Smoothie season

The most exotic smoothies incorporate tropical products such as bananas, mangoes, passion fruit and prickly pears. Many typical French fruit, such as melons, contain too much water (in my humble opinion) to be integrated into smoothies. So, when I speak of the "smoothie season", what I really mean is the time of the year when ideal imported fruit start to appear, at cheap prices, in local supermarkets. And that time, in France, is now. A purely-French smoothies ingredient, on the other hand, is top-quality yogurt.

Today's smoothie is an elegant variation on the celebrated milk shakes of my Anglo-Saxon youth in Grafton. Once upon a time, my adolescent girlfriend invited me around to her place, unexpectedly, so that I could taste a drink she had just concocted, in her mother's Grafton pub, with another girl. It was a kind of super milk shake incorporating ice cream, chocolate, malt and crushed macadamia nuts. It was divine. My Aphrodite had served me up the nectar of gods and goddesses. A rival classmate once drew my attention to the interesting fact that the initials of my earthly blond divinity, written as Ag, were the symbol of silver... which was surely, in the case of such a creature, the least of things. I think of her constantly, especially when I get around to making smoothies.