Up to now, if parsley was in my kitchen, it was for dinner—however no extra. Now, as a substitute of utilizing it in pasta or tabbouleh or chimichurri (to slather on eggs or tofu or fish), my parsley shall be used for one thing else completely: smoothies.
I stumbled upon this frosty drink in Heston Blumenthal’s newest cookbook, cheekily titled, Is This a Cookbook? I’d say so. In it, there are many stomach-growl-inducing recipes, from pickle-y egg salad sandwiches to fried fish with seaweed salt. But it was the parsley and banana smoothie that I couldn’t resist making first.
What does it style like? I needed to know.
“Maybe you discover it an unlikely mixture,” Blumenthal writes. “For me, one of many pleasures of cooking is taking that step into the unknown and discovering one thing unexpectedly great.”
Unexpectedly great it’s. The trick is to make use of a green-ish banana, which tastes midway between vegetable and fruit. Plus, in response to Blumenthal, “Partially ripe bananas are richer than ripe ones in prebiotics (compounds equivalent to resistant starch and pectin that feed micro organism within the microbiome), so that they’re significantly good in your intestine well being.” Who knew?
Construct on this sorta-sweet basis with juicy cucumber (I go for a small Persian one), recent parsley (flat and curly each work—we’re mixing every thing anyway), and tangy yogurt (or kefir), and also you get my new favourite breakfast. That is how a inexperienced smoothie ought to style. It seems like kicking off your sneakers and skipping by means of mushy grass. So shiny and sunny, it may possibly flip round even the grayest winter day.
How one can make a parsley smoothie:
Peel and chop 1 not-quite-ripe banana (yellow meets inexperienced and agency to the contact). Roughly chop 1 Persian cucumber. Add each to a blender, together with 1 massive handful (about ½ cup) parsley leaves and ⅔ cup plain yogurt or kefir. Mix till clean, scraping down the blender as wanted. Pour right into a glass and drink up.
Recipe tailored from Is This a Cookbook: Adventures within the Kitchen by Heston Blumenthal. Copyright © 2022 Heston Blumenthal. Pictures © 2022 Haarala Hamilton. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury.
