Today's Smoothie

[ysabetwordsmith]

Today we made a smoothie with:

1 cup Lakewood Organic Papaya Blend juice
1 cup Brown Cow vanilla yogurt
1 banana
1/2 cup Great Value Frozen Fruit Salad Blend (peaches, pineapple, red seedless grapes, kiwis)
1/2 cup ice

This is our first try with the Frozen Fruit Salad Blend, but it sounded interesting.  The smoothie came out thick and delicious.  It's rather an odd color, though: sort of pinkish-purplish-gray.  I suspect that the bright green kiwi (which is excellent in green smoothies) is muting the warm pink-orange of the papaya and the sunny yellows of the peach and pineapple.  Eh, who cares, it tastes great.

Comments

[pattrose]

Thanks for the recipe. Sounds delish.

You're welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I post recipes fairly often, and smoothies are common. Our basic fruit smoothie algorithm is:

1 cup fruit juice or nectar
1 cup yogurt (vanilla or plain)
1 banana
1/2 cup frozen fruit OR 1 piece fresh fruit
1/2 cup ice

Add to a high-power blender in that order and blend until smooth.

Sadly, one of the things we discovered after buying the Vitamix a few years back is that most smoothie recipes suck. Eventually we worked out this one. We have a different base recipe for nut butter, and we have a green smoothie, and that's almost everything we use. But I do keep an eye out for new inspiration.

Re: You're welcome!

[pattrose]

I don't blame you for experimenting until you found what you loved. Smoothies are the best. I'll keep my eye out for some recipes too.

Re: You're welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's easy to find recipes. There are whole cookbooks; we bought one.

The hard part is finding recipes that work.


We found out that:

-- Oatmeal congeals. :P

-- Berries with small seeds (e.g. blackberries) taste peppery when ground up. Not fun.

-- We love blueberries fresh or cooked, but the frozen ones we tried were just sort of ... not good.

-- Lots of recipes have gross textures or off flavors or just taste like health food. :P again.


On the bright side:

-- Most tropical fruits and soft fruits work well.

-- Yogurt is a great ingredient, cheap and healthy and tasty.

-- If not using frozen fruit, a frozen banana broken in chunks is helpful for texture. Which is a good way to rescue bananas before they get overripe, so I've always got some in the freezer.

-- Surprisingly, baby spinach is very easily covered up by stronger flavors like lime or kiwi. Hence our version of Alan's Going Green.