Vegan, Sugar-Free Ice Cream

Did you know you can make ice cream out of nothing but bananas? It's pretty much the best thing ever. Personally, I put a few more things in just for flavor, but if you really like banana flavor you can just make banana ice cream, and here's how you do it:

One-Ingredient Ice Cream

1. Buy a bunch of bananas
2. Peel them and chop them into chunks
3. Freeze the banana chunks for at least an hour and up to two weeks
4. Run the frozen banana chunks through a blender

If you like soft-serve, stop here. Otherwise, or if you want to make it ahead of time, store it in a tupperware and re-freeze. If you freeze it longer than a few hours you may have to let it thaw a little bit before serving (a few minutes on the counter or 10 seconds in the microwave should do the trick).

I like to put cocoa powder (about a teaspoon per banana, adjust to your personal taste) and peanut butter (about a tablespoon per banana) in the blender with the bananas to make chocolate-peanut butter-banana ice cream. You could also put in just the cocoa powder to make chocolate ice cream, or strawberries, raspberries, or some other fruit to flavor the ice cream.

It turns out there's another super magical thing you can do with these frozen bananas, and that's make milkshakes. This is one of my absolute favorite recipes, and it makes a great breakfast in the summer. Healthy milkshake for breakfast? Yes, please!

Vegan, Sugar-Free, and Unbelievably Delicious

Chocolate & Peanut Butter Breakfast Milkshake

Ingredients

• 1-2 frozen bananas (I freeze pre-cut bananas by the bunch, so I usually just grab a little more than a handful and drop it in the blender; if your bananas look like most supermarket bananas, you'll only need one, but with the smaller non-GMO bananas you sometimes need more)
• 1 generous spoonful of peanut butter*
• 1 generous tablespoon of unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 tablespoon superfood powder (optional)**
• 1/2 cup hemp milk or other non-dairy milk (or, if dairy is not a concern for you, dairy milk works fine--my boyfriend is allergic to dairy so we use Pacifica hemp milk)

Process

• Put all the ingredients in a blender, put on the lid, and blend it on up.
• Taste test and adjust flavor and thickness as desired. You may want more or less cocoa powder or peanut butter, or for a thinner milkshake add more liquid (in this case, hemp milk or whatever milk you're using).
• Pour into a tall glass and enjoy (share only if you want to)!

I always wash my blender before I'm even allowed to sip my milkshake. That way it gets washed and reassembled quickly and easily (otherwise, it never happens until I need to make another milkshake).

*It's only sugar free if you use sugar free peanut butter--Trader Joes, Organics, and Nut'n Better all make peanut butter where the ingredients list consists of literally nothing but peanuts and salt, and it doesn't get better than that. Those three brands all taste the same to me, but I'm not sure if the TJ's PB is organic or not. The other two are definitely organic.

**I use a superfood blend from the good folks at Enchanted Cedar in Lorena, TX. It contains Arriba Criollo Cacao Powder, Macca, Lacuma, Mesquite, Cinnamon, & Vanilla, and is 100% raw and organic. It's great blended into milk (dairy or non-), chaga tea, or coffee, and I also like to slip it into my milkshakes to bring the nutritional value up an extra notch.

January: Abstain From Sweets

When I originally set my goal/resolution/project for January, it was simply to abstain from dessert-type things (e.g. cakes, cookies, ice cream, candy, hot cocoa, etc), and to refrain from adding sugar to things myself (e.g. sugar or honey to coffee or tea, honey on cheese, etc.). When January arrived, I was actually much more strict than that--I didn't eat anything that had any added sugar at all. I had bought some non-fat vanilla yogurt from Trader Joe's because I was on antibiotics, but when I noticed it had sugar in the ingredients list, I let it go bad. After two days of nearly starving myself on this madness*, I reconsidered.

*Allow me to clarify: NO added sugar is a great thing to try, but because I was staying with my parents for a while (i.e. I was NOT in charge of grocery decisions), and because my work requires me to do a good deal of restaurant dining, it did not work out for me to be quite that strict this month. I wasn't going to starve myself at my mom's house just because much of her otherwise healthy food had something like 1 gram of sugar per serving, and I'm not going to interrogate waiters for hours trying to figure out exactly what I'm allowed to order, because I don't have a deathly allergy or a medical or dietary restriction.

I've pretty much stuck with my original plan, although I did have a mixed drink that I later realized probably had a good amount of simple syrup in it, and I did order a few pancakes sans-syrup that they put the syrup on anyway, but I figured I already paid for it, I was hungry, I did my best to get them without syrup, I might as well eat them rather than throw them away. I also had a teaspoon of honey the other night to fight off a cough and sore throat I was dealing with, but I had allowed for that use when I originally wrote the rules of my challenge.

Here on day 13 it's pretty easy to avoid temptation. I remember the first three or four days were awful--I had one constant, dull headache for at least 3 days straight, and for the most part I would just not eat. Both my parents' houses were in Holiday mode (especially Mom's), so they were full of homemade cakes, pies, tarts, cookies, and candies, and frankly not much else ready-to-eat (even the cereal selection was FULL of added sugar), and my low blood sugar made me super tired so I never felt like preparing anything. This meant that I pretty much skipped breakfast and lunch for the first two or three days--not something I would recommend or repeat. If you're thinking of severely cutting down on the sugar in your life, I recommend you go pre-purchase some ready-made, no-sugar-added food beforehand, enough to last you two or three days (think prepared salads, etc.), because if you're anything like me you will NOT want to cook anything, and you probably won't want to drive anywhere either. Good luck if you want to start this on a workday.

Around the middle of day 4, my headache just went away and never came back. I wasn't so tired anymore, and making gyoza for lunch sounded doable, so I did. I still would occasionally open a box of See's Chocolates and just smell it, so I will say it's easier now that I'm home at my apartment, largely removed from temptation.

I've also been juicing a bunch, since it's a way for me to get sugar from fruit and a whole bunch of nutrients from fruits and vegetables at the same time. I'm making a sweetener-free dessert today, too, since my bananas finally ripened. Expect a few recipe posts from me soon.

All the best,
Lovely Wednesday

The Minimalist Game (part 10)

105/496

That's the number of things we've listed on here as things we got rid of, out of our total goal for number of things to get rid of in the Minimalist Game. This leaves us 391 things to go, which is roughly 80% of our total goal. Crazy that half the month only came out to about 20% of our item goal.

I have a few lists of things we already got rid of and didn't blog about, so I'll start with those things:

1. 17 more neckties
2. 5 orphan socks
3. a fitted sheet, two regular sheets, and two pillowcases (none match)

That's already 27 more items, so we're at 132/496.

1. two hairbows
2. old digital watch
3. two lighters (one has the White House on it)
4. mystery key
5. empty Hearos (musician's earplugs) box
6. unused smoke bomb
7. frayed velvet microphone bag
8. rainbow striped headband
9. broken suitcase (protects luggage just fine but won't stand up on its own)
10. unopened lipgloss sample (I gave it to a friend)

Now we're at 144/496.

1. We got rid of our rice cooker because Boyfriend got a new and awesome saucepan for Christmas. Granted, they take up about the same amount of space, but the saucepan can hang from our ceiling, where there is lots of space, and the rice cooker had to sit on the counter, taking up rare and valuable counter space. Plus, I don't know why he wanted that godforsaken rice cooker in the first place when you can make better rice in a pan anyway, even if your second-hand rice cooker isn't broken and actually came with instructions, or wasn't so old that you couldn't even look up the instructions online.

145/496, but if you ask me that rice cooker should have counted as at least 2 items. Now I've got to go find the other list, which I wrote on the back of an envelope and hopefully didn't throw away with the suitcase. 

I remember that I gave away 50 tea lights and a glass vase, which would bring us to 196/496. It may be a while before that update, because I just went looking for the list (albeit without my glasses) and I have no idea where it is.

Happy New Year,

Lovely Wednesday

2015 Goals (part 2)

In the last post, I went into detail on my monthly projects, such as November's Gratitude Journal, December's Minimalist Game, and this coming January's No Sweets Policy. In this post, I want to talk about the Goodreads' annual reading challenge, and some crafty projects and general progress goals I have for myself.


Reading Challenge
For the 2014 Reading Challenge, I set a goal to read 50 books. When 2014 ends, I will have read about 40 books. I won't quite have met my goal, but I'll still have read twice as many books for fun as I did during high school and college put together. The ones that stand out in my memory and which I would definitely recommend are Pagan Visions for a Sustainable Future, Covencraft, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Good Omens, Uglies, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

For the 2015 Reading Challenge, I think I am going to make my goal 50 books again. It's about a book a week, and I really should be able to do it, but I won't be upset if I don't make it to 50 as long as I put out a good effort towards reading consistently. I've done some thinking about some books I want to read as part of the 50, so here's a nifty bullet list:

• I want to re-read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Series.
• I definitely want to finish Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at the Harry Potter read-alouds, and if we can I really want to do Goblet of Fire as well.
• I at least want to give The Satanic Verses my best shot. It's huge and dense and very different from Haroun, but I loved Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life both so much that I really want to read the book that made Salman Rushdie have to hide from his government. Plus, I already bought it.
• I want to read some Terry Pratchett. I really enjoyed Good Omens (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman) this year, and read it in a FLASH. If the rest of Pratchett's stuff is anything like that, I'll love it. I'll probably read some Discworld. Also I think he's written some stuff about witches that I'd really like to read. That may or may not actually be part of the nigh-infinite Discworld series.
• I want to read The Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman, and at least one Neil Gaiman novel. I loved Anansi Boys, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, but I never finished Neverwhere or American Gods (didn't get very far in that one, even) back in high school, and I never even started Stardust. That's three big problems right there, and I know I can solve at least one of them this year.

I'm noticing a strange pattern: 2014 was definitely over 50% non-fiction for me (largely metaphysical), but everything I've written as a goal for 2015 has been a novel (or graphic novel).

There's two more:

• This one's kind of iffy and I don't know if I mean it, but I kind of want to read the Game of Thrones series or whatever it's called. What that means is that I want to have read it, but I know what reading it is and what I would be getting into, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of committment given that I already definitely want to read The Satanic Verses and re-read LotR.
• And let's throw one non-fiction in there to retain my sanity: I've got two Stephen Hawking books and I haven't read either one, so I'll try to read either The Universe In A Nutshell or The Grand Design. I'm leaning towards the latter.

As far as Crafty Stuff goes, here are some goals.

Abstract things to achieve:

• Sell my wares at a market regularly.
• Give Etsy a serious shot.
• Repair my woodburner and do more woodburning
• Get my craft room up and running
• Teach Minimalist Girl to sew
• Do more crafting than Pinteresting

Things to make:

• Finish Britt's cloak
• Finish my already-cut-out teal-blue linen Renaissance overdress
• Make something to wear under it
• Make a Spirit Quilt (I'll probably do a series of posts about my Spirit Quilt, as it will be my first quilt and a big project). This involves quilting, applique, embroidery, beading, and a lot of patience.
• Quilted leaf potholder
• Make a woven seed bead bracelet in a pattern of my own design (I'm about halfway done with my first one, actually, but it's got a lot of mistakes)
• Anything (seriously, anything) out of all the fabric I have accumulated. I keep saying I need skirts--well, there are at least three different fabrics that I bought for the express purpose of making skirts. Make some skirts, goddammit.

And I know I already talked in-depth about my monthly projects for 2015, but here are a few more thoughts, general goals and stuff:

• By the end of the year, have developed healthy habits for cooking, eating, exercising, and socializing (be less lazy and more accountable, cook more, eat better, exercise more often and get better at it, and don't be so gosh darn afraid to go out and do things and meet people)
• Keep a clean, organized, and largely clutter-free home (hopefully a large part of this will come naturally out of having played The Minimalist Game)
• Actually make enough money to contribute a full half of the rent
• Build skills
• I'm kind of thinking about doing weekly projects as well. For example, my monthly project for January is no sweets/sugary things; I may also have a week in January where I'm not allowed to use any prepared food from Trader Joe's or anywhere else and I have to cook everything from scratch, including packed lunches (I thought about that for a month, but with our schedule it is NOT realistic at this time). I might have a week where every day I have to practice a certain aria, or a week where I have to finish a Quilt block every day, or read a short story every day, or write a song every day. I like the idea of these shorter weekly projects for things like skill-building and creative productivity. Expect to see a January post soon

I think that's all for now (I know it was quite a lot).

Good night and Happy Almost New Year,

Lovely Wednesday