Smooth moves

I'd been pondering out how to get my son to eat fruit other than Cuties or apples, and Alton Brown has come to the rescue. With his guidance, I have figured out how to make high-quality fruit smoothies in the morning quickly, with a minimum of muss and fuss. It does require some advanced prep work, but that's just the way it goes sometimes. It's so nice to be able to put one together in less than five minutes on a busy weekday morning, when my time is at a premium because I can't stop hitting the snooze alarm.

On a recent episode of Good Eats, Alton showed off his Buff Smoothie, which boils down to a banana, twelve ounces (by weight) of frozen fruit, and eight ounces of liquid. Toss it all in a Vita-Mix (What? Everyone doesn't have a $400 blender?) and there you have it: A 24 ounce smoothie.

Well, right away I noticed a few problems with implementing that at my house. The blender I have -- a fairly decent Cuisinart -- is very noisy and a huge pain in the butt. The blades are set way down in a little recess at the bottom of a wide container and trying to keep the contents in contact with the blade is an invitation to frustration. There's no way I'm dealing with that first thing the the morning before my coffee kicks in. I am also not going to pull multiple items out of the freezer and weigh out the ingredients.

I played around with the concept over the weekend and I think I figured out how to make it work. This method required a blender or food processor to make the smoothie base in advance, and a stick blender when you're ready to actually consume the smoothie.

Sometime when you have time and patience, make your smoothie base.
(The following measurements are by weight.)

• 1 banana (~ 4 ounces)


• 4 ounces frozen peaches or mango chunks (I buy the bags of IQF fruit)


• 8 ounces frozen berry mix (IQF), or 4 ounces each frozen strawberries and blueberries

Toss the fruit into a food processor or blender and process until it's fairly homogeneous.

Alton's recipe yields a 24 ounces smoothie but that is a LOT of smoothie so I decided to go with two half-sized portions. Divide the pulverized fruit mash in two equal portions -- should weigh about 8 ounces each -- and package in resealable sandwich bags (I flattened them out so I ended up with a thin frozen disk) or small containers. Toss into the freezer.

When you're ready to complete the act, pull one of your smoothie base portions from the freezer and let it sit on the counter for a few minutes to thaw slightly. I nuked mine for about 15 seconds.

Measure 4 ounces of liquidous ingredients (I used 2 ounces each of soy milk and pomegranate juice, but plain yogurt or milk would be good too) into a tall, deep container like the one that usually comes with a stick blender, or a 2 cup liquid measuring cup. (Safety tip: I haven't actually used a 2 cup measuring cup so it might not be deep enough to prevent splashover.)

Crumble your smoothie base on top of the liquids and stick blend the heck out of it. It takes me maybe a minute to blend it.

Pour into a glass and enjoy, but beware of brain freeze! We discovered an added bonus: Smoothies give us an excuse to use our rarely-utilized root beer float spoons, small plastic spoons with a straw for a handle.

My favorite tip from Alton is to buy the bananas that are fully ripe, peel them, lay them side by side in a resealable bag and freeze. Then you can pull them out as you need them, although you'll want to cut them into chunks before trying to pulverize them. Brilliant!

Now that I have it as simplified as possible, I'm hoping my husband will make one for himself once in awhile. A girl can dream!