Innocent Smoothie Recipe Book

review by Milly Bernice

Everyone from vegans to omnivores can delight in the Innocent Smoothie Recipe Book, which has bog-standard and unusual smoothie recipes using ingredients that are readily and cheaply available anywhere. God bless smoothie recipes and brutalising fruit!

• Buy Innocent Smoothie Recipe Book: 57 and a half recipes from our kitchen to yours from Amazon
• Buy fairly cheap Moulinex Turbomix Handblender from Amazon (will handle fruit and soft veg)

I have something of an addiction to smoothies. Maybe I'm just too lazy to chew, but drinking healthy smoothies is a passion. Specifically, I drink as many as I can of the cute little Innocent smoothies with the silly phrases on the side (I'm exceptionally easily amused).

There's a limit, though, to how many smoothies I can buy without feeling (A) very lazy and (B) as though I'm singlehandedly bankrolling the world smoothie market. That's where this little book, Innocent Smoothie Recipe Book, comes in handy.

There are a few smoothie recipes in the book that you could probably have worked out yourself after some random fruit blender experiments. The main benefit of the Innocent Smoothie Recipe Book comes from the smoothie combinations that you might not have thought of.

Take their avocado and pear smoothie recipe, for instance. It doesn't (as I'd initially feared) taste like gone-wrong guacamole, but bloody lovely. Seriously. As do plenty of other not very obvious combinations.

Natural yogurt is used in many of these smoothie recipes, but as a vegan I replaced it with soya yogurt and so far nothing has tasted fundamentally wrong - so with a soya yogurt tweak I'd recommend this for vegan smoothie recipes.

Also, while these smoothie recipes use fresh fruit, I have by and large replaced fresh fruit with frozen and canned fruit to no discernable disadvantage.

Don't try dried fruit though - unless you have a really strong blender, or a desire to spend quite a lot of time excavating your liquidiser.

On the whole, these smoothie recipes contain quite easily available ingredients, with only the odd one or two fancy items that might cost a bit more. Even those slightly costlier ingredients, such as rose water, should be easily found in your local supermarket/deli/greengrocers.

The only real disadvantage is that if you want to make all the smoothie recipes in the Innocent Smoothie Recipe Book you will need both a blender for fruit and a juicer for harder fruit and vegetables.

Juicers for hard fruit tend to be more costly than blenders, and the cheaper ones can be a pain in the bum to clean out if you don't have a dishwasher. However, if you don't mind sticking to just the softer recipes for a while, or you're lucky enough to have a kitchen to make even Nigella jealous, then the Innocent Smoothie Recipe Book is great for vegan-friendly smoothie recipes and inspiration.

• Buy Innocent Smoothie Recipe Book: 57 and a half recipes from our kitchen to yours from Amazon
• Buy fairly cheap Moulinex Turbomix Handblender from Amazon (will handle fruit and soft veg)

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