Really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree.

By Jessica Roy

Peach season is here. It’s time to peach it up people! Of course, fresh local peaches are lovely all on their own but, like many things in life, they are even better when pizza is involved. Perhaps, like me, you are skeptical, having had a similarly bad fruit-pizza experience that you’d rather soon forget. Or, maybe you are concerned that I am unwittingly leading you into the wacky world of dessert pizza. Rest assured that peach pizza is nothing like these botched pizza experiments. I suggest that you brush your favorite thin crust homemade pizza dough with olive oil (if you like it crunchy like how I like it) and top it with thinly sliced peaches (marinated in a little lime juice and brown sugar), fresh basil leaves, arugula, bocconcini cheese and fresh ground pepper. I promise you won’t regret it and, afterwards, you can make peach and basil sangria with the leftover ingredients.

This is what the end of summer tastes like. Pretty darn good.

Peach pizza

Check out Jessica’s bio on the Contributors page.

Summer Smoothie

by Amanda Halfpenny

summer smoothie

I enjoy nothing more on a hot summer’s day than a cool fruit smoothie. My first experiences making smoothies were inspired by a Moroccan roommate for whom it was normal on a trip to the grocery store to buy at least 15 bananas at once. At first I thought he was absolutely crazy. How could someone possibly attempt to eat so much fruit without it going bad? Yet he would make delicious smoothies on a daily basis and showed me that they can be one of the most effective ways to get your recommended daily fruit servings in one tall glass of refreshing goodness.
Winter smoothies are great because most fruit that is available in the winter like apples and bananas are extremely tasty in smoothie-form. Nothing though compares to the taste and sensation of drinking a fruit smoothie on a hot sunny day in the summer.
This smoothie that I made today was an especially refreshing reward to down after a 45 minute jog in the humid heat of July. I made it with fresh strawberries and raspberries from Nova Scotia, an Ontarian peach, an organic banana from Ecuador and a combination of chocolate soy milk and regular milk. How refreshing!

Check out Amanda’s bio on the Contributors page.