A couple of weeks ago, I journeyed down to Palmerston North for a meeting with a local MP. I had a few errands to run before heading north again, one of which took me to Spotlight for some voile to make my own nut milk bag. The Spotlight shares a car park with New World so I popped in there in search of some of this:

The Stir It Up line of non-dairy milk powders (almond, coconut, oat and soy) was launched a few weeks prior but had been slow to appear on shelves. My previous supply of coconut milk powder having dried up, I’ve been keen to give it a go.

Anyways, New World had nice big juicy oranges for 99 cents/kg so I mega stocked up; looking back I should have bought twice as much for juicing and freezing. The trouble with juicing oranges is having to peel them all so, being inherently lazy, I googled a solution…which said…peel the oranges…

My quest did lead me to a site – now forgotten –  that listed fruit that could be juiced unpeeled – the short version is most of them less citrus – and extolled the virtues of unpeeled banana…it seems that the lowly banana peel is rich in serotonin which helps keep the demons away of grey winter days…so…

…remember to take the sticker off – it’s not rich in serotonin – and give the banana a good wash to remove anything unhealthy…hack the ends off and dice the rest up peel and all…

…slice off and dice up a centimetre ring of pineapple…

before tossing in a tablespoon of chia seeds – don’t put these in first or they will just glug up at the bottom of the mug – a teaspoon of turmeric (organic from Hardy’s), and four teaspoons of coconut milk powder: this is about the same as a cup of coconut milk. Add filtered water up to the mark, blend, fill to the top with water and blend again.

And that’s half of tomorrow’s lunch done…

I’ve been blending unpeeled bananas for a week or so now with no detrimental side effects…I wouldn’t say that there’s been a big surge of serotonin-based benefits either but it does reduce waste and I am now keen for another crack at banana peel cake, using the kumara cake base from a few weeks ago…