The other night we celebrated dh’s birthday. Oh my, the food was heavenly. I fixed the Trim Healthy Mama Smarty Pants Stroganoff, which is on p. 44 of the THM Cookbook. So good!!!! I ate it on top of sliced sauteed cabbage and the rest of the family ate theirs with plain old pasta. I felt exquisitely nourished from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head when I had my first bite. Then even more so as I continued to eat it. I felt I was dining so luxuriously! My hubby liked it too, I could tell by the adoring looks he was giving me from across the dinner table. For dessert, he had requested mint chocolate chip ice cream to use up the leftover Thin Mints he bought from the Girl Scouts last month. He always has a soft heart for buying Girl Scout cookies. I would rather save the money and make my own cookies, especially since I usually almost always want to avoid white sugar, refined grains, and hydrogenated oils.

Anyway, I combined two recipes to come up with what is pictured above: The recipe from the Trim Healthy Mama cookbook, called  Creamy Indulgent Ice Cream,  p. 346, and Mommypotamus’ Mint Chocolate Chip recipe here. The ice cream that came from my spur-of-the moment combo of the two recipes was so delicious. I did relax my purist standards and ate a generous serving. It tasted like a bite of spring, zippy and creamy and satisfying in every bite! You can’t see the Thin Mint crumbles, but they are in there! Next time I will stir them in by hand so they don’t get pulverized by the stirring of the ice cream maker.

So here is my recipe for Healthful Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream:

1 qt cream (or do coconut milk if you want to be dairy free)

6 egg yolks

1 qt water, or 1 qt milk (use water if you want more icy, or milk or cream if you want more creamy)

1 c sucanat or demara sugar, ground fine in a blender. This makes the brown color less brown so it doesn’t clash too much with the green look that you want. If you want this sugar free then use your favorite low glycemic sweetener to taste. You need quite a bit of sugar to mask the spinach leaves and avos (Shh, don’t tell the kids you are putting in spinach and avocados!)

2 tsp gelatin, bloomed or softened in 4 t cold water and then mixed with 4 t  hot water. Make sure this is fully dissolved/blended in. I didn’t and we had little chunks of undissolved gelatin in the ice cream, ugh. Maybe next time I will have to blend this mixture separately in a blender

4 small avocados

2 handfuls of spinach leaves

10 drops peppermint essential oil

Mix the avocado and the spinach in with the cream in a blender. Blend until the spinach leaves are as fine as you want and you have a pretty lime green color. If the green is not dark enough for you, add more spinach leaves until it is. Or you could add liquid chlorophyll, and if it’s mint flavor, then that’s a bonus, for you won’t have to add as much peppermint EO. Transfer to a stand mixer bowl and add all of the other ingredients. Mix until well blended. Taste and adjust to your preference. Pour into your ice cream maker. Any that’s leftover just pour into a plastic container and freeze. Follow the ice cream maker’s directions. Towards the end of stirring the ice cream in the ice cream maker, add crushed up Thin Mints or your favorite sugar-free chocolate, like the THM skinny chocolate or Wellness Mama’s chocolate here. Or stir in by hand if you think they will be pulverized. Enjoy!