“Mint Nice Cream” was the recent Featured Recipe at the website drfuhrman.com (Check it out. His books are good too.) It blends frozen bananas, raw spinach, pitted dates, nut butter, a dash of almond milk, mint leaves, and a sprinkle of 100% dark chocolate chips. Uploading the recipe here seems forward and possibly unethical. But maybe it is ok to use this little slice of screen shot above, because it certainly looks more tempting than the fan version turned out by me.

When bananas on the countertop are fully ripe, I peel them and wrap in waxed paper and old bread bags, pressing out the air and sealing them up for the freezer. Then they’re ready to slice as needed. 

Spinach: For my third practice run with this recipe I hand-picked only the freshest driest leaves. The rest of the spinach was getting wilty and a little dark around the edges, so I cooked that up for tomorrow’s egg scramble. This bag of spinach was a very kind gift from the neighbor downstairs. A more practical less perishable substitute would be… maybe blending in celery juice pulp, or fennel greens, or baby kale, or jicama, or raw zucchini, or pureed sweet potato? Food for thought.

In the Vitamix I blended the spinach with just enough almond milk first, then added the pitted date pieces. Then in the Cuisinart, the hard-frozen banana slices spun around for a minute or so. They clumped up and had to be mashed with a fork. When they were well whipped and frosty, I dropped in some fresh peeled peach chunks, then a drizzle of coconut oil instead of the nut butter, then added the spinach mixture. (Our garden mint has a very strong taste, so I didn’t add any.)

Doesn’t it sound more sensible to put the spinach mixture in the Cuisinart first and swirl it around, then add frozen banana slices?

Yes it does. But in the Cuisinart the spinach mixture by itself (even with my hand pressed down firmly on the spout) went all over the kitchen wall and my hair. So just start by pureeing the bananas first.

I packaged up tonight’s batch and walked it outside to Dog Play Hour at the neighbors’ patio. Because it was too dark to actually see the dessert, two brave neighbors agreed to taste it. Angelina pronounced it “Totally edible. A kid would eat this!” I left her some for tomorrow, and she sent me home with some vegetarian enchiladas, a pretty good deal all round.

This dessert needs to be eaten as fresh-frozen as possible so the bananas don’t get melty. When frozen overnight, the texture is more scrap-y like an Italian ice than it is creamy. This opens the possibility of freezing in advance, then walking it over to the church freezer until fellowship time in the parish hall. The point after all is fellowshipping, not toting in equipment and making a racket and then washing spinach off the walls.

To me this is just as good as ice cream from the store, and no, you can’t taste the spinach. But even without the refined white sugar, this is still a whole hit of fructose. Next time I’ll omit the dates and chocolate chips and add healthy fat like avocado or nut butter.