Thirsty Thursday

Yup, continuing the trend of terrible titles!

They say Thursday is the new Friday. Is that because you already feel like you’ve done a whole week’s work by the end of the day? After a morning at my regular job, followed by a walk to and from a casual afternoon of work involving 3 hours of traipsing round a library trying to find books to send off to other libraries, I got home in need of nourishing refreshment but with a juice-less refrigerator and no inclination to cook straight away.

Enter the smoothie. In keeping with the frugal theme I am incorporating produce I got for free. There’s one of the apples from earlier in the week, and some rhubarb I picked from my garden earlier in the summer and froze. This does double duty, cooling the drink and adding zing!

Rhubarb, apricot and carrot smoothie

Ingredients:

35g chunks of frozen rhubarb

40g dried apricots (un-sulphured)

6g brown flax seeds (brown are cheaper than golden, for no reason I can fathom)

6g sliced root ginger (this does make it quite gingery, you might want to try 3g and take it from there)

50g raw carrot, in chunks

25g apple, quartered and cored – a bit more would have been good, I think

6 ice cubes (100ml water, frozen)

about 350ml water (basically, to make it up to around an imperial pint for the drink in total – 20 fluid ounces, as opposed to 16 fluid ounces in a US pint, if wikipedia is not leading me astray).

Method: blend it until it’s smooth. Pour into glass. Drink!

You may be wondering why I didn’t use one of the bananas I picked up from the market earlier this week. The reason is that I don’t think bananas play very well with rhubarb. Apricots fulfil many of the same functions of sweetening and thickening a smoothie, and they’re a reasonable source of iron, fibre and other good stuff.