 |
| Strawberry pastel prettiness |
Well, actually, our first attempt - ice cream - is only sorta-yeaa. It looked much better than it tasted, I'm told. I think the biggest problem was that we didn't have enough strawberries for this one, and we were trying to keep the sweetener low. The taste reflected that and came off tasting pale. Just a hint of strawberry and that was about it.
Frozen Strawberry Rice-milk
1. We mixed room temperature rice milk with a little coconut oil in a blender (it had no previous oil mixed in with it). It's hot here already; we keep it 80-85 F in our house, so it's only 15-25 degrees colder than outside. As a result, our coconut oil is liquid. If it wasn't, we'd have had to heat the oil a little to keep it liquid and mix with the milk that way. The milk CAN'T be cold or the coconut oil with instantly turn into little balls of solid oil, like pieces of shortening, and it pretty nasty. Been there, done that, don't recommend it.
2. After the oil was blended well, we added washed strawberries with the tops cut off and blended that in, too. I believe we added a little agave syrup, too, as these strawberries weren't too sweet and we didn't have many. Popped it right into the ice cream maker as soon as the blending stopped
3. The quantities for this recipe need to be done to taste, really. Blend and taste, adjust amounts, blend again and taste. And then add more sweetener than you think you want.
Remember the mantra: anything cold will taste less sweet than it did when it was warm.
Inspired by:
A fondness for strawberry ice-cream.
What would make this better:
LOTS of things, LOL. Less coconut oil than we used, as that was a significant taste this time around. Lots of strawberries are a must. We used just a few and it wasn't enough. We also didn't make it sweet enough, and with the fewer strawberries, that really made the flavor fall flat. I think something sweet and, if the berries are very sweet, maybe even something to add a little tart overtone to the sweetness would be nice, too. Maybe little pieces of chopped strawberry would be nice, added just before it's put in the ice-cream maker.
Allergen note:
For this to be free of many preservatives, corn, and sulfites, you need to make sure and make the rice milk yourself out of brown rice rather than purchasing it, or any nut milks.
The next one we tried was using cantaloupe.
Cantaloupe-Rice-milk smoothies
1-2 cups frozen cantaloupe chunks
1/2-1 1/2 cups rice milk
1/2-1 orange, peeled and broken into pieces
a tsp or two of vanilla (we used homemade vanilla that is vanilla and potato vodka based)
sweetener (optional)
Directions:
1. We blended the cantaloupe and rice milk in the blender until just a little thicker than we want the end product to be, starting with just a little rice milk and adding more until we got the right thickness.
2. Then, we added the orange and blended until smooth. The orange will thin it out some, so again, you want it a little TOO thick before adding orange.
3. You'll have a residual pulpiness from the orange in this smoothie. If you don't like that, I'd go a different route. I'd take regular cantaloupe and rice milk and orange, blend it all together, strain it, and then use an ice cream maker instead.
4. This smoothie was quite sweet. Even frozen, we didn't have to add any sweetener to get a nice sweetness out of it, so I really enjoyed this one. The orange we used was a little old. I think a sweeter, newer one would have been a bit nicer.
Inspired by:
Long, long ago, I remember making cantaloupe smoothies when I was pregnant, from The Pregnancy Cookbook. I remembered that they used cantaloupe, looked it up again and was reminded of the vanilla, and that's about all I could use out of it, LOL. But this turned out quite nice, honestly.
Allergen note:
For this to be free of many preservatives, corn, and sulfites, you need to make sure and make the rice milk yourself from brown rice rather than purchasing it, or any nut milks.
No comments:
Post a Comment