Fruit Ice Cream!

Hi Everyone!

Just thought I would share a picture of one of my favorite summer time suppers--Fruit Ice Cream!  That's right.  You read that correctly.  I eat ice cream for supper.  Not for dessert after eating my vegetables, for supper itself!  Well, first of all, our family usually eats our main meal of the day at lunch time as we are blessed in that most of the time my hubby can come home to eat lunch.  So that is the meal when we really do eat a lot of veggies!    But for supper time--especially in the hot summer days--just give me ice cream!

Alright.  Before you turn me over to the "Unhealthy eating Food Police," I plead my case by saying that the above supper you see in the picture is 100% healthy, because it is 100% fruit.  Not fruit flavored sugar, but just fruit.  The magic little kitchen machine that helps me turn out such suppers is my beloved Champion Jucier.  I'm sorry I do not have a picture of my Champion to show you--if anyone REALLY wants to see what they look like let me know and I'll take a picture--but you would see a picture faster if you just look them up on Amazon.  I do not use my juicer to juice.  I use it sometimes to make almond butter, but I use it ALL the time to make fruit ice cream.

I do not follow a recipe, but the key to fruit ice cream is frozen bananas.  I prefer to just place my ripe bananas in a freezer bag with the peels still on them, and then when I want to use them I have to take a paring knife and peel them kind of like you would an apple.  Other people prefer to peel them ahead of time, break them in chunks, and put those chunks in the freezer bag.  That's fine too.  Only reason I do not do that is my chunks sometimes turn brownish in the freezer when I peel them ahead of time, and I prefer to keep them as white looking as possible.

Anyway, once you have your frozen banana chunks, you can make any flavor you want to depending on what other frozen fruit you add in.  The ice cream in the above picture was a mix of banana chunks and frozen strawberries.  I will put in the juicer a few chunks of frozen bananas, then a few frozen strawberries.  Then frozen bananas, and frozen strawberries.  I just keep this alternating and pushing the frozen fruit through with the tamper until I have as much ice cream as I want in my bowl, depending on how many people are going to be eating it.  Sometimes I will use several different kinds of fruit, first making straight frozen banana ice cream, then making strawberry next to it in the same bowl, and then will make peach ice cream next to the strawberry.  The key is to just always alternate with frozen banana chunks, because it is the bananas that give your ice cream a creaminess.  Without the frozen bananas, it turns out more icy rather than creamy.  For people who think they don't like bananas, just don't tell them and make sure you put in plenty of the other frozen fruit--really--if they don't see the bananas going in or tell tale banana peels, they will never know.  Except for when you are doing straight banana ice cream, you don't even taste the banana in it.

In the photo above, I had some fresh strawberries and fresh blueberries in the fridge, so I threw a couple of those on top of the ice cream, along with a chunk of frozen peaches.  Yum!

For those who do not have a Champion Juicer--and I do realize they are REALLY expensive (I'm hoping mine lasts F-O-R-E-V-E-R!)--you can basically do the same thing in your blender, except that you will need to add some water, juice, or soy milk so it will blend and that will turn it more into a smoothie instead of ice cream.  But it's still yummy!

Hope this helps give some ideas for healthy suppers during summer heat!

Susan