Recipe of the Month: Summer Fruit Smoothie

First of all, apologies for not managing to get a blog entry up last weekend. I was planning to write one on Sunday, but on Sunday morning we got a call from my dad asking to borrow our wet-dry vacuum. In the aftermath of Hurricane Henri, the lower level of my parents' house had flooded for the first time in the 47 years they'd lived there. The carpet was completely soaked, along with everything else within an inch of the floor. And the damage wasn't confined to their house; as of that morning, all the cars parked on the main drag were up to their axles in water. This is global warming in action, folks.

So we ending up spent that whole afternoon and well into the evening literally bailing him out. Fortunately, our little Shop-Vac (which Brian has dubbed "Artoo") didn't have to do the job on its own; a contractor friend of theirs came by with a much larger one. He also advised Dad to get the carpet out of there as soon as possible, before mold could develop. So we spent much of the day moving furniture and accessories off of the carpet (hauling them outside to dry when possible), sucking water out of it and the padding below, cutting them both into strips, rolling them up, and removing them. But little Artoo proved handy for squeezing in between the cars in the driveway, which had also become waterlogged in the flood.

Anyway, by the time we got home, it was too late to do much except tumble into bed. So it wasn't until this weekend that I got around to trying the new recipe I'd had in mind for August: a summer fruit smoothie.

After about a month and a half and close to 95 pounds in total, our plum harvest is finally tapering off. The red Opal plums are gone, and Brian has picked as many as he could reasonably reach with the aid of a stepladder from the Mount Royal (blue) and Golden Gage (yellow) trees. We might still manage to shake a few more ripe ones down from the Golden Gage, but by the time this week is out, we shouldn't need to make room in the fridge for two or three baking pans full of plums anymore.

But at the same time, another summer fruit is just getting started: our fall crop of raspberries. We already got around 15 pints off the canes in June and July, and now production is ramping up again. With both plums and raspberries in the fridge, I realized we were going to have trouble keeping up if we didn't find some way to use them both up in bulk. And the best way I could think of to do that was to blend them all into a smoothie.

Making this was super simple. The last time he picked plums, Brian had found several that were partly damaged, so he cut out the bad spots and piled a quart container in the fridge full of the bits that were good. I just filled up a cup measure with those, aiming for about half blue and half yellow plums, and tossed in in the blender. Then I added half a cup of raspberries, about all we had at this point, and half a cup of orange juice (the extra-pulpy variety Brian likes). I then turned it to the Smoothie setting (the highest it has) and ran it until everything looked blended.

The mixture was an appealing shade of bright pink and surprisingly thick, considering that I hadn't added banana or yogurt to thicken it as most smoothie recipes recommend. The flavor, to my taste, was a bit on the tart side, certainly not as sweet as straight orange juice — though Brian, who is the main consumer of OJ in our house, said the sweetness level tasted just right to him. But it was certainly bursting with summer fruit flavor, and it made short work of a cup and a half of fruit.

This simple recipe should make it easy to use up the remainder of those miscellanous plum fragments, and to use up any whole plums that might be in danger of going bad before we can use them up. And better still, as we have both plums and raspberries in the freezer at this point, we can probably make this smoothie again even when the plum and raspberry crops are long gone. In the dead of next winter, a little taste of summer fruit will be a welcome change of pace.