My ice cream obsession

If you, like me, come from a long history of sugar addiction, you may be thinking that life without desert surely cannot be worthwhile. I love making and eating deserts - pre- and post-low carb living. When I made the choice to remove sugar from my life I thought it was going to be really, really hard, but soon after embarking on this route, I realized that cheesecake and ice cream recipes need no flour and surely sugar is not the thing that makes it fabulous. I longingly thought about those wonderful rainbow cheesecakes I used to bake. Super rich, but not that sweet!

 

The challenge I've put myself for December 2014: To convert the NOT-LOW CARB rainbow cheesecake recipe in these pictures to a LCHF friendly recipe. Watch this space. The crust is easy, to fix, one can just use nuts or a nut flour and butter, sorted. The batter itself is virtually ready for use, it's just deciding how much Xylitol or Stevia one would need. I find that I reduce the "sugar" requirement for all my normal recipes significantly because my taste-buds just don't like sweet stuff that much anymore. When a recipe requires 1 cup of sugar replacement (i.e. Xylitol) - I tend to use 1/3 or less. Especially in ice cream and cheesecakes, I find the sweetness spoils the taste for me. I cannot for example enjoy even the 85% Lindt Dark Chocolate anymore - way to sweet. For me, the 90% is a sweet treat.

The need for sweet stuff dramatically and unexpectedly vanished within the first month of eating like this. Where I used to crave sugary stuff all the time, I suddenly just didn't miss it. And I know, telling you about it won't make you believe it, but it still surprise the hell out of me. I know most addicts fear "going cold turkey", but it worked for me. After 6 months, I don't even like the taste of most sweet things, I find it too sweet and not palatable at all. My sweet tooth is still there and requires management from time to time, but in a different form. I still enjoy a decadent desert every so often. Nothing nicer on a Sunday after lunch to serve, strawberries smothered in whipped cream. I eat fruit as a rare treat. I really had to cut back on the carbs to get my sugar levels stable. I hover between 30 to 50 grams a day and if I want to really buckle down to I should get it down to 20 grams. This may not be true for everybody and really depends on your sensitivity to carbs. Some people can get away with 100 grams or even 150 grams a day! This means some people could eat 1-2 fruit a day and enjoy sweat potato as a nice treat - makes excellent chips, but this is not me. Remember - very sensitive to carbs and no thyroid etc. etc. In order to reduce my carbs below 30 grams a day, I find I have to track my food intake quite carefully. I get my carbs from veggies mostly, but of course some foods like milk, cheese, yoghurt have "hidden" carbs as well. It is also easy to accidentally top up with protein instead of with fat. I also mentioned before, that even though I believe Banting or Low Carb living is right for me, it does not fix one's eating disorders . I have, gotten better at listening to my body. Not just eating a meal, because it is time to eat, this is such a golden rule, but tougher to learn than you think. Especially for me, who lived on 2 hourly snacks (low fat yoghurts, fruit, Provitas) for the past 20 years, just to be able to function properly. Plus i really just like eating.

So for today I thought I'd share a quick and easy ice cream recipe I've "cobbled" together. Ice cream is really hard to mess up, and how you tackle it depends on what your aim is. I have made ice cream that really rivals the best Italian ice cream I've ever eaten. But sometimes you just feel like a quick desert to serve as a treat. I love my ice cream maker dearly, almost as much as My Precious (my Nespresso's nickname). To start, I am opting for an easy one, the more complex, but rich inventions to follow. If you don't own an ice cream maker, don't fret, just put it in the cold box :-) it will be great too.

Isabel's Coconut Milk Strawberry Ice Cream (LCHF)

1 can of coconut milk (I used the Woolworths one, nice quality)
1 packet of Simply Delish  Strawberry Jelly (I feel really guilty about this because normally I make the flavouring from strawberries I cooked into a jam with lemon juice and a spoon of Xylitol, but the idea of this recipe is to show how easy a low carb recipe can be invented)
250-300ml pouring cream (this is to adjust the sweetness, the coconut milk is also quite strongly flavoured and requires some getting used to if you are not familiar with the taste in deserts, I added cream until the sweetness didn't bother me too much)

I mixed in the jelly with the coconut milk, whipped it until frothy and then added in the cream and continued to mix it until frothy. The mixture went into my ice cream maker and 12 minutes later I had soft-serve ice cream that blows my taste buds out of the water. I could eat just that for the rest of the day :-) I estimate about 6-8 servings.

Enjoy!