Sailor Klerr: Food Friday: Not your average smoothies

It's been a while since I bought my blender, and I've been using it quite a lot. It's so easy to get stuck in a little bit of a rut with smoothies and to keep adding the same ingredients all the time. Then it gets boring and you loose the motivation to keep making them. My old blender has recently broken, but soon after I found a Cuisinart SmartPower Blender for $60 less than the RRP, score! It's shiny and new, and has given me the motivation to start getting more creative with my smoothies! Plus, it's way better at blending things more smoothly than my old blender. Coming up with recipes is hard when you're not keen on a lot of fruits - I hate banana and oranges. But, these are 4 recipes that are a bit more different to the usual berry, spinach, cucumber and water smoothies I've been stuck with.

My top tip for smoothies? Buy a bunch of fruit, get a bunch of strong containers (none of those thin takeaway containers, they will break!) cut it all up and stick it in the freezer. Use containers that stack well to maximise space. This works best for pineapple, watermelon and spinach. I buy the rest of my fruit frozen - Raspberries, Strawberries, Blueberries and Mango.

Minty Melon, Peach Iced Tea, Apple Pie and Peanut Butter

Minty Melon Smoothie
This smoothie is super refreshing. To make it even better, freeze the watermelon in chunks and you'll get a delicious watermelon slushie. If you're not a fan of cucumber in smoothies, it adds a kind of earthy flavour, you can cut it out. You could add pineapple to this too!

1 cup watermelon
1/2 cup frozen strawberries
1 inch piece of cucumber
a few mint leaves
1 cup water or chilled peppermint tea

Peach Iced Tea Smoothie
I love iced tea, and peach is my go to flavour. This isn't exactly the same, but sure is delicious. I've tried using green tea and black tea, and I prefer black tea, but it depends on your tastes. You can around with the strength of the tea too. Just remember not to brew your tea for too long, or it'll go bitter and ruin your smoothie. And, if you like sweet iced tea, replace the raspberries with strawberries!

1/2 cup canned/tubbed/fresh peaches
1/2 cup frozen mango
1/2 cup frozen raspberries
1 cup of your favourite tea.

Apple Pie Smoothie
This really tastes delicious! You can play around with how much apple you add, depending on how thick you want it. If you use a whole medium sized apple, it will be quite thick. You can also replace half of the apple with some oats to get a good breakfast drink.

1 small apple
1/2 cup blueberries
1 tbsp yoghurt
1 tsp mixed spice (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg)
3/4 cup soy/almond/coconut/cows milk

Peanut Butter Smoothie
When looking for inspiration online, I found a lot of people added peanut butter to their smoothies. Honestly, I'm not sure how much I liked this one. It could be because I used Coles peanut butter ice cream instead of peanut butter, which has chocolate in it. And chunks of peanuts, which I'm not a fan of in my peanut butter OR my smoothies. So I would recommend using smooth peanut butter. Or make your own peanut butter in your blender. And if you like bananas, they featured in a lot of recipes that had peanut butter in them, so maybe try that instead of/as well as the apple.