Smoothies

What are smoothies?

Smoothies are blended drinks made with fruit/vegetable juice and sometimes blended with milk or yoghurt. You can choose any combination to suit your taste and the result can be nutritional, healthy and delicious. As there are a vast range of fruits and vegetables out there, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. All you need is a blender/food mixer and your chosen ingredients.

5-a-day

Using whole portions of fruit in your smoothie recipe mean that drinking your smoothie can count towards your 5-a-day. To find out more about eating 5-a-day and to see some example smoothie recipes, visit the 5-a-day website (link at the bottom of the page).

Where can you buy ready-made?

If you don't feel like making your own smoothies, there are lots of places you can get them these days. While they can be expensive, indulging once or twice a month should be OK on your wallet. Try places such as at juice bars like Zest on the third floor of the Bentall Centre, or how about trying a Vivanno smoothie from your local Starbucks? There are also bottled brands of smoothies, such as Innocent which you can buy in most places. If you're looking for a smart price, beat the credit crunch and save yourself some cash by getting your Innocent smoothies as part of a £2.99 meal deal from Boots for example.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

With today's headlines of child obesity and school dinners not being healthy enough, Nan Pancoast and Allysia Wood of the Youth Unlimited magazine team decided it was worth the effort and risk of food poisoning to experiment and present to you some smoothie recipe ideas!

The Good	The Bad	The Ugly
LIKE ICE CREAM	SALMON SMOOTHIE	GUNKY GREEN
Ingredients: Grapes Kiwi Strawberries Apple Juice Yoghurt	Ingredients: Grapes Melon Strawberries Apple Yoghurt Orange and apple juice.	Ingredients: Melon Apple Yoghurt Honey
Appearance: Sky red	Appearance: Salmon red	Appearance: Gunky green
Taste: Sweet Like ice cream? Nice texture Good for grape lovers	Taste: Bitty Too many clashing flavours Too sweet Watery	Taste: Weird Odd Awful Bad texture Butter-like texture
Tip: Apple juice is a very overpowering flavour, so keep it's use to a minimum.	Tip: Use half the ingredients, or completely abolish the idea and go back to the recipe book. This is the one case where less is more and you don't want to poison people.	Tip: If you are looking for faces of disgust, then this is the smoothie for you. If on the other hand, you have good taste, either avoid altogether or use apple juice instead of apples as apples don't blend down as well.

Thanks to 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' you should by now have some ideas about what to use (and what not to use!) in your smoothie creations. Check out three alternative recipes in issue 9 of Youth Unlimited magazine.

Also see:

Youth Unlimited Magazine
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