Make a Green Chickweed Smoothie & Enjoy This Tasty Spring Herb

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Chickweed is a tasty and nutritious little spring herb with many health benefits. Enjoy it in this delicious smoothie recipe that pairs its mild green flavor with pineapple and other yummy ingredients.

With its mildly sweet flavor, chickweed is one of my favorite wild spring greens.

It’s so tasty that my kiddos stuff it into their mouths by the handful.

While you can use chickweed in raw salads or any recipe that uses baby greens and spinach, one of my favorite ways to use it is in this Green Chickweed Smoothie.

It’s a delicious and creamy blend of chickweed, fruits, and cultured dairy that will make you a foraging fan in no time. Try it while the chickweed is growing!

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But Why Eat Chickweed When It’s a Yard Weed?

While my children are happy to munch on fresh chickweed from the yard, my husband hasn’t always been convinced.

“Why do I need to eat things that look like they blew out of the lawn mower?” he once asked.

He wasn’t wrong about the lawn mower thing, but he was missing the big picture on edible yard weeds.

Many of these freely growing plants like dandelion, purple dead nettle, cleavers, and more offer all sorts of health benefits:

• They’re packed with vitamins and minerals, like Vitamin C and potassium.
• Eating them gives you a healthy dose of chlorophyll.
• They can support your body’s natural detoxification processes.

In fact, that final reason is why people used to traditionally eat wild spring greens as part of an annual “cleanse.”

In a world where we’re all learning how valuable it is to eat locally harvested foods, it’s hard to beat the ones that grow right outside your door. You can’t get much fresher than that!

My husband will eat some yard weeds with the rest of the family now, too. It might be in smaller amounts than the rest of us, but it’s better than nothing.

Get to Know Chickweed

If you’re wondering how to identify this yummy herb or other ways to use it, you can find all you need to know about chickweed here.

But to summarize, it’s a low-growing and tender spring herb that likes to grow along the edges of and in between landscaping and garden spaces. You’ll find opposite leaves growing up its stem and tiny white flowers with five petals split deeply down the middle.

If you’re not sure if you’ve found chickweed, you can also pull apart the stem to see if the outer layer pulls apart from the center. You can watch me demonstrate this chickweed identification trick here.

As an herb, you might use chickweed for several benefits:

• It has a high nutrition profile, so you can add it to tea blends designed to provide vitamins and minerals.
• It’s a cooling and moistening herb, making a great poultice over skin irritations like burns and stings.
• As a vulnerary, chickweed helps the skin heal and is a common ingredient in many skin salves.

Other Tasty Ways to Eat Chickweed

As I mentioned earlier, chickweed is one of my favorite wild greens to eat. It’s never bitter, it has a pleasant texture, and it’s so mild that even children enjoy it.

Even people who are skeptical of foraging, like my husband, can appreciate it!

So after you make the Green Chickween Smoothie recipe I’ve shared below, try using chickweed in some other kitchen recipes:

• Chop raw chickweed and add it to your salads.
• Use chickweed in scrambled eggs in place of spinach.
• Add chickweed to a foraged pesto recipe.
• Sprinkle chopped chickweed on baked potatoes.
• Blend it into a zesty foraged chimichurri with other wild greens.
• Finely chop fresh chickweed and add it to a creamy pasta sauce or lasagna cheese filling.

Green Chickweed Smoothie Recipe

This chickweed smoothie recipe was inspired by herbalist David Hoffmann’s chickweed juice recipe in his book Medical Herbalism (available on Amazon and Bookshop). He combines fresh chickweed with pineapple in a blender, then strains it to make a delicious juice.

I like smoothies over juices for a few reasons, though.

• You get valuable fiber from smoothies.
• You can add in some healthy fat and protein.
• When you use cultured dairy (or coconut yogurt), you get a boost of probiotics, too.

With some easy tweaks, Hoffmann’s chickweed juice became my chickweed smoothie.

This recipe combines chickweed and pineapple for flavor, cultured dairy for protein and probiotics, and avocado for healthy fats. It’ll give you a nutrient-dense start to your morning or a steady pick-me-up in the afternoon.

This recipe makes enough for a family, but you can easily reduce it if you only need one or two servings. Look for the printable recipe card at the end of this post for easy printing.

Ingredients

• 3 cups plain yogurt or kefir, dairy or nondairy as preferred
• 2 cups chopped fresh young chickweed
• 2 cups chopped fresh or frozen pineapple
• 1 1/2 cups sliced frozen peaches (or additional pineapple, if you prefer)
• 1 avocado, chunked
• Optional: collagen powder and/or whey protein for extra protein

Instructions

1. Place the ingredients in a large blender (I used my big Ninja blender).
2. Blend on high until smooth and mostly uniform.
3. Pour into 6-8 small glasses or 3-4 larger ones and enjoy!

Smoothies aren’t an exact science, which means you can adjust the fruit options to fit your tastes. I picked light-colored fruit so the chickweed’s bright green color could shine through, so if you opt for darker fruits you might get something a little brown.

But it’ll still taste good, and that’s what matters, right?

Like my hubby, you may not be ready for a bowlful of wild weeds that remind you of lawn clippings, even if they are edible and nutritious.

But I’m pretty confident you’ll love some chickweed when you have it in this smoothie.

Printable Recipe Card for Green Chickweed Smoothie

Green Chickweed Smoothie

Yield: 6 servings

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 5 minutes

Chickweed is a tasty and nutritious little spring herb with many health benefits. Enjoy it in this delicious smoothie recipe that pairs its mild green flavor with pineapple and other yummy ingredients.

Print

Ingredients

• 3 cups plain yogurt or kefir, or nondairy alternative
• 2 cups coarsely chopped fresh chickweed
• 2 cups fresh or frozen chopped pineapple
• 1.5 cups slice peaches
• 1 avocado, chunked
• Optional: a scoop of collagen powder and/or whey protein powder

Instructions

1. Place all of the ingredients in a blender.
2. Blend on high until smooth and mostly uniform.
3. Pour into 6 medium-sized cups to serve.

Notes

Any other tart and sweet fruits can be used in place of the pineapple and peaches. Light-colored fruit will keep the bright green smoothie color.

Nutrition Information:

Yield: 6 Serving Size: 1
Amount Per Serving: Calories: 186Total Fat: 7gSaturated Fat: 2gTrans Fat: 0gUnsaturated Fat: 5gCholesterol: 9mgSodium: 161mgCarbohydrates: 24gFiber: 4gSugar: 19gProtein: 9g

Have you ever used chickweed in your kitchen?

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