Keeping my cool!

Wow! What a change there has been in the weather! Rain, rain, rain, rain and more rain, then HOT! Now if you're one of those who loves to lie in the sun and catch yourself a tan, you may not be complaining, but me, I'm not so keen to damage my skin these days and I really don't like getting hot and sticky and HOT and sticky we have been! 

In our (current) humble abode, the sun come in one side in the morning, moves around the neighbour's side during midday and comes back in the other side in the evening. So we heat up all morning and get even hotter in the afternoon. Risks of pollen and flies stop me opening the windows too much. Usually, I stick a fan on, to try and create some cooling breeze.

Yesterday, the temperature went up to at least thirty degrees in here - too much for The Hub. Used to his air-conditioned office at work, he soon switched the air con on, now why didn't I think of that? Well I had, but it needed a bit of brute force and fiddling to get it set up, so...

I must admit, I would have liked to have been sat in the shade, in a garden, with my feet dangling into a paddling pool, whilst Baby splashed about. However, not having a garden and paddling pool to hand, I have been thinking up my own ways of keeping cool - some more successful than others!

Inspired by Dietitian UK, who was challenging her followers on Twitter to have fruit with their breakfast, I started with this:

A lovely little bowl of fruit for breakfast, to which (as it was already high twenties, by the time I got 'round to breakfast) I was going to add my little tub of dairy free and soya free yoghurt, which I had stuck in the freezer the day before. 

It was the first time I had tried this little trick - inspired by a recent shopping trip, during which I noticed a stall selling frozen yoghurt. However, the yoghurt now looked like this:

It was frozen solid!! Oops! Even after five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, it was still quite solid! So I gave up, ate the fruit, and gradually chipped away at the frozen yoghurt with a spoon. Then I ate some toast - by now, my stomach needed some carbs!

'Hmm!' I thought to myself, 'maybe it just needed a few hours in the freezer, not twenty four!'


By this point, I was wishing I'd stuck some banana in the freezer too. It was a suggestion I'd come across on Mumsnet. One mum freezes bananas and mashes them with a little dairy free milk, to make her own 'ice cream'. It does sound good. 'How long does she stick them in the freezer for,' I wonder.


Fortunately, I did have something in the freezer that was just right.

And this, (adopting a French accent here) was my Piece de resistance:

It's what I'd like to call it a cornetto. The Hub had one the other day, which inspired this creation. So simple to make:

1. Take one gluten free, and dairy free ice cream cone (mine's Eskal, Barkat will do).

2. Add a couple of scoops of dairy free ice cream (Bessant and Drury's from Tesco, in this instance).

3. Place some pistachios in a small plastic bag. Bash them up, with the end of a rolling pin. Sprinkle the crushed pistachios over your ice cream.

4. Hey presto, one home made cornetto!

Yummy!

Baby's version obviously omitted the nuts, although, I did plaster the top of hers with Moo Free dairy free chocolate buttons (available in Waitrose and Holland & Barratt or, if you prefer to shop online, at Love Lactose Free Life)! Moo Free are ideal for this kind of thing, as they're much smaller than other chocolate buttons. Must remember to do that with mine next time!

I'd like to add, that I could of course have made it more authentic by adding some vanilla dairy free ice cream as well and dribbling some ice cream sauce on the top (some seem to be dairy free) but as these thoughts only came to me later, they missed the photo -op! ;)

So what about you, how have you been keeping your cool?

Related posts:

Wot no dairy! Wot no soya! 

Ice - a - cream - oh!

Bessant and Drury's Dairy Free Ice Cream

Ice, Ice Baby