove after it’s cooled. You can also more quickly cool it in the refrigerator.
This is a soft and firm cheesecake that is baked twice.
Course Breakfast, Dessert
Cuisine American
Author Brandy @ Healthy Happy Life Secrets
Equipment
Broil-heat safe baking vessel
Ingredients
Ricotta cheese
Curd (milk, egg yolk, flavor and butter optional)
2tspraw honey (optional)
Instructions
Combine ingredients and bake at 350°F/180°C for 15 minutes (or until set and cheesecake is solid at the top).
Set baking vessel on top rack (about 5-6 inches from the top of oven). Close oven door and turn on oven broil setting for 3-5 minutes watching the entire time until browned to desired. Tip: Broiling is heating that comes from the top of the oven that's about 525°F in a regular oven.
Turn broil setting off. Let cool for about a minute and pull the cheesecake out of the oven.
Cottage cheese frozen dessert with peach is a pairing that may be your next dessert to help with more protein, weight management, and satiating a sweet craving.
…And dare I say as good as any frozen yogurt or peach ice cream you’d have! It even has the pretty peaches and cream color. And you can make this with other stone fruits like plums and cherries that will hold up.
And it’s so easy to make at home with a blender, like a Magic Bullet.
Cottage cheese and peaches are a delicious taste pairing. 🍑 +🧀
…I discovered this as a child, as that was the only way I would eat cottage cheese as a picky kid eater. And today, you can give it a try for yourself with your picky tastes!
Whether you use fresh peaches is up to you. Fresh peaches are abundant in hot summer months.
So you can stock up during summer season when peach desserts and juicy peach-everything are in full swing. Then freeze them for later in the year or year round if you like when they’re harder to find.
And if you want an easy way to get a smooth peach dessert year-round, use canned peaches that are the smoother way for this cottage cheese frozen dessert.
Canned peaches are also already soft. You won’t need to cook them. And you don’t have to wait until peak summer peach season. All you need to do is drain them, and rinse them if you like.
You can pair your peach cottage cheese dessert that’s like an ice cream with peach cobbler or peach profiteroles. Both are low-sugar.
Peaches are great for healthy peach drinks like juice, tea, or coffee. Also, how about a peach donut?... have you seen them around? That’s a newer type of peach, also called a flat peach or Saturn peach that are fresh.
They look more out of this world than earthly. 🪐
The ones I found came in a plastic casing with a handle that made it look like a purse.
But the best peaches for this peach cottage cheese frozen dessert are canned.
And whatever peaches you choose, you can freeze your extra peaches. Frozen peaches are perfect for this peach cottage cheese dessert.
You can bring them out of the freezer and move them to the fridge. That will soften or mush them without needing to cook them over a day or two. They are perfect for bakes too.
You can use your freezer as your second pantry (that’s what I do!).
It makes meal prep easier, along with food variety for your groceries on hand.
This is a low-fat delicious frozen cottage cheese dessert.
Course Dessert
Cuisine American
Author Brandy @ Healthy Happy Life Secrets
Ingredients
1cupcottage cheese
1cup softened peach (about one fresh peach or 8 peach canned slices)
water or coffee
Instructions
Blend peach and cottage cheese together and add back a little liquid as needed.
Freeze, and bring out to enjoy!
Notes
Canned peaches will work well to make a smooth texture like creamy ice cream. You can also use frozen peaches that are brought to room temps and will be soft.
00 vs bread flour is the difference in pizza crust style, and for making light and airy pizza crusts you may dream about from a pizzaiolo, or New York’s finest pizza shops.
…Which btw, good pizza is not in the water, despite the old saying. 😀
It starts with a consistent flour choice that will help make consistent pizza crusts you like, and that you can make for weekly and daily meals… oh, and they’re healthy ones you put on the table.
And that can be the first pizza myth bust (where you’ll find more myths below)…
Pizzas can be healthy topped meals if you watch the cheese portions that have protein, but are high in fat. You can add cheese puddles and not fields.
Then you can add your elevated paired healthy flavor toppings. For someone like me that would be ideas light tomatoes, and veggies like peppers, mushrooms, onions, greens, and other plant-based ingredients on top. Have you seen my tofu as pepperoni pizza?
Pizzas are a good opportunity to add the kitchen sink as we would say when I was a teenage pizza maker for 4 years, working in one of the busiest pizza delivery franchise stores in the world.
Plus you can add ontop, anti-inflammatory spices like oregano, pepper flakes, and a za’atar blend. And even turn your pizza into smoky taste with turmeric and smoky paprika spices.
…I mean, who doesn’t love pizza for the taste and topping variety?
But it alls starts with the pizza crust that should be the best part and not leftover on a plate.
Here’s the skinny: you start with the choice of 00 vs bread flour.
Or whole wheat flour or whole wheat bran with more fiber if you’re being more health-conscious and want to add in some.
Below I help you decide, and even bust a couple common pizza crust making myths.👇
But let’s start with where 00 flour came from… and if you’re not familiar, it was named by Italians for how finely ground the flour is.
“00” flour is an Italy naming based on its flour ground-milled fineness. Bread flour is not as fine and named by its protein content. They’re almost uncomparable, but those are our common choices on the grocery shelves.
And bread flour’s uses is in the name. It’s used for many bread purposes besides pizza crust. It’s more about the protein content where bread gluten protein is higher than in 00 flour.
So without knowing more, with “bread” in the name you can guess that bread flour can yield rising airy crusts because of the other bread products you’ve seen in the world.
But you’ll be able to see more for yourself below.
And this may help sway you or help you re-think your flour grocery store purchase choice, and if you need 00 pizza flour at all (that everyone talks about as the one to use for pizza crusts… and maybe the same people that referred to “it’s in the water” for best crusts 😀).
And for this person, 00 flour is not the better flour choice for pizza if you’re looking for a possibly high rise pizza crust, which of course, is subjective to tastes… as in, you decide what you like or prefer.
…But most people would agree that a GREAT pizza crust is an airy and lighter pizza crust, like a wood-fired, Neapolitan-style crust with some bread pockets or bubbling action along with some added brown charring leopard spots. 😊
For me, hands down… that’s my favorite too! The kind that almost melts in your mouth with the cheese.
And if that’s what you like too, bread flour is the better choice for pizza crusts as the rustic airy pockets are endless possibilities. It’s up to the magical oven!
…Oh, and not to mention you can use the remaining bag of bread flour for other common daily bread baking applications.
In comparison (and all fairness to 00 flour), it will yield more uniform (less rustic) pizza crusts that are more like grocery frozen section pizzas after you bake it in the oven.
They’re great for everyday enjoyment, and especially afterschool specials and soccer kids, if that’s what you’re after.
…And with either 00 vs bread flour choice, you can make delicious daily pizza crusts in your home oven and save ordering pizza dollars).
But 00 flour is not necessarily the wood-fired effect pizza choice.
That’s a myth.
And while we’re busting myths here, lemme give you the summary low-down so far:
Myth #1: 00 flour will give you a more airy pizza crust than bread flour
The opposite is true. Bread flour will give more rustic-style pizzas where air pockets form in spots like an inflating balloon, but those are as unpredictable as charring spots.
00 flour on the other hand will yield a more even-style crust.
In a way, bread flour makes for a more exciting pizza crust making experience and 00 flour makes for a more predictable one.
It’s counterintuitive to what you would think bread flour would do as the heavier (less fine) flour choice. Because in other applications, bread flour also makes heavy-duty rolls and bread loaves for your daily meals, so naturally you’d think it’s heavier… oh, and with more gluten.
You would think “fine” (in 00 flour) means resulting in light bakes, like cake flour (vs. all purpose flour) in an angel food cake.
But not so with 00 flour (vs. bread flour) for baking pizza crusts in a hot oven.
And that’s where the magical oven comes into play and it’s predictable that way.
The proof is in the oven baking results. This is a 100% bread flour pizza crust that is light and airy with some puffy air pockets that would make a better air bag… and is a nice food pillow that is about to enter the mouth.
This is a 00 flour crust. It’s much more uniform than a bread flour pizza crust that has been baked the same in a regular kitchen oven with a bake and broil setting.
And this is a pizza made from half bread flour and half “00” flour, that has more of the 100% 00 flour pizza crust characteristics (as the 00 less rising flour will bring down the bread airy-rising flour).
It’s subtle but noticeable if you make enough pizzas.
Myth # 2: you can’t make light and airy crusts from a regular home oven
Yes, of course you can make pizza crusts from a home oven, similar to the kind you find from professional restaurant ovens, pizza ovens, and wood-fired ovens. I do this regularly in my kitchen.
You don’t need a fancy outdoor pizza oven even though that may sound like a dreamy idea that’s fun for entertaining. And you definitely don’t need a wood-fired oven or to even to go to a pizza establishment that has one…
You can make your own star tasty pizzas that look like professional pizzas from your home kitchen or apartment oven that has a bake and broil setting.
…And if that sounds good to you, then keep coming back for more pizza crust tips and healthy food topping inspiration. 🎉
Beet green smoothie is a way to make a sweet and healthy smoothie you’ll love… that is so refreshing!
You can have a healthy and deliciously sweet green smoothie that’s not a bitter one. It’s great for breakfast or a daily sweet break.
…You can beet that!
Where to get the beets? Find a local farm or farmers market. There you can find the greens directly from the source without having to grow your own garden or driving hours out of your metro city.
And beet greens are some of the healthiest greens on the planet.
They are full of anti-inflammatory ingredients like A, C, E vitamins. Plus minerals including magnesium that we usually don’t get daily enough of compared to say, potassium that’s on many food labels.
But you shouldn’t go overboard with beets, as with most good things in life.
Even healthy foods are good up to a certain point. Moderation is the sweet spot. And a smoothie a day is one way.🧉
With fiber, this helps your gut and is good for healthy weight maintenance.
And if you have extra beet greens: you can make a nice anytime salad that’s similar to a spinach salad.
What will make it extra special, says my catering self 😊, is wilting the greens with heat and about a teaspoon of water. That softens the greens. And then to take the bland taste to an extra special WOW, add a few douses of garlic powder (I find fresh whole garlic too strong), pears or apples, and walnuts for a crunch.
Fresh farm salads don’t need a salad dressing, but if I were to add one it would be with balsamic vinegar and Buffalo mozzarella (or substitute with other mild white cheeses, and even cottage cheese).
But now it’s breakfast time… and a sweet breakfast smoothie will do! And a beet stalk is my new happy Twizzler.
These are the simple beet green smoothie ingredients: beet greens, natural peanut butter, and a banana.
The most pure peanut butter to buy that’s good for a healthy smoothie has just roasted peanuts and salt in the ingredients (that you stir).
And if peanut butter or banana is not your vibe, but sweet IS… beets also play great with berries! You can make a beet blueberry smoothie that has a punch or make an after fasting herbal rose beet smoothie… schhweeeet and sweet!
Simply blend and enjoy! Or add your other healthy goodies like chia or flax seeds and protein powders that are a healthy good smoothie ingredient opportunity. 💚
