Vegan Ice Cream

As the mother of a family on a vegan and gluten free diet, sometimes I just run out of ideas and I don’t know what to make for mealtime.  This morning was one of those days….
So I asked the Little Farmhands.  A more organized mother would not be polling her offspring for opinions, but that’s what I did.

“Let’s have ice cream!” they said.

Being the ever-so-responsible parent that I am, I said, “Yeah!  That sounds like a great idea!”

And it did sound like a great idea at the time!  But you know that inevitably, today will be the day that a grandparent calls and asks one of them, “So, what did you have for breakfast today?” And they’ll say, “Mama let us eat ice cream.”  And I’ll be jumping up and down in the background waving my arms wildly, yelling in a whisper, “No!!  Don’t tell her that!” 

But I didn’t think of that in the moment, so I said, “Yeah!  That sounds like a great idea!” 

Here’s how we did it….

Earlier this week Papa the Farmer came home with a couple of large brown bags of really brown, squishy bananas. 

We peeled them and laid them out on a cookie tray.  Then we put the whole tray in the freezer and let them freeze.

 

This morning, we pulled out our Champion Juicer. 

(Frugal note here!  If you want to make banana ice cream like this, but you don’t have a juicer, you can probably find a used one comparatively cheaply!  These juicers are top of the line so a lot of people buy them when they make a new year’s resolution to juice more or be healthier or whatever…  Then when the phase fizzles out, you see a lot of Champions on Craigslist and ebay, just looking for a new home!  If you want to be even more frugal, you can just skip the juicer altogether and just chop the bananas up and eat little frozen banana slices.  That’s pretty tasty, too!)

Now, are you ready for our very complicated recipe?

The next thing you do is run the frozen bananas through the juicer.  It comes out looking like this….

 

 Hey!  Who is sticking their finger in that!? 

Get your finger out of there!  Don’t you know I’m posting these pictures online later?!

We wanted to make carob “ice cream” so as we were running the bananas through the juicer we also added a scoop of peanut butter and about a cup of carob powder.

That’s it.

 

It’s important to have good help for the clean up phase. 

I may consider renting out our farm’s Dripper-Licker-Upper for a small fee.  Otherwise you’ll just have to lick up your own drips. 

To redeem myself in the “responsible mother” department, I didn’t just let them eat ice cream for breakfast.  We had air-popped popcorn, too (sprayed with a little olive oil and sea salt!)  After all, corn is technically a grain (not a vegetable).  That’s almost as good as cereal, isn’t it?