GAPS recipe: Banana “Ice Cream” with Coconut and Cacao (Plus the Giveaway Winner!)

I long for the day when I can eat food that isn’t placed in quotation marks. Who wants “ice cream” when you can have Ice Cream? Or “truffles” instead of Truffles? Hopefully that day will come. But until then, I’m stuck with inventing GAPS-legal counterparts for all of my favorite treats.

This week? It was really hot and I really wanted ice cream. So this is what I made:

I fully admit to it being “ice cream” instead of Ice Cream, but even so, it’s completely delicious.

One of the reasons I bought the juicer that I did is because it does more than just juice. Among the other handy things it does? Turn frozen fruit into iced purees, something like a sorbet without the sugar. To do this, I use what is known as the “blank plate” that came with the juicer. This is a piece that allows everything to come out the end of the juicer, rather than separating the juice and the pulp. With this plate whatever you send through the juicer will get all mashed together until it’s fairly smooth.

This recipe started with pureeing a frozen banana, and then I just kept adding things until it got so delicious I couldn’t help but share it. I recommend mixing everything up before freezing it, since it creates a more consistent ice cream that way (as opposed to feeding the frozen ingredients through the juicer individually). If you eat it straight out of the juicer, it’s something like soft serve ice cream. Or you can put it back into the freezer for a while, if you prefer your ice cream a bit firmer. If you have an ice cream maker, I’m betting you could put the mixture from the food processor into the ice cream maker and come up with a fairly similar end product.

I can’t wait to experiment with other mix-ins (strawberries, anyone? mango? almond butter? Yum!) I like to make this recipe in big batches and keep bags full of the mixture in the freezer. Because summer’s still going strong and I have a feeling there are a lot more “ice cream” days in my future.