For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with ice cream. It’s one of those foods that I don’t just “really like”… friends who know me well would say my love for ice cream knows no bounds. (And if you don’t like ice cream, I will view you with extreme suspicion.) I can easily down a whole pint in one sitting (though this is something I think I’ve only done once!), especially a pint of one of my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavors: Mint Cookie, New York Super Fudge Chunk, Peanut Butter Cup, or Cherry Garcia. One of my favorite things in the world is walking into Walgreens and being met with a sign telling me that all the Ben & Jerry’s is on sale 2 for $5. Those are the days when the universe is on my side.
The mother of all flavors: Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup, 1,400 calories per pint.
Thanks to my foodie parents and a childhood spent in the Dairy State, my love for ice cream was nurtured starting at a young age. No summer vacation to Door County was complete without a trip to Not Licked Yet, which still serves the best, most humongous sundaes in the world and has an epic Nordic-themed playground with trolls and gnomes that seems like a magical fairy land when you’re only 3 or 4 feet tall. Summer nights at the pool often ended with excursions to Dairy Queen, where I always ordered one of my two favorite blizzards: Mint Oreo or Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. My dad always got a Peanut Buster Parfait. I loved the familiar ritual of pulling up to the drive-through, basking in the glow of the menu board listing all of their blended soft serve creations, hearing my dad shout our order into the crackly microphone, and pulling forward to the window to receive my blizzard with a bright red spoon sticking out. The blizzard cups used to have Peanuts characters on them in the 1990s. Around the cup stretched a picture of Snoopy perched on his little red dog house, which had icicles coming off its roof.
My town was also home to not just one, but TWO Culver’s locations. Every morning on the way to school, we’d pass by the Culver’s on Bridge Street, and I would take note of the Flavor of the Day, which flashed across the marquis along with other specials and the date and time. “PATTY MELT—7:26 A.M. 23º—FISH FRY BASKET—” wait for it, wait for it…“—TURTLE.” Fist pump. Turtle is still my family’s favorite, and whenever it’s the Flavor of the Day, we always go get like 2 quarts to keep in our downstairs freezer on reserve.
So, given how much I love ice cream, but also my lovely genetic predisposition to… er… roundness (everything carb-loaded goes straight to my middle region), I was really excited to find that a pretty decent ice cream substitute exists that involves no gluten, is incredibly easy to make, and basically requires only one ingredient: FROZEN BANANAS.
The miracle: chocolate peanut butter frozen banana “ice cream”
I’d heard about this revelation from several sources: Apartment Therapy and an elementary school friend’s awesome food blog, to name a few. I was a tad skeptical because I tend to not only be able to taste the difference between, but also kind of loathe, other substitute-y or low fat or sugarless things like diet sodas, skim milk, “skinny” Starbucks drinks, whole grain pasta, etc… Blech. But this recipe proved me wrong. All you need are:
-a few overripe bananas (like 4 or 5), peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces and frozen solid
-2 Tablespoons cocoa powder (optional)
-2 Tablespoons peanut butter (optional)
The above is just a chocolate peanut butter version. You really only need the bananas as the base.
Simply throw the banana disks into a food processor, blend them until smooth (they’ll look like little pebbles for a while, but just be patient until it reaches the ice-cream like consistency), and then add the extra flavors. Voila!
This discovery pretty much changed my life. I hope to experiment with vanilla, honey, berries, and maybe even espresso soon!
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