easy breakfast recipe | chocolate peanut butter banana smoothie

***This post is part of a social shopper marketing insight campaign with Pollinate Media Group® and Nestle, but all my opinions are my own. #pmedia  #BreakfastEssentials http://my-disclosur.es/OBsstV

I sometimes feel bad about the fact that weekday breakfasts in our house almost always consist of cold cereal. Don’t get me wrong – my kids love it and I don’t think there’s any need for me to cook a hot breakfast every day if I don’t have to – it’s just that the nutritional value of their favorite cold cereal is a little on the slim side. My husband and I have been making green smoothies for breakfast, but we’ve had a hard time getting the kids too excited about them. I’ve taught the older boys how to scramble eggs, but we don’t have time to make those every day. So I finally decided to try Carnation Breakfast Essentials®, and I picked some up at Walmart (get a $1 off coupon here!).

Carnation Breakfast Essentials® Powder provides 21 vitamins & minerals, 13g of protein, and as much calcium as a 6 oz cup of yogurt. Not bad, right? Certainly better than sugared breakfast cereal. The only problem is that most of my kids wouldn’t consider a glass of chocolate milk “breakfast”, so we decided to try making a smoothie instead.

We added ice, peanut butter, and banana to the normal powder+milk mixture to give it a little more substance. Now, I should admit that we’re not big banana + peanut butter fans in our family. But we really like banana and chocolate, and we really like peanut butter and chocolate, so I thought I’d take them all for a whirl and see what the kids thought.

As you can see, the breakfast smoothie was a hit.

Everyone wanted a taste.

It’s easy to throw Carnation Breakfast Essentials® Powder into the blender with some ice and a few other ingredients to make a quick breakfast smoothie that packs a nutritional punch. For a single serving of our smoothie I blended up:

1/3 C Carnation Breakfast Essentials® Powder

1/3 C milk

1 C ice

1/2 banana

1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter

Click here for more great smoothie recipes using Carnation Breakfast Essentials® Powder, or keep up with Breakfast Essentials® on Facebook!