Fuel Your Body
Refreshing treats for the summertime
By Joanna Gertler | July 19, 2011
Photo by Lori-Greig via Flickr
It’s not unusual to find your appetite reduced once the hot weather arrives – but it gives you great opportunity to fuel your body with a variety of fruits just on their own or in a combination with other ingredients. While fruits generally contain a lot of natural sugars, they are also high in water, and thus a good food to consume when you need to hydrate.
Nobody needs an excuse to dip into a bowl of icy cold cherries, apricots or peaches and once the local markets are full of them, it’s hard to resist bringing buckets of them home. But if you have bought more than you can reasonably eat, then why not get creative and impress your friends and family.
Everyone has a favourite fruit slushy – be it made from mangos, watermelon or blueberries and bananas and putting extra, or quickly softening fruit and ice into a blender is a quick and easy way to use and appreciate it. Here’s a recipe for a smoothie using a combination of fruits from one of my favourite recipe websites.
One trick I find to creating great fruit salads is to add freshly cut up mint to the fruit bowl. I don’t know why, but also adding freshly squeezed lime (lemon will do if you don’t have lime) with the mint creates a totally awesome combination – especially on papaya or melons. Supposedly, the citrus juice helps slow down the fruit from browning, but once I’ve made my fruit salad, it’s usually consumed pretty quickly – before there’s a chance it might go brown!
Here are more great recipes to try now that the dog days of summer are upon us:
Watermelon and cantaloupe wedges with lime-mint syrup - this tasty treat will certainly refresh you and adds lots of water back into your system
Blueberry lime ice-pops - obviously it’s not just my own tastebuds that appreciate lime juice with fruit and these are so darn easy to make!
Watermelon-berry granita - this refresher is also dead easy to make, although you need to plan ahead if you want to serve for a specific occasion as it takes some time to freeze.
And be sure to check out these five fruits that can help you beat the heat!