Friday, April 23, 2010

The perfect summer treat

If you've got a tub of plain yogurt, some sugar, various fruits and a few ice cubes then you too you can make the tastiest drink shake thing known to Pegasus.

I speak, of course, of Lassi.

Lassi is an Indian drink made from yogurt and fruits or spices. Every time we visit our favorite Indian restaurant we always order one. We tried all their options: Cherry, Strawberry, Mango and Rose. Rose is interesting but Strawberry is probably my favorite.

Anyway, for a long time we debated about making our own but we simply didn't have a blender to make it happen relying upon the blenders shorter cousin. Then, one day, mysteriously something happened to the food processor. I won't go into detail but suffice it to say it knows what it did and won't be talking to anyone ever again.

So we purchase a fancy (okay not that fancy) new blender (we know it works because my husband uses the same model in lab to mince up pieces of emu jerky for analysis) and promptly stuffed it into a corner for a month or so and forgot we ever got one.

But now summer is acoming, sure we'll get the occasional freezing cold rain but no matter the resistance winter throws up Heat miser is dancing with his little flames.

Last night I decided to give this home lassi plan a try.

We don't have many plain yogurt options here, and after some disastrous attempts at making tzatziki with a plain yogurt that had sugar added (blech!) we discovered that Dannon has a nice tub of plain unsweetened and full fat yogurt. It's a little sour but I like that and it just means using a bit less lemon juice with Greek.

It's our go to for any Greek or Indian cooking I get up to.

For the Lassi we used a low fat version because they were all out of the full fat at the store (though it didn't matter much thanks to the sugar added).

The first step is to drain the yogurt. I just layer two paper towels inside a colander, plop in 3 cups of yogurt, and let that sit inside a pot for an hour or so.

After that just roll your yogurt off the paper towel into your blender. Some will stick to the towels but not much and it really isn't worth the fight and the inevitable paper towel bits to try to get the last bit off.

To the blender toss in 5-6 ice cubes, 3 table spoons of sugar and your fruit of choice.

Because it isn't berry season right now I picked a frozen triple berry mix which works well with lassi as it's supposed to be a cool drink though I'd let the fruit thaw in the fridge before.

Now just blend the heck out of it for 30 seconds or so and tada!
Now all that's left is to sit outside watching the setting summer sun while you sip upon your cool fruit and yogurt drink placing bets on when the first 100ยบ day will hit (I say July 12th).

And that's how to make Lassi, probably the second easiest drink after chocolate milk.

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