Smoothie Criminal

It's so exciting to bust out my favorite warm weather recipes, now that it's finally Spring where I live. This is my family's all time favorite. I actually make it all year, but it's most refreshing when it's hot outside. This is the easiest fresh fruit smoothie. The only ingredients are frozen fruit and juice. I buy way too much fruit every week, and i loathe to throw it out. At the end of each week I simply divide the fruit into freezer bags, cutting what's necessary into chunks, and freeze to then use in this recipe. We love blueberries,strawberries🍓,mangoes, and pineapple🍍.I've found that bananas 🍌and peaches🍑 turn mushy and brown in the freezer, and citrus gets funky. Raspberries and blackberries work well too. Grapes won't have taste. Cherries would be eh and not worth the pitting🍒 (sorry, cherries). Melons also don't seem to work. They get too soggy.

Ingredients

• Blueberries
• Strawberries
• Mangoes
• Pineapple 
• Fresh squeezed orange juice

My favorite juice to use is fresh squeezed orange juice, but I also love mango or pineapple juice. Basically, something that will act as an accompaniment to the fruit. Grapefruit juice, for example, would be too tart and competing. We want sweetness here!  No need for ice cubes since the frozen fruit itself act as such. I make everything in mass quantities, and for some reason I never got myself a great blender, so I use my food processor.

Directions

I use one cup of juice to each cup of fruit. I use four and four. Any four cups of mixed fruit will do. I pour in the fruit after letting it thaw a bit, then simply add the juice and blend until smooth.

Play around with the juice amount to achieve the desired texture. I'm a straw gal, so I like mine to be straw suck able. I serve these in pretty glass mason jars, with fun striped straws. Some of my mason jars have holes in the lids, but if not, the lids aren't necessary. The glass jars look gorgeous on a white tray, since the smoothie always yields a beautiful, bright color. It's visually refreshing too😄.

My guests always welcome this drink, especially when a little vodka is added for the adults. Btw, this is a great trick to get the kiddies to ingest fruit. Everything seems to work better in liquid form. Try freezing the finished product in cute individual cups for an easy homemade sorbet.

Tip: always test your machine before dumping in the ingredients. I learned that the hard way, having to dig all the stuff out if my blade wasn't secured and wouldn't work. Oh, and frozen fruit from that section of the supermarket works great too, it's the exact same thing.

That's really it: blend and enjoy! This recipe is just what summer should look, taste, and feel like; vibrant, easy, and enjoyable to the max, all without having to work hard. Savor this time of year, you deserve it.