Berry Smoothie #Recipe by Maya Corrigan

When I wrote my first culinary cozy mystery, I had no expectation of writing more than three books and no idea that I'd end up including more than fifty recipes in the books. I’m putting the finishing touches on my 9th Five-Ingredient Mystery and as usual I’m testing recipes at the last minute before the manuscript is due. 

In A Parfait Crime I needed to get my sleuth, Val, to a gala open house at a fancy spa, where some nefarious things are going on. Val isn’t the type to visit a high-end spa, so I had to give her a catering gig there. She’s hired to run a smoothie bar at the spa’s grand opening festivities.

Needless to say, one of the recipes in the book, which comes out in 2023, has to be for a smoothie. As someone who enjoys chewy and crunchy food, I’d never tried smoothies though there’s a chain eatery devoted to them less than a mile from my house. Today I’m passing on a recipe for a delicious berry smoothie. It turned out so good that I'll make it again and try other homemade smoothies. Before selecting the flavor, I checked out recipes for different kinds of smoothies, including many made with kale and a Greek salad smoothie with tomatoes, cucumber, Kalamata olives, and feta cheese. A dessert smoothie appealed more to me, but the vegetable ones would be healthier.

This recipe makes two small smoothies or one big one. I used an immersion blender to make it. You can easily double or triple the recipe, but you'll have to use a standard blender or make the smoothies in batches. The restaurant near me that features smoothies often makes them with fruit sherbet. This recipe calls for sorbet, which has less fat and a stronger berry flavor than sherbet. 

Ingredients

10 ounces of raspberry sorbet

1/3 cup milk (I used 2% milk but any kind of milk or a vegetable-based milk alternative like Ripple would work.)

4 ounces of plain Greek yogurt (or any kind of plain yogurt)

1/3 cup fresh or frozen raspberries

1/3 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Adapted from a blueberry smoothie recipe on bellyfull.net

The instructions are simple: Put all the ingredients in a blender and whirl them until the smoothie is the consistency you like.

I made the smoothie in the container that came with my immersion blender

Pour the mixture into glasses and serve with or without a straw.

Do you enjoy smoothies? Any favorite flavors?

📚

Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. The 8th book in the series, Bake Offed, comes out in November 2022. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Try a Five-Ingredient Mystery for Halloween . . .

CRYPT SUZETTE: ​​When a murder masquerades as an accident, Granddad's ghost-busting and Val's foray into a haunted house turn up clues to the killer. 

THE TELL-TALE TARTE: When Val serves a dessert at a book club dinner, she uncovers a fraud that embroils her and Granddad in a murder among deadly serious Edgar Allan Poe fans. 

Visit my website for easy recipes, mystery history and trivia, and a free culinary mystery story. Sign up there for my newsletter. One subscriber wins a free book each time I send a newsletter.

Follow me on Facebook.

📚