Being lactose intolerant, finding the work around for dairy has become a part-time job. Thankfully, there are companies like Earth Balance, Whole Soy Co., So Delicious, Daiya, and many others, that have created great products that taste pretty damn close to the real thing. In most cases, you can’t tell it’s not dairy. That makes living dairy free a lot easier and not quite so limiting as when I first figured out that it was dairy making me sick.
One of the things that I love making now that I can is a fruit smoothie. I take two 6 oz vanilla (or one of the berry flavors), about 1.5-2 cups of frozen mixed berries, and about .5 cup frozen mango chunks, and blend them together with some honey to taste. When I started doing these, I realized that my parent’s 15+ year old blender wasn’t cutting it–figuratively and literally, I was getting huge chunks, no blending, and there was a burning smell whenever I used the blender. So we bought a new one. Again, I started having problems. With this one, the blades had a hard time thoroughly mixing my ingredients and pureeing all of the fruit. In fact, it would blend the bottom section, but a full 1 inch layer sat on top of it, immobile. So I took to sticking in a rubber spatula (mostly carefully, we do have a rather mangled and misshapen spatula now that I’m told I will be taking with me when I move out) and gently guiding the rest of the mix into stream. Finally, the last time I made a smoothie, I got so fed up I vowed the next time I wanted one I was going to try using the food processor.
Well, this time I used the processor and it was beautiful. And delicious. And way more than I expected! Oh well. In this case, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing. Spread out over a couple of days, it’s filled in the time between my trips to Whole Foods to stock up on yogurt.
Rebecca's Kitchen Escapades 