One of my strategies to find the light as the autumn establishes itself and the days shorten, is to keep my smoothie habit going. It’s such a great lunch and having devoted a drawer in my freezer to bags of summery fruit, you can have the flavours (and colours) of summer all year around.

I’m making my Cherry Pineapple Smoothie a few times a week, interspersed with homemade soups or warmed up leftovers from the night before and am still totally loving working from home for reasons such as these. It’s such a pleasure to not be eating hospital sandwiches from a plastic pack or a chocolate bar with a side serving of steaming hot guilt!

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Pineapple is a brilliant addition to smoothies if you like them on the sweeter side (I do) and it masks the banana flavour very well. Against the exoticism of the pineapple, the very British berry richness of the cherries work extremely well together. You don’t need many cherries for the flavour to come through which is handy, as they are the most expensive of the fruits used here.

I’ve recently been using cashew nut butter more and more in my cooking (did you see my Steak, Mushrooms and Bulgar which uses it to create a creamy sauce without adding actual dairy cream?) and I add a single tablespoon here. It’s a good thickener in place of oats (although you can add some rolled oats as well if you want a really filling smoothie) plus the nutty flavour, reminiscent of peanut butter makes this feel like a real treat too.

Using unsweetened almond milk rather than cow’s milk makes my Cherry Pineapple Smoothie vegan/dairy free, for those who need it to be so. It is delicious whichever milk you choose but I like using the almond milk as it provides variation and different nutrients in a diet which already consumes enough dairy milk.

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Cherry Pineapple Smoothie
Servings: 1
: 2014 kcal
Author: Just Jo
Ingredients
  • A nugget of frozen spinach or a handful of fresh leaves
  • Half a frozen banana
  • 4 chunks of frozen pineapple about 1 inch across each
  • 8-10 frozen cherries
  • 1 tbsp cashew nut butter
  • 1 tsp chia seeds
  • 1 tsp linseeds flax seeds
  • 250 ml almond milk or dairy milk if you prefer
  • Upto 250ml water
  • Optional - upto 2 tbsp oats
Instructions
  1. Place all the ingredients in your high powered blender (such as a Nutribullet or NutriNinja) apart from the water and blitz for 60 seconds.
  2. Take the lid off and check the texture - it is likely to be very thick like a slushy at this point, so do feel free to add up to 250ml of water to thin it down to your liking. Give it another 30 second blast to mix it well.
  3. Serve immediately.

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