Persimmon Ice Cream. No Dairy, No Sugar, No Time. Fast Fast Fast!

    
   I've started to realize lately that there is a lot of unfinished business going on with me. For the last two plus years I've been involved to one extent or another with elder care, end of life care, along with our regular family business of work and living. Both of my parents shuffled off this mortal coil last year with a bare gap of nine months between them. Sometimes it seems as though nothing in the last two years really happened, and sometimes I feel as though it happened to someone else a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

    One of the reasons that I think this is coming up right now is the fact that what Alan and I have been involved with for the last several months has been cleaning up the family house and rehabbing it for sale. We've finally started the work we need to do and fortunately, most of what needs to be done is as I like to say, "cosmetic." Alan says it's more like "heavy make-up." The place hasn't been changed in 34 years.

   For the first few months I just couldn't face doing it. I couldn't look at those yards of kelly green carpets, the '80s plastic butcher block counter tops, the fact that one had to walk out the front door and completely around the house to get to the laundry room. How is there not a connecting door?! It turns out that my mom's friends asked her that all the time. But she liked it that way. Go figure. The place was a meat locker from the lack of dual paned windows, another thing that Fran blew off with regularity. Evidently she said she liked wearing a coat in the house. For me going there was painful and not just because I expected to find penguins living in the spare room. I just couldn't stand being in that empty house, seeing the last 34 years of my life just rolling by before my eyes like a bad episode of American Horror Story. It seemed way too overwhelming. I couldn't face the task of sorting through everything and making decisions.

   Of course I'd talked to friends, I'd heard stories of people taking years to sort out the family home after the death of parents. Some friends told me to act fast, the old "pull the Band-aid off the scab." Other friends told me to take it easy, and we'd find our way in time. Actually the thing that I began to realize was that by letting the house go, I was closing a big chapter in my life. I'm actually surprised it took me this long to realize it, but I was going to be closing the door on all we'd all been through for the last 3 years. Even though I wasn't going to be moving, I was going to be moving on, and that would be a good thing.
 
   So we sort of struck to the middle track, not moving too fast and not too slowly. We gradually started the process and before we knew it we found ourselves starring in our own HGTV special. Alan and I hadn't done a home rehab project since our house in LA 20 years ago. That little adventure took over 3 months and we stayed in the house while it was going on. There was so much plastic sheeting it was like living in a cross between Silence of the Lambs and Contagion. Two decades having passed since the last time we looked at counter tops. We realized we had a lot of catching up to do.

   First of all we aren't in LA anymore, so the task has been finding good help on new turf. But,we did our homework and it seemed like in the blink of an eye, we had carpenters on speed dial, found ourselves watching scary movies and staring at the closet doors and hinges rather than the guy with the butcher knife hiding behind them and  saying "where the hell did they get those drawer pulls!" In short we found ourselves in Rehab! Yes, yes, yes. Only we weren't having to live in this plastic sheeted mess. we just had to fix it, or find the right people to fix it. Luckily it appears we have and that is what's been consuming a great deal of our time. Of course in the middle of all this I managed to get that stinky, rotten flu that was going around, but we pushed forward and are on track today. House rehab as I'm learning is a marathon not a sprint.

   One of the things I've missed most during this process has been my regular cooking. I've managed to log a day here or there, but too often lunch has been grabbed outside and dinner is a steamed artichoke. Last week however we seemed to get over the hump and I've started cooking again. I haven't given any dinner parties but I have managed to make a few things that are quick and easy and nothing can be quicker or easier than this Persimmon Ice Cream, and yes, I'm calling it ice cream even though it contains no cream and only two ingredients. It doesn't get much faster.

Persimmon Ice Cream

Here's What You Need:
 2 very ripe Hachiya Persimmons (the large heart shaped ones)
1/4 cup coconut milk.

Here's What To Do:
Freeze 2 Hachiya persimmons until they are rock solid

I bought 4 super squishy soft Hachiya persimmons at our Friday Sonoma Organic Farmers Market. These little buggers were so, so soft that he actually had to put them into a box to keep them from exploding. I put the persimmons directly into the freezer the next day they were solid.

Take 2 large frozen persimmons and peel them.

When they've been peeled, chunk them up.

Place the chunks of persimmon into a food processor.

Add in about 1/4 cup of coconut milk. You can also add almond or rice milk if you wish. You can even add in buttermilk or cream, but then of course it wouldn't be vegan. But then again you might not require a vegan recipe, so there's that.

Turn on the food processor and swirl the persimmon coconut milk into "ice cream."

Scoop it out and serve it up.

There it is, simple and sweet and creamy, without any sugar or dairy, you have ice cream.  Serve it up immediately or shove it in the freezer to keep it chilled until you're ready to enjoy it. And boy we did! Two persimmons make enough ice cream for 4 people.  Coming up next, more fast recipes for a rehabby  mood. Follow along on Twitter @kathygori

Fast Vegan Ice Cream. Summer Is Coming!

 
   Summer is coming. Growing up in San Francisco's Sunset District, those words had a bit of a different image for me than for most people.

You see, Summer in The City is not hot fun, hot times or any other song lyrics. Summer In The City was standing on my green painted (beyond fake grass) concrete "lawn" in a parka with gloves, waving a sparkler and hoping the fog didn't make it fizz out. We didn't have cook outs we had cook ins (rimshot) yeah, I got a million of 'em. Summer in my neighborhood The Sunset District looked something like this.

Try watching fireworks in that.

   Of course when I moved to Los Angeles, I lived in Santa Monica blocks from the beach, so my  summers stayed pretty much the same.

   So you'd think spending summers in cities not known for blazing Summer weather would dull the appetite for ice cream. Not so. One of my fondest memories is taking an after dinner walk on chilly summer nights with my parents to Polly Ann Ice Cream on Noriega street about a 1/2 mile from our house. There wearing coats and jackets, sometimes a hat (I had delicate ears), the whole family would belly up to the bar and order ice cream cones.

   So did moving to a real, genuinely hot Summer town like Sonoma dim my enthusiasm for ice cream? Not hardly. Whipping up ice cream for family parties and friends gatherings is one of my favorite things to do. But not everyone can enjoy ice cream, even if they want to. My friend Anne is lactose intolerant, my friend Terri is gluten free and just found out she's also allergic to eggs (except not duck eggs, sorry Daffy) and had to cut out dairy. This started me on a search for ice cream that my ice cream loving friends who have had to "break up" with ice cream could enjoy.
  
   Let me say, there are a  whole lot of vegan ice cream recipes out there. I'm not kidding. It's nuts out there. I found out that a whole lot of those recipes involved a very pricy blender device that seems to be all the rage right now and which I am too much a of a tightwad to buy. I finally settled on a very simple one that I'd found on many sites. And you know what they say, a million vegans can't be wrong. So, if you just want to make some vegan ice cream with a simple ice cream machine and a cheap ass 20 buck blender, this is your recipe.

Chocolate Almond Milk Vegan Ice Cream

Here's What You Need:

2 Tbs of sugar
2 Tbs of unsweetened cocoa powder
1 and 1/2 cup of unsweetened almond milk
2 ripe bananas

Here's What To Do:

Mix 1/2 cup of almond milk together with the sugar and cocoa powder.

Pop it into the microwave for 30 seconds, then take it out and give it a good stir blending it together well.

Peel the bananas.

Break them up and put them into a blender along with the cocoa sugar mixture, and 1 cup of almond milk.

Blend it until it's smooth.

Pour the mixture into any ice cream machine and let it blend for about 25 minutes or until it's the desired thickness.
Serve it up.

   The ice cream has a nice deep chocolate banana flavor and really can do the trick for someone who wants their ice cream but either doesn't want, or can't have all the fat, and dairy. This makes about 4 guilt free servings.

   But be warned, this ice cream is best made and served directly. When stored in the freezer before serving it turns to icy stone. Truly. I found that out the hard way last Saturday night when I tried to serve it to friends. Good thing I had a back up dessert. This ice cream makes up so fast you can really just churn and burn and don't worry about left overs. There probably won't be any.
 
   Coming up next, a book review and what's on for Mothers Day? Follow along on Twitter @kathygori