Drinks - Juices, Milkshakes, etc

Would anyone have a chilled milkshake in Winter? I will! :) & so would my husband. We looove looove the drinks made from fruits. Weekdays, we get our daily dose of milk from the cereals we eat for breakfast. But on weekends, I make south Indian tiffins for b/fast. In the afternoons, I make milkshakes so that we get to have milk in some form during weekends too. They are quite refreshing and at the same time, healthy.

If you have a blender/mixer, you are good to go. Blend any fruit (like strawberry, mango, banana, chikkoo - only used these so far) or a fruit-combo with sugar, milk, ice and vanilla sugar (optional). From my experience, I learnt that banana-based shakes should be consumed immediately. Since we don't get ripe mangoes and chikkoo here, I use store bought mango pulp and frozen chikkoo.

Few pictures of the shakes I make:

Strawberry banana m/s

Chikkoo (sapota) m/s

There's this small chaat place in San Diego called Surati Farsan Mart where you get chikkoo shake. Until few weeks ago, we used to visit this place almost every week to have this milk shake. Fellow used to charge 3$ per serving. I always used to crib that I can get a whole week's supply of milk for the same amount. But because I couldn't get chikkoo anywhere, we had to go to this place to have it. I tried really hard in all the Asian and American grocery stores for something even remotely belonging to the sapota/chikkoo family, but in vain. Then one afternoon, I sat and started thinking, if that Surati fellow can get his supply of chikkoo, why am I not getting? It then struck to my mind that probably he could be using frozen chikkoo from India. I never peep inside the frozen foods section of the desi stores. But when I did, the last time I went, I found a bag of "frozen chikkoo". Hurray!! I proudly showed it to my husband as though that was a trophy/award I achieved :) From then on, we started having home-made chikkoo shake. Very fresh, with a very heavenly taste. This is one truly "dil maange more" drink. All for under 1$.

Coming to juices, the only fruit juices that I make are with watermelon and pineapple. Reason- I don't like to eat the melon directly & my husband doesn't like to eat pineapples directly :)

Fruit + sugar + ice + water = one "aha moment" after a day's work :)

Pineapple juice

Watermelon juice

Masala buttermilk



My grandma first made this after seeing us purchase packets & packets of masala buttermilk from Visakha Dairy. These elderly people tend to favour "at-home" cooking a little too much. "Why waste money, when you can have something more healthier and fresh at home" is what they say. I'm so glad my grandma made this, for now, even in the US, I can have masala majjiga whenever I feel like.

For the recipe, churn the curd with water (manually/mixer) and add salt, lemon juice. Grind ginger, green chilli, jeera, curry leaves in a mixer and add to the buttermilk. Serve chilled.