“Don’t give me any dinner this week,” my husband said to me. “I’ll just have your fruit drink.” What delightful words for any busy mum to hear: No cooking real meals for a week! Well actually I did still cook a little something extra for myself and my son. But fruit drink every night was a great way to start off November – the month set aside in New Zealand to promote eating ‘Five-a-day’. Five-a-day means eating five serves of fruit and vegetables each day. It’s not that much. A serve is one average sized piece of fruit, half a cup of vegetables or a cup of salad. For children, a serve is the amount they can hold in one cupped hand.

I’ve worked out that my fruit drink has about 11 or 12 serves and 22-24 grams of fibre. Split between three of us, we just about hit our daily 5-a-day with one large glass! And no wonder my husband doesn’t feel like dinner: he’s just drunk eight or nine grams of fibre – almost a third of the recommended daily intake. So it’s filling and also incredibly healthy. I’ve just checked in the highly informative and easy-to-understand antioxidant book “Hot Potatoes & Cool Bananas” co-written by my friend Anne Perera. It tells me that my fruit drink contains bromelain – an enzyme which aids digestion – from the pineapple, vitamin B6, potassium and some fructo-oligosaccharides (a prebiotic which is like food for the healthy bacteria in our gut) from the banana, and flavonoids from the oranges which work together with vitamin C in the oranges and pineapple to boost the immune system and help protect against heart disease and cancer.

This fruit drink is so simple. Just blend up a whole pineapple, two oranges and a banana. I often add watermelon, plain low fat yoghurt, strawberries or, when I lived in Brisbane, mango. A mango in New Zealand is far too precious to blend up – I need to savour every satiny, sweet mouthful on its own. If you have a family that won’t eat fruit, even if it’s cut up, try blending it into a drink – yum!