Summer seems to finally be here and if you’re like me, you need to keep ice cream in the house. But if you are like me, you’re also trying to eat better and cleaner – that is to say staying away from processed sugar, dairy, gluten, etc. For the most part, it amounts to eating a lot of vegetables, which gets old…real quick. And you start to realize that foods like ice cream – a staple for the humid months of summer – cannot be eaten.
Sad face.
So I’ve searched high and low for a recipe for ice cream that would fit my diet and I started to think that ice cream couldn’t exist without sugar and dairy – I tried avocado alternatives, and found something using cashews (which just kind of creeped me out… I mean, I like cashews, but I just don’t think they should be turned into ice cream) and something that uses hemp (???).
I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw this link for ice cream that uses two ingredients: bananas and almond milk. I watched the video and it seemed pretty straight forward, and it looked like ice cream. So I ran out to the store and got bananas and almond milk. The thing is, banana ice cream is just as appealing as avocado ice cream (which basically tasted like cold grass)…I mean, I like bananas and all, but whenever they’re added with something, I find them to be perfumy and overpowering. So I added a splash or two of vanilla to dilute the bananas and I added in all natural peanut butter (I use Teddie’s) to make peanut butter ice cream (my favorite kind).
At first it did not turn into ice cream like the videos. They make it look like you blend it together and BAM you got ice cream. I blended it together and BAM, I got a friggin banana-peanut butter smoothie that just tasted like banana (perhaps too much almond milk splashed in). It did have some thickness to it, but it was like the ice cream had already melted. I put it in the freezer for a couple of hours and now it actually has the consistency of ice cream, and sort of tastes like peanut butter-banana ice cream. So I feel like I’m cheating on my diet with a fattening dessert (which, I suppose I am), but it’s really not that bad.
