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Within it is warm; the fruit bowl sits lusciously on the window ledge, bursting with seasonal lots peaches, mangoes, grapes as well as the year round banana. All of the fruit is at point of perfect ripeness, begging to be eaten right now before it descends into a pool of pulp.

It might have stayed in the refrigerator and been brought out in cost-effective relays to ripen for a day, but there are a few things about a full fruit bowl, a guarantee of health and succulence, that time and time again makes me organize it as a still life, as I empty the shopping, only to be wrong-footed when it all ripens at the same time. Often the kids are only troubling to eat apples, which last for all eternity in the refrigerator. Even kids, who would not give a second peek to raw fruit, can generally be beguiled by a smoothie. It’s also a rare treat for adults, a simple thing to do for visitors who drop by, when it is too hot for tea. Any ripe fruit can be employed, even if it is a touch overripe, as long as it smells good and not fermenting. You get a mega-dose of vitamins, plus calcium from the yoghurt and milk, just about a meal in itself.

Giving a recipe for a smoothie is not exactly required. It is dependent on what you have in the house already.

Use this example as a template and evolve and change it as you like. So long as you use fruit that’s actually ripe, it will be mouth-watering.

The one necessary piece of gear is a liquidizer or blender, without that I’d just have to coerce feed the youngsters the fruit as is, it is way too laborious to puree fruit by hand on a hot summer’s day.

The joy making smoothies is the effortlessness. No set quantities, but as a guide I’d use one mango with 1 or 2 bananas.

Just peel and stone the fruit, fling it into the liquidizer with an enormous spoon of plain yoghurt and a cup of milk and blitz. If it is too thick for your liking add more milk. Chuck in some ice cubes for instant chill factor.

A tip for working with mangoes: without peeling, cut off both the long sides as near to the stone as you can, cut the flesh in a criss-cross fashion to make 1cm cubes, without going right thru the skin, then push the skin up to invert the cubes into a mango hedgehog. The kids eat them like this and a particularly sloppy business it, needs a bath after.

Suggestions for fruit combinations:

Mango and banana

Pear, berry and banana

Peach and berry

Strawberry and banana

Peach, apricot and banana

Any fruit in the whole wide world can be added to this list, experiment with whatever is in season and make up your own combinations.

Bananas make a good background for most other fruits and give a good velvety texture, besides being the most likely fruit to have around overripe. If you want to move away from the healthy fruit scenario, you can use bananas with a few teaspoons of hot chocolate to make a scrummy, decadent milkshake. Or go the whole way and put a blob of vanilla ice-cream in too. I remember as a child, my mother adding a raw egg to ours to build us up. It made it wonderfully frothy, but then nobody worried about salmonella in those days – I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a guaranteed source of salmonella-free eggs.

If you have berries of any sort stashed in the freezer, you can throw in a handful still frozen and watch the color transform as you blitz. Mulberries, blackberries, youngberries, blueberries all add deep color and plenty of useful nutrients, loads of anti-oxidants – instant immune boosters in winter, if you can keep them until then. I usually freeze strawberries as puree, when the strawberry harvest overwhelms us, so can bring it out for a change later on in the year. The other berries I freeze whole, stalks and leaves picked off, so they are ready to use. You can also buy frozen berries in mixed packs, which would work fine.

Whatever fruit you’re using, let the children press the buttons on the liquidizer and then dole out the smoothie, in glasses with straws, easy in the knowledge that the vitamin quota for the day is being filled.

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