homemade 'ice cream'

Why did I put 'ice cream'? Well, simple. It's not really ice cream. My 2 year old thinks it is, though! I originally found this on Pinterest with the title 'single ingredient ice cream'. Single ingredient? Now, I remember making ice cream in school when I was in like 3rd grade. We definitely used more than one ingredient, so this made me want to find out what magic was the cause of this single ingredient ice cream. One word: bananas. Seriously. You can make 'ice cream' from bananas. I owe a ton of thanks to the writer over at Use Real Butter for posting this for me to stumble on. Although, my 'ice cream' was not a single ingredient, since we wanted more than just the banana flavor. Here's how you do it.

Ingredients:

4 bananas, slightly over ripe (some brown spots)

and then if you want flavor, I used:

2 tablespoons of peanut butter

2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

Slice your bananas into about 1/4" thick pieces. Put them in a bowl (or on a plate and cover) and freeze. It'll take at least an hour, depending on which you use. If you put them in a bowl, it will take longer since they are stacked on each other. You need them nice and frozen. Do not freeze an entire banana or you will have trouble cutting it up. Once the bananas are frozen, plop those suckers in a food processor (or a blender if you are me). Use the pulse setting. It will first look like tiny bits of gravel, but keep pulsing. After a few minutes, it looks like soft serve ice cream. You can stop there if you love banana taste, or if you are like me and want some more flavor, add in the peanut butter and vanilla (or whatever other tasty ingredients you want to add) and pulse until it's well blended. There you have it. 'Ice cream'. It's really soft in this state, so you can always put it back into a bowl and put it in the freezer for a bit if you want a firmer 'ice cream'. Here is what mine looked like:

I ate some soft right out of the blender, but froze the rest. As you can see, scooping it out after frozen was a bit difficult. I'd let it sit out for a few minutes before attempting to scoop. :) I'm so glad I found this recipe. My favorite part is that I can try so many different variations by adding in other things like blueberries or cocoa powder and my kid will think he's getting this delicious treat, when it's actually good for him! Yay!