In praise of frozen fruit

Right now you can use farm-fresh local strawberries to make smoothies. Blueberries and peaches will follow in due course. But smoothies can be enjoyed year-round, thanks to frozen fruit. In fact, frozen fruit can make an even better smoothie than out-of-season fresh fruit. Here's why:

Fresh fruits destined for the market usually are picked before they are fully ripe because a dead-ripe fruit can turn into a bruised fruit or a rotten fruit long before it reaches the store. But fruits destined to be frozen can be harvested at peak ripeness since they need to travel only from the field to the freezing plant.

Frozen fruits are every bit as nutritious as their fresh counterparts, if not more so, since the longer fruits and vegetables "stay out," the more nutrients they lose. Vitamin C, for instance, is destroyed by light, air and oxygen.

The one downside to freezing is that the texture of the fruit usually suffers. A defrosted strawberry could never be mistaken for fresh. But in a smoothie, everything is pureed into a uniform smoothness, anyway.

When shopping for frozen fruit, select packages that are clean, dry and fresh-looking. When you shake the package, the fruit should rattle; if it doesn't, it may have thawed and been refrozen.