Vanilla Mango Smoothie

I am now back into the full swing of my second semester. I'm pretty excited about a 3 day field trip up to the Central Otago wine region at the end of this week and I now have a date booked to do my experiment for my honours dissertation so a lot is happening! The three day field trip is essentially fend for yourself in terms of food so I have decided that to save money I am going to try to make my own breakfasts and lunches from home and just buy dinners. This has two benefits: 1) It will be far less expensive than trying to buy all 3 meals for 3 days and 2) It is much easier to eat healthier when all the food prepared for you is nutritious, real food. My plan at the moment is to make some whole wheat spinach and feta muffins to go with hard boiled eggs and fruit for lunches and to bring a chia porridge mix for breakfast. I tested the chia porridge this morning and it was fantastic!! I stayed full all morning. I will have a little play around with the flavours before I share it with you, so watch this space.

I have found that for some reason I am not responding to the cold weather the way I usually do. Usually first thing on a cold morning I want something warm to fill me up like porridge. However, for some wierd reason after not really craving them all summer I keep getting cravings for smoothies. At least it means that I have a great use for all the mangos I keep buying (2 for 1 was possibly getting ambitious). If I do forget about the mango and it starts to turn a little to the mushy side I can just slice it up and throw it in the freezer, ready for a tropical inspired smoothie that leaves me dreaming of lazing around in the sun somewhere.

Ingredients

1/2 medium mango, sliced and frozen

1/2 banana

1 Tbsp peanut butter or other nut butter

4-5 almonds, chopped in half (unless you have a really good blender)

1- 1.5 cups coconut and almond milk (or milk of choice)

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

Make sure that you have skinned and chopped the mango before you freeze it. I find snack-size snaplock bags work well for this.

Place all of the ingredients in a blender and blend until nice and smooth. 

*NB I found this sweet enough for me but if you like things on the sweeter side you could easily add in a chopped medjool date or two :)