Sensual smooth sun-drenched strawberry smoothies

The sun is shining...the weather is sweet....Make you wanna move, those dancing feet...

Ah yes, the height of summer. As I'm writing this, I'm gazing into my parents' neverending backyard and listening to the birds' chatter become more and more silent as the sun rises higher and higher. Sitting atop of the garden on the house's patio, I feel fantastically lucky to be able to enjoy all these pleasures of the good life. Now, the good life in my book always includes lots of dinner with friends and good food. However, sometimes you need to refrain from eating very rich delicacies and just get back to basics. Especially when it's just too damn hot outside to get into elaborate cooking. Moreover, it being the bathing suit season, you want to keep it rather healthy. That's why I've recently started making my own fruit smoothies. I know there's lot of store-bought alternatives such as Odwalla in the US or Innocent and Chiquita in Europe. But althought those are quite good, they simply don't stack up against freshly picked/bought produce which is then blended together to make liquid perfection.

My two personal favorites are two orange juice based smoothies and can be made in 5 minutes.

Ingredients

1 strong blender (one that can handle the crusing of ice cubes)

Ice cubes (I tend to use 7-10 cubes, the more you use, the more watered down the smoothie will become in the end)

1 banana

150 -200 gr of fresh, ripe strawberries or 150 gr of raspberries

250ml of orange juice

Preparation

1. Clean your strawberries, rinse them and remove the grean leaves and stems. Peel the banana and break it into large pieces.

2. If you're feeling very active and energetic, squeeze some oranges for the OJ.

3. Put about 7 to 10 ice cubes in your blender. Add the strawberries, banana pieces and the orange juice.

4. Blend away! Blend until you've got a dark pink/light red liquid.

5. If it's especially hot, you could put some extra whole ice cubes in a tall glass and then pour in the smoothie.

6. I sometimes like to add a couple of leaves of mint to each glass; it really brings out the strawberries' flavor, give the smoothie an extra hint of freshness and it just looks nice. If you leave a leaf floating on top while you drink the smoothie, you'll get a really funky sensation: you taste the strawberry and you smell the mint. Groovy! ("break" the mint leaves a little before adding them, this will improve the release of the minty odors).