Are you serious, its been over 3 months now since Michaela bought me the ice cream machine? Definitely one of my favorite presents ever. Most importantly, it makes me feel normal again in terms of one thing that was missing for the past two years, and that of course is “ICE CREAM”. Not a big mystery right…? Did anybody else stop eating Ice Cream sometime after getting the UC diagnosis?
Before I was diagnosed I ate dairy(and drank it) all the time. Now, I stay away from dairy almost completely (and it’s pretty clear that a bunch of you have started or have already been doing the same thing). I don’t eat nearly as much cheese as I used to, milk on it’s own is an absolute NO NO for me, it scares me almost as much as poison oak plants(if you’ve never had poison oak, it licks a big fatty, believe me). For any of the hard core SCD diet people, or even for the new beginners, please realize I don’t eat or make the SCD yogurt anymore. After making that for quite some time, I found out my system does much better without it. (You can read my SCD yogurt making post from last year: Making SCD Yogurt)
With the removal of so much dairy from my diet, of course I had to check ice cream off the list a few years ago as well(that’s when I started treating my disease with diet and getting off the meds). It was tough at the beginning, come on, I used to pound mint oreo cookie ice cream shakes at the Peninsula Creamery in downtown Palo Alto all day long.(Ben G, you had one of those lately?) I loved that stuff. I could put down a 1000 calorie milk shake in less than 5 minutes (sure my wife thought it was disgusting, but come on, mint oreo, don’t knock it until you try it). The best 5 bucks you could ever spend on a milk shake! But no more. All that dairy was ripping up my colon and making me bleed like a whale getting harpooned . You know what I’m talking about, the really nasty colitis symptoms were feeding off the milk shakes too. My symptoms would get all out of wack after one of those dairy filled meals. It was rough.
Let’s bump the timeline up to right now. It’s the final day of March, 2012, I’ve been diagnosed for 42 months with ulcerative colitis, and I’m starting to feel even more normal as the time moves forward. Can I really say it’s because of the ice cream machine Michaela got me in December? YOUR DAMN RIGHT I CAN!
So check this out. It’s Super Simple.
Coconut…….Milk…….Ice…….Cream
That’s all. Nothing too crazy(unless you want to add in some wild ingredients like I do sometimes)
I know what some of you are probably thinking:
- How good can coconut milk really taste?
- Sounds kinda weird – NON-DAIRY ICE CREAM…???
- I bet it’s expensive to make
- It’s just not going to be the same as regular ice cream
And some of you who might be a bit more interested might be thinking:
- I might try it, but I’d never make it
- Isn’t it gonna have a lot of fat in it?
- How much is it really going to cost me?
Let me put it to you all this way. If anybody reading this has some ideas on how we could get a crapload of coconut milk, an old ice cream factory(Alice from Ontario???) and some connections with local or national grocery stores, I’m pretty sure we could blow the ice cream industry out of the water. Ben and Jerry’s just might be crapping their pants more than us in a few years. That’s how good this stuff tastes.
Example: I’m dipping my spoon in the ice cream maker, eating the hell out of it, way before it’s done(EVERYTIME!)
As for the cost of this stuff, well, I just made about 4 cups(32 ounces, or 1000 mL for you milliliter folks) of ice cream as you see in the pictures here, and it came up to a big fat cost of less than $3. Here are some conversions into other currencies:
- less than 2.25 EURO —–that’s about half the cost of a coffee in Paris…right Frenchies???
- about 3.66 New Zealand dollars —-maybe the same as 8 kiwis?
- roughly 17 Norwegian Krones —probably equal to a few drops of beer in your country
- about 17 SLOVAK koruna —2-3 beers over there, well, not anymore but maybe 1 in a nasty herna bar
- 38 Mexican pesos – at least 3 fish tacos down in Baja, just not in expensive Cabo…
- 13 Argentine pesos — same as hotel room in General Alvear, cockroaches included, DONT ASK
- 2.99 Canadian Dollars — can you get anything with that up North anymore?
So you tell me, did I get ripped off by spending $3 USD for 1000mL of coconut ice cream today? Don’t get me wrong, 3 tacos down in Baja Mexico(as long as the drug cartels don’t wack me) sure sounds good right about now, as it’s raining pretty hard in Berkeley today.
So that’s my news. This coconut ice cream I bet will hit it big sometime, it’s still pretty under-cover with the mass populations, but it works super good into my colitis diet eating habits. And, I know others will like it too.
I have a full recipe of the Coconut Milk Ice Cream in the “Cooking For Ulcerative Colitis Cookbook” which is part of the Feeling Crappy to Feeling Happy Colitis Package,(available for download) but I wanted to make sure that everybody gets this recipe. It’s too yummy to hold in, simple as that.
Here’s my Special Coconut Milk Ice Cream Recipe:
- I put my ice cream machine on the counter.(real complicated right…)
- I get out my blender too, it’s usually already on the counter where it lives.
- I add two cans of coconut milk(400 mL each) to the blender (ingredients are coconut and water only)
- I add 1 super ripe banana to the blender
- I add three tablespoons of honey to the blender
- I add 2 tablespoons of peanut butter (ingredients are peanuts and salt only)
- Then I blend it all up for 40 seconds
- I turn on my ice cream
- Pour the blender’s contents into the ice cream mixer
- Let mix for 20 minutes
- BINGO! ICE CREAM PARTY TIME, just no dairy
- Put it in a container, take 2 minutes(any longer and there’s something wrong with you) to clean up
- Call up your friends and serve some COCONUT MILK ICE CREAM!
That’s My Cuisinart Ice Cream Machine
That’s me today, scooping out my fresh coco ice cream(and sneaking some tastes too)
that’s pretty much it, clean the mixer(red thing)
don’t pull the “but it’s gonna be hard to clean Adam” 2 seconds!
when the red mixer is clean again, put it back in the freezer for next time
(my finished product is the white stuff in-front of my wife’s Vodka Bottles…)
It’s that simple. And yes, if you don’t like peanut butter as much as me, or if you cannot tolerate peanuts, then don’t add them. There’s about 5000 other things you can include in the blender that will taste super good, that’s just limited by your imagination.(strawberries, blueberries, more banana, mint to name a few…)
OK, thanks for letting me get this off my chest. Now I’ve got to go fight Michaela for the rest of the Coco Cream.
-Adam Scheuer
–Side note
if I was in the middle of a flare up and dealing with active colitis symptoms, I’d put my ice cream intake on hold, it is much much easier to get past UC flares by eliminating all sugars, and all nuts(even coconuts) when active symptoms are present. Of course its different for everyone, all of us are unique, but by minimizing the sugars when times are rough has always helped me out a bunch
I started site shortly after being diagnosed in October of 2008 with severe pancolitis (when my whole colon was inflamed).
For me, it was a very rough start with severe symptoms. Getting bounced from medication to medication was not easy or too helpful. But, I did meet another UC’er, changes several parts of my diet, and of course the rest is history.
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