I scream, you scream…

We all scream for ice cream! As I have had the sore throat and earache I have been craving cool, soothing frosty goodness to slide down the back of my throat. Obviously dairy ice cream is out of the question. But never fear, there are alternatives. Swedish Glace makes a delicious soy milk ice cream, however it is loaded with sugars, fats and some artificial gunk.

Juicy Raspberry contains:

Water extract from premium graded soya beans, raspberry ripple 14% (sucrose, raspberry, water, pectin, stabiliser: E410, citric acid E330, preservatives: E202, E211), sucrose, glucose, non-hydrogenated vegetable oils, emulsifiers: mono- and di-glycerides from vegetable oils, stabilisers: carob bean gum, guar gum, carrageenan, salt, colour: red beet powder, raspberry flavour.

Per 100 gram serving it has:

Calories 210

Protein 2.5g

Carbohydrates 29g

Of which sugars 28g

Fat 9g

Of which saturates 5g

Of which mono-saturates 2.5g

Of which poly-unsaturated 1.5g

Fibre 1 g

Sodium 0.1g

That’s a lot of gunk to put in your body as often as I crave a frosty treat. So what is a hungry but health conscious Spidergrrl to do? Adapt, adopt and improve!

Frozen Yoghurt is our newest discovery. You just freeze pots of soya yoghurt and then take them out and let them thaw and they are ready to eat. For this comparative exercise I will use cherry yoghurt since I was talking about raspberry ice cream. They're both fruits, right? And cherry is my favourite. Pop your pots of yoghurt in the freezer over night and then before you want to eat them take them out and sit them on the counter. In 45 minutes they are defrosted enough to be the texture of ice cream but not melty puddle-y. They really do look and taste very similar to ice cream or TCBY frozen yoghurt. Yum! It seems to work best with fruit ones—the plain vanilla one went all icy, but the fruit ones rock.  Maybe that's because the plain vanilla ones comes in a big pot and you have to divide it up into your own smaller pots. Who knows. anyway, let’s see how Alpro Cherry Soya Yoghurt compares to Swedish Glace.

 Alpro Cherry Soya Yoghurt contains:

Water, Hulled soya beans (7.3%), Sugar, (Cherries (6.3%)), cherry juice (4.6%), Glucose-fructose syrup, Tri-calciumcitrate, Stabiliser (Pectin), Acidity regulators (Sodium citrate, Citric acid), Natural colouring (Anthocyanins), Carrot concentrate, Modified maize starch, Flavouring (), Sea salt, Emulsifier (Lecithin), Vitamins (Riboflavin, B12, D2), Yogurt cultures (S. thermophilus, L. bulgaricus), Antioxidants (Ascorbyl palmitate, Tocopherol-rich extract)

Per 100g serving it has:

Calories 75

Protein 3.7g

Carbohydrates 19.4g

Of which sugars 19.2g

Fat 2.0g

Of which saturates 0.4g

mono unsaturated 0.4g
poly unsaturated 1.2g

Fibre 1g

Sodium 0.08g

Calcium 120mg

Plus 15% of your daily allowance of riboflavin, B12, D2

Wow! What a difference!

The second way we indulge in frozen goodness is to make banana ice cream When ever bananas get over ripe and are brown and speckled, peel them and cut them into chunks and then freeze them. When you have 3 frozen bananas then you can make ice cream for  two people. This is where the frozen yoghurt can help ease your cravings--it can take a while to get enough bananas saved up for this. But when you do have enough bananas saved up it is totally worth it.

Banana Ice Cream

Put all the frozen banana chunks in a metal bowl or pot. Add a drizzle of maple syrup and a blop or two of yoghurt (not frozen--just from the fridge) and a pinch of sea salt--smoked if you can get it (smoked sea salt gives it caramel tones)  then use you immersion blender to pulverise it until it is the consistency of ice cream which doesn’t take long. Then add a handful of nuts--walnuts make it like maple walnut/pecans like butter pecan--and pulse quickly to chop and incorporate into the ice cream. Serve immediately. 

Some people do it in a food processor but I found that always made it melty and gloopy. I like the metal pot because it gets super cold--so cold the metal almost burns your skin--and it keeps the bananas from melting and retains their creaminess with no gloopy bits. But that’s just me. If you wanna try it in the food processor then go for it.

These are 2 of the ways we keep cool in summer. What do you eat?