Apricot, Date & Coconut Smoothie
Dates are fabulously useful! Just don’t confuse them with figs, which are also lovely but which don’t have the staying power or sweetness of dates. (And don’t confuse fresh figs with the gritty stuff inside Fig Newtons — an actual fig tastes much lighter and fruitier, plus it beautifully shades from pink to cream to tan and back again.) Dates are a hardy lot, prized throughout the world for their lush sticky sweetness and their ability to hold things together. Lärabars, for example, are bar-shaped thanks to mashed dried dates. Many cakes and breads of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern origin are both shaped and sweetened by dates.
Because dates contain such a high percentage of natural sugar, dried dates preserve themselves quite nicely. (Sugar is a preservative.) In fact, once they’ve lost enough moisture, dried dates can be ground into date “sugar.” It doesn’t dissolve as readily as cane sugar does, but date sugar is pleasantly sweet and retains a mild, mellow date flavor that pairs perfectly with less-sweet fruits like apricots and strawberries.
One of my favorite ways to use date sugar is in smoothies. I came up with this smoothie because my apricots were a bit on the tart side — adding date sugar was the perfect solution. You can find date sugar nestled alongside the other natural sugars in health-food/whole-food stores. (If you spot a bag of sucanat, pick that up, too!)
Apricot, Date & Coconut Smoothie
To make a single-serving smoothie, blend together 1 apricot (pit removed, but skin left on), 1/2 cup whole coconut milk, 1/4 cup cold water, and 1 T. date sugar. If you’d like your smoothie to be extra-thick, use less water and more milk; if you’d like it to be thinner, reverse the equation. You could also use dairy milk, but I think the tropical palm + palm combination (i.e., coconut + date) is a tasty one. If you’d like your smoothie to be sweeter, simply add more date sugar.
Enjoy!
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Tags: apricot, coconut milk, date sugar, smoothie
