The Drink That Eats Like A Meal!

It’s mango season, and the Consort has a sweet spot for mangoes, so we usually get a few even though they come loaded with food miles. The drinks book we have has a couple of recipes that are buttermilk-based, which I thought sounded neat, so I decided  their mango smoothie would be drink recipe experiment #3 for us.

I bought some buttermilk from a local dairy, and used mint from the garden (remind me to show you pictures of our Jurassic-style mint plants!).

Whir up some buttermilk, milk, yogurt, mango, mint leaves, honey, and ice cubes, and serve.

“I look delicious, but I’m not.”

Not so good. I thought it was too thin, and the 3 other testers thought the mint was overpowering (overpowering, my foot! There were 4 little leaves in the blender — that comes out to the equivalent of one mint leaf each!). That’s easy to tally. Final score: –4.

I realized, after a Google* search for “buttermilk drink”** that the reason a buttermilk drink sounded like a good idea was this: that’s how lassi is made — you know, that refreshing drink you get when you eat out at an Indian restaurant. If you’ve never had one, I don’t want to hear about it. It’s one of the perks of eating Indian food!

I made some after dinner tonight. Of course, I was lazy and didn’t look up any of the recipes I found online the other day. So I just poured some buttermilk into the blender, dropped in 2 mangoes’ worth of flesh, added 2 tablespoons of honey, some cardamom, coriander, cloves, and ground ginger, and dropped in a large handful of ice cubes. Whir it up and pour (more accurately, “plop”) into glasses.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that…

There were only 3 of us at home tonight, but we all liked it. The only change I would make next time (and there will be a next time) will be to substitute milk for a portion of the buttermilk; mangoes are thick, buttermilk is thick, and I think a little balance with some thin would be a good idea. Final score: +3.

Do you notice the thickness?

*No WAY you’ll ever catch me “binging”. But then, I think most things Microsoft does is lame.
**I had lots of buttermilk left, so had to find some way to use it up!