Mango quasi-lassi with cucumber, mint, and almond milk

November 11, 2012 at 1:08 pm (Beverage, breakfast, B_minus (2.5 stars), Derek's faves, My brain, Summer recipes)

It’s really too cold here for smoothies, but I bought some almond milk that I don’t care for in coffee, and was trying to figure out ways to use it up.  I also had some mint that needed to get eaten (from the escarole, sweet pea, and mint dish) and some homemade yogurt that was becoming rather sour.  I thought I’d try making a smoothie kind of reminiscent of the “Vitality” smoothie they serve here at Dean and David, which has cucumber, yogurt, basil, mango, honey, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.  But the container of frozen orange juice that I pulled out of the freezer turned out not to be orange juice, but rather mango puree.  So this quasi-lassi was born.

Ingredients:

• about 1.75 cups mango puree (about 1 pound I think, mine was still mostly frozen)
• half of one of those very long cucumbers (about 150g I think)
• 150g yogurt (about .6 cups, mine was made from whole milk)
• two large handfuls of mint leaves (I used about 20g of still damp mint leaves)
• 100g almond milk (about .4 cups—or maybe I used 150g?)
• 1 tsp. turbinado sugar (optional, Derek likes his smoothies sweeter than I do)

Makes 2 large smoothies or 3-4 small ones.

Derek said “best non-peanut-butter smoothie you ever made!”  I was surprised he liked it so much.  It tasted quite green from all the mint, and the cucumber taste was also quite noticeable, but still all the mango and yogurt did give it a quasi-lassi feel.  And the sugar added with all the mango made the whole smoothie quite sweet.

Rating: B
Derek: A

Nutritional stats for half of the recipe:  214 calories (75% carbs, 9% protein, 15% fat),  excellent source of vitamin C and good sources of calcium, vitamin E, potassium, folate, B3, and beta carotene.