My Mission to Accept Yogurt into my Life: Shakeology Pudding / Frosting

Shakeology Pudding / Frosting

This post should have been made several weeks ago, but I just never got a picture of it. When I started the 21 Day Fix, I had to rethink how I made my Shakeology. I really don't like Shakeology with water so that was just not going to happen. I didn't want to use a bunch of fruit and drink too many of my containers so I decided to throw some Shakology into some yogurt that wasn't runny. I used a red container's worth of my homemade yogurt and mixed in a scoop of Shakeology. Now this isn't easy to mix in. I had to use a rubber spatula and really work it in. The result was amazing. It was like pudding! I thought I had found a miracle. I was so excited about it. I couldn't wait to make a post about it. That was like a month ago. Ooopsy. 

I thought it couldn't get any better than that, but I was wrong. I took some of my homemade Greek yogurt and mixed in the Shakeology and the consistency was more like frosting. It was amazing. I ate it out of the jar with my rubber spatula. It made me feel like I was totally cheating on my diet. It was my morning pick me up. I looked forward to it! I'm still eating it for breakfast and still using my rubber spatula to eat it. It reminds me of being a kid and sneaking some frosting out of the fridge or making it with my mum and getting to lick the spatula after the cake was frosted. LOVE LOVE LOVE this stuff. 

I thought I had invented something. I was so stoked about sharing it with the world. Until one day, I was reading Facebook and saw a post about protein pudding! Apparently I did not invent this little thing. Oh well! 

My homemade yogurt is pretty thick before I strain it. It's more like the consistency of store bought Greek yogurt. If you're using store bought yogurt, I would use Greek and you'll end up getting pudding consistency. If you want frosting, you might try straining store bought Greek yogurt to see if you can thicken it up a bit. 

My Mission to Accept Yogurt into My Life - Raspberry Yogurt Parfait

I've been on a mission to life yogurt. It's been a year or so in the making. I've actually found some ways to incorporate yogurt into my life. While doing the 21 Day Fix, I decided that I also wanted to get oatmeal into my life. What better way to do both than a yogurt and fruit parfait. I mixed a yellow container's worth of oatmeal with a red container's worth of homemade Greek yogurt. I layered frozen raspberries in it and put it in the fridge for the night. I had read some stuff on the Internet about doing something like this so I decided to try it. 

This was not a win for me. I barely managed to finish this. I'm not sure if I used too much oatmeal or what, but the texture of the oatmeal in the yogurt was just not something I liked I actually gave up on it twice, but I went back to finish it since I didn't want to waste it. I hate wasting food. I really want to like this, so I might try it again with less yogurt and maybe a different berry, but it will be awhile before I try it. I almost didn't post about this because it was really not my thing, but I really liked the picture. :)

My Mission to Accept Yogurt into My Life Part 7 - Chocolate Shakeology with Homemade Yogurt

Chocolate Shakeology with Homemade Yogurt

My hubby made me some homemade yogurt with our Cuisinart yogurt maker. It was intended to be used for my Frozen Yogurt, but I had more yogurt than I needed for my Froyo and I needed to use it up before it went bad, so I put some in my morning Shakeology. I used a full scoop of shakeology, 8 ounces of milk and about 1/3 cup of my yogurt. The yogurt was thin enough that I was able to mix it up in the shaker cup. 

Normally, I'm still hungry right after I drink my Shakelolgy, but not so much today. I ate breakfast simply because hubby cooked it and it was yummy, but I didn't need it. I wasn't hungry all morning. I ended up eating lunch pretty late in the day only because I knew I needed to eat. It wasn't because I was hungry. I think I'm going to keep putting the yogurt into my morning Shakeology. It will give me extra dairy, extra probiotics and extra protein. We used full fat milk for the yogurt and I used full fat milk, so the calorie count was a wee bit higher than I'm used to, but they say that dairy fat is good for you so we'll see how this goes. 

My Mission to Accept Yogurt into My Life Part 6 - Plum Frozen Yogurt

Plum Frozen Yogurt

Hubby bought some plums, but didn't eat them. I decided to steal them and make frozen yogurt. I had plenty of blueberries that I could have used, but I wanted to try the plums for some reason. I really have no idea why. It was a lot of work to peal them and cut the pits out of them. I can see why I didn't find any plum frozen yogurt recipes when I Googled it! It's a lot of work!

I mixed just about 3 cups of frozen plums with some Fage non-fat Green Yogurt. I used a 1/4 cup measuring cup, but I heaped it and then threw in another spoonful just for kicks. I also used a tablespoon of vanilla. All of that went into the food processor until it was all nice and blended up. I then dropped spoonfuls of the mix onto a frozen cookie sheet with wax paper on it. I've learned that using a frozen cookie sheet helps keep the shape of the drops. The cookie sheet went into the freezer for a few hours or maybe I even left it in there overnight. I can't remember now. 

For some reason, this batch never really got hard. They were a bit icier than previous batches, but they never got hard. I liked them, but they were different. Maybe it was too  much fruit and not enough yogurt. I'm not sure. These gave me major brain freeze and I could only eat a few at a time. What you see in the bowl was about one serving for me. They lasted all of last week plus the first two days of this week. I didn't eat them over the weekend. My previous batches have only survived one week and Friday's servings have been smaller. It might have been a bigger batch, but I know I ate less per serving due to the brain freeze. I'm not sure if I'll ever make these again. I don't regret making them. I even enjoyed them. I didn't enjoy peeling and pitting plums!

My Mission to Accept Yogurt into My Life Part 5 - Mango Frozen Yogurt

Mango Frozen Yogurt

I'm on this kick to like yogurt. I'm not a fan of the taste or the texture. I've always been able to handle frozen yogurt though, so I'm starting there. I started out with Peanut Butter Drops. I've also made Blueberry Drops and Grape Drops. This time, it was mango. I picked mango because my husband bought a mango that he hadn't eaten and I don't do fruit juices so I thought it would make a good froyo. I Googled it and found this recipe for Mango Frozen Yogurt without a Machine. I didn't follow the recipe exactly though. I skipped the honey. I figured that the mango was sweet enough that it didn't need the honey. I also made them in drops instead of a full bowl. I like to have bite sized pieces each night. I don't like scooping ice cream and I've heard that this stuff can get pretty hard. 

To make the drops, I put a cookie sheet with wax paper on it into the freezer several hours before I made the mix. Once it was pretty cold, I made the mix. I then quickly took a small spoon from the silverware drawer and dropped bite sized pieces on the cookie sheet. I then stuck that back into the freezer. A couple hours later, I pulled them off the cookie sheet and put them into a freezer safe bowl. Each night, I put a handful into a coffee cup and snacked on them while editing. 

The Verdict

These things were uber yummy! I'm not a fan of mango fresh, but in froyo, it's to die for! I thought about this stuff while I was at work! I snuck a couple pieces out of the freezer as soon as I came home. I munched on them while putting dinner together. After dinner, I munched on some more! They were just so good! This batch made enough to get me through the week by only eating a little bit each night. I could certainly consume the whole batch in one setting though!  We bought another mango today so I can make it again! I just need to cut it up and freeze them. Since I didn't do that part yet, I'm going to make blueberry again. I've got quite a few blueberries in the freezer.

My Mission to Accept Yogurt Into My Life Part 5 - Grape Frozen Yogurt Drops & Shaved Grape Frozen Yogurt

Grape Frozen Yogurt Drops

I'm on a mission to like yogurt. It's this weird obsession of mine. I've never liked yogurt, but frozen yogurt has been fine. I'm a texture girl and I just don't like creamy things like yogurt. I like pudding though. Sometimes I make no sense. Frozen yogurt and ice cream are good. Yogurt and sour cream out of the fridge not so good. I've been Googleing different things I can do at home with yogurt. I've done Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops, Blueberry Frozen Yogurt and Blueberry Frozen Yogurt Drops. 

My husband bought some grapes that he didn't eat. I ate them in my salad for just about as long as I could deal with them, but they started getting soft. I just don't like to eat soft grapes. Since I'm on this froyo kick, I figured I'd look for a grape frozen yogurt recipe. Keep in mind, I didn't think I'd actually find anything because grape just doesn't seem like a froyo flavor, but I found something! I also found a grape ice cream recipe. I didn't end up following any of the recipes though. I just wanted to see if anyone other than me had thought about grape froyo. The recipe I found sounded like a lot of work. It involved making the stuff in the blender and then putting it in the freezer. Every 30 minutes, I was supposed to get it out of the freezer and stir it up really well. That just sounded like a whole lot of work. 

I just tossed a cup of grapes and a cup of non-fat Greek yogurt into my blender and blended away. I then dropped spoonfuls of the mixture onto a cookie sheet with waxed paper on it. Then I tossed that into the freezer. The picture above is what came out of the freezer. The mixture melted pretty fast even though I got it into the freezer very quickly. When I opened the freezer, I was reminded of all of my high altitude baking failures. If you bake cookies at high altitude, you need to decrease the grease and increase the flour otherwise everything just spreads out. You get super thin cookies that are about four times the diameter that you were expecting. My yogurt drops did not hold their shape at all! There were spots where four of them sort of merged into one big blob. I was able to pick them up and break them up into smaller pieces.

The Results

As far as flavor goes, it was just okay. It wasn't very sweet. It was nothing near as good as the Blueberry Frozen Yogurt Drops. It may have been a step up from the Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops in the flavor department. I didn't really get a strong yogurt flavor from them, but I didn't get much of anything else either. The pieces ended up a bit too large and they were difficult to eat. I had to bite them into smaller pieces. Both the Peanut Butter and the Blueberry Frozen Yogurt Drops were much easier to eat just due to the size. I wasn't a fan of the texture of these. The grape skins were a bit gross for me. Overall, I wasn't impressed and I don't plan on making this concoction again. I still have a cup of frozen grapes to deal with though! 

I made these on Sunday. I ate them Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, I just didn't want any. I skipped froyo and had some peanut butter with Hershey's syrup on it. Oh the importance of finding a dessert that I like enough to keep me away from the peanut butter and Hershey's syrup. Okay so Friday (tonight) rolled around and I knew I needed to eat these things up. There was far too much for me to consume in one night in it's current form. I can handle about a Dixie cup of it, but I had way more than a single Dixie cup. So, what's a girl to do....

I had read somewhere that instead of doing the 30 minute mixing, you could just toss it in a food processor after it's been frozen for several hours and it would make it like soft serve again. I grabbed my mini Cuisinart food processor and went to town. It didn't make it creamy though. My mini only had a chop and grind settings. I ended up with shaved froze yogurt which oddly enough seemed more appetizing than creamy frozen yogurt. I'm not sure if you can really see it in the picture, but it really did resemble shaved ice. It melted in my mouth to a soft serve type of consistency. It wasn't half bad! It still had the skin issue, but it was certainly better than when it was in drop form. I polished off the rest of the bowl! Now to work on making mango froyo! Hubby bought a mango the weekend before last. He didn't eat it. I had him cut it up and we froze it so I could make froyo with it! We've also got a pineapple on it's way out. I might chop that up for some froyo. 

I recently decided that my 50 pound present to myself will be a frozen yogurt maker. I'll use the yogurt that we make in our yogurt maker. I'm at 42 pounds right now. I need to buckle down and lose these 8 pounds so I can make froyo easier! I even have the one I want picked out! I would really love the fully automated ones where you don't have to freeze the bowl, but I would have to get to 150 pounds before I spent that kind of money on a weight loss present. I'll stick with a more affordable one. It's the Cuisinart ICE 30-BC Indulgence 2 qt frozen yogurt, ice cream and sorbet maker. I just hope I can make smaller batches than 2 quarts! 

My Mission to Accept Yogurt into My Life Part 4 - Four Ingredient Blueberry Frozen Yogurt

Four Ingredient Blueberry Frozen Yogurt

If you've been following along, you'll know that I'm slightly obsessed with finding ways to eat yogurt. I want to like yogurt. Everyone on the planet says it's good for you. Well, maybe the paleo people don't think so. I don't think it's part of their thing, but everyone else. Hm, vegans might not think so either, but I think you can make non-dairy yogurt, so maybe they like it too. Anyway....yogurt = good. I can't stand the taste of yogurt and don't think buying the stuff that's all sugary and full of chemicals is good for me, so I'll pass on that crap. My mission is to take plain non-fat Greek yogurt and turn it into something edible. My first three attempts were all variations of Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt. The last batch was good even without the added sweetener, but I wanted something different. So I went to Google!

I found a site called Healthy Nibbles & Bites. There was a post with Four Ingredient Blueberry Frozen Yogurt. I have no idea why I thought this would be a good idea. I don't like blueberries and I don't like yogurt. Let's put them together and see what happens! 

I got the ingredients the weekend before last, but I didn't have time to deal with it that weekend or even this past weekend. On Monday, I ate up the last of my Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops. Which resulted in me having to make frozen yogurt on Tuesday. I try to avoid too much effort on work nights since I have editing to do and the blog, but I needed a dessert so I made it. 

I tossed my ingredients into my food processor and pulsed away. I didn't take pictures because I was racing the clock on this. I didn't want it to melt too much. The picture showed sort of a light purple, but mine was deep deep deep purple. It also didn't look like frozen yogurt. I used a spatula to scrape the stuff down and I tried some more pulsing. The consistency just didn't seem right so I threw in some more yogurt and tried again. I had to put a bit more in again before it looked like yogurt. It made far more than I anticipated. It also had a rather strong yogurt flavor in my opinion. I ate a small bowlful though because I had made it and I wasn't going to waste it. 

The rest of it went into a zipper bag with a star tip for cake decorating. I thought I would attempt to do the same creation as the peanut butter drops. I thought I could make cute little starts. I was so wrong about piping this stuff out. It was sooooooooooo cold! My hands were warm and they started to melt the stuff in the bag. I was getting some decent looking drops, but then I would get blobs of mush. I gave up caring what they looked like and just piped as fast as I could. It wasn't pretty. I tossed them into the freezer for a few hours and then peeled them off the wax paper. I didn't have high hopes for them, but they seemed edible. 

The next day I ate a Dixie cup full of them. Okay, no need to lie. I ate two Dixie cups full! They were just soooooooo yummy. I started craving these things! The sweetness from the blueberries is crazy good. Who would have thought that you could take two things that I don't like and turn them into something this yummy! With the Peanut Butter drops, I had to chew them and swallow them kinda fast otherwise the yogurt flavor would take over. With these, I put them on my tongue and just let them melt away. Keep in mind though.....the ratio of peanut butter to yogurt versus the blueberry to yogurt is pretty much flipped over. There wasn't much yogurt in my blueberry frozen yogurt. I bought 8 pounds of blueberries today so I can freeze them and make more of this stuff! I plan on doing a batch tomorrow to serve after dinner. The three of us should be able to polish off one recipe of this. I'll make another batch for drops, but I won't bother with the piping thing next time. I read another post once where they just spooned it onto the cookie sheet. I think I'll just do that. It doesn't need to be pretty. It just needs to be edible. 

 

My Mission to Accept Yogurt into My Life Part 3 - Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops Take 3

What I made and why

I really want to incorporate yogurt into my life, but I just hate the flavor. I'm on a mission to change that. I started making these Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops a few weeks ago. I've made them twice before. The first time, didn't go so well. I had to cover them in Hershey's syrup just to eat them, but the second time came out well. I didn't need to cover them in anything. Woot Woot. 

Last weekend, I set out to make another batch, but things didn't go so well. I couldn't find my start tip, and then I discovered that it had been thrown away. I tried to make it using a different tip, but the stuff was so thick that I had to squeeze harder to get it out of the bag. This caused too much pressure on the bag and it ruptured. So then I just tossed the whole mess and tried again the next day.

The next day was a success as far as mixing everything up and getting it onto the cookie sheet. However, as soon as I put them in the freezer I remembered that I had forgotten the Stevia! I wanted to work the Stevia out of them over time, but I hadn't anticipated it being so soon. I figured I would have to coat them in the Hershey's Syrup again.

The Verdict

They were actually edible even without the Stevia! I didn't eat any on Monday though since I just didn't feel like eating them. On Friday, I didn't have any because on Thursday, I had left them in the fridge instead of the freezer. Oopsy. Anyway.....I think I've successfully succeeded in step one of accepting yogurt into my life. My next plan was to try mixing frozen fruit with yogurt. I had a recipe for this, but now I can't find it. I'm not really sure how it disappeared, but I can't find it on my Facebook. 

My Mission to Accept Yogurt Into My Life Part 2 - Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops Take 2

What I made and why

I made Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops again. This time I used Stevia since it had a really strong yogurty flavor the last time I made Froze Yogurt Drops. These things are super simple to make. Everyone says yogurt is so healthy, so I'm trying really hard to like it. I don't want to mask it with sugar and chemicals though. I caved on the Stevia as a baby step.

Here are the ingredients  

Here are my tools other than the food processor that wouldn't fit in the picture. 

This is what it looked like after I blended it all up. It's a little annoying in my blender because I have to keep pushing the stuff down off the sides. 

I don't have piping bags, so I just cut a corner off of a zipper bag. You have to make sure you don't squeeze too hard though because you can get a hole in the bag. 

Here are my cute little stars before they went into the freezer. 

A nice little close up of them. 

The Verdict

These were much better than the first batch. I didn't have to put anything on them. I filled up a little 3 ounce Dixie cup and ate them while playing around on Facebook. I'm going to keep making these and maybe I'll eventually be able to eat yogurt without freezing it first! 

My Mission to Accept Yogurt Into My Life Part 1 Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops

What I made and why

I'm on a mission to like yogurt, but it can't be dessert yogurt that's loaded with chemicals and sugar. This is becoming quite the challenge since I can't stand the taste of yogurt. I've tried and tried to like yogurt, but it hasn't happened in the past. This week, I put some new effort into the mission. I can deal with frozen yogurt, sooooooooooo I searched high and low to find recipes with yogurt that I could freeze! I found this recipe for Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Drops. It's got peanut butter in it so really how can it go wrong?

The Process

So the first part of the process was to find yogurt that didn't have any crap in it. I wanted just yogurt! The only ingredient should be............cultured low fat milk! I managed to find two. However, they were GIANT containers. It's really annoying that you can't get a small thing of straight up yogurt without crap in it. I needed 3/4 of a cup, but I ended up getting like 6 cups (it might have been even more) 

Okay, so I mixed up everything in my food processor. I skipped the Stevia though since I don't like sweeteners since they make me hungry. He said it tasted great and didn't need sweetener. I put it in my "piping bag" (translation - a sandwich sized zipper bag with a corner cut off and a start tip crammed into the corner) I then set out to making my little stars. I didn't make them very uniform, but I've never been very good at cake decorating. My mother would be so disappointed in my work. She used to make wedding cakes for people when I was a kid. Okay, so after they were all on there, I stuck my cookie sheet in the freezer for several hours. 

I was so excited to pull them out of the freezer to pull them off the wax paper and put them into a Rubermaid container for the freezer. And then.............I ate one. It was not pretty. I stuck that sucker on my tongue and initially thought that it was great, but then it melted. The yogurt flavor took over my mouth! I wanted to cry! I wanted to love these things. I wanted to use them to replace my after dinner snack. I'm doing this whole baby stepping my way to eating healthier and my current mission is my after dinner snacking. I've gone through a Browne Brittle phase, but we're out. I went through a peanut butter with Hershey's syrup phase as well. I do pretty well with my eating if I have a plan, but if I don't have an after dinner dessert plan, things go badly. After dinner dessert is like the end of the night. Once the dessert is done, I'm done. If I don't have an after dinner dessert, nothing tells my brain that I'm done and I get all crazy with the snack cravings! Like tonight, I really want to go eat the corn chips that are in the kitchen. I tried one more that first night, but it didn't go any better. The yogurt flavor was just over powering! I couldn't taste the peanut butter at all.

So the next night, I tried again. It wasn't any better. I tried to sprinkle them with some sugar just so I could choke them down because I didn't want to waste all of that yogurt. The sugar didn't really help. I forced myself to eat them, but while I sucked on them, all the sugar flavor went away quickly and I was left with the nasty yogurt flavor on my tongue! 

Okay, now it's Tuesday night. I'm determined to eat these things! I look around the kitchen to figure out what to do with these things so I can choke them down. I grabbed some Hershey's syrup and the yogurt drops. I put some in a coffee mug and squirted some syrup on them. I mixed them up while thinking to myself, "This defeats the whole purpose of these things, but I just need to get them down!" I ate them slowly while I was playing around on the computer. The syrup didn't help. I let them sit on my tongue to melt and the syrup flavor went away and left me with nasty yogurt flavor again! I ate them very slowly after that. At some point, I decided to try chewing them instead, and they were less gross! 

The next night, I tried again with the Hershye's syrup. I then let the cup sit out for a little bit so they got a little softer. They weren't melted, but they were softer. I could chew them without if feeling like I was chewing ice. They were less gross than the night before! 

So, the following night I did it again and they were less gross again! They weren't yummy that's for sure, but they were definitely less gross than the day before which was less gross than the day before that which was less gross than the day before that.

Now we're on Friday, but I don't have any yogurt drops left. I'm afraid that if I don't eat any tonight, all of my progress with be wasted! I'll go back to thinking they are the grossest things on the face of the planet! I should have made more when I first got home, but I had editing to do. I fond another recipe for yogurt drops and it has chocolate in it! Oooooooooooooooooooh that one sounds like a good idea! However, it also has banana in it and I"m not a banana fan! Oh the woes of a girl who just can't stand yogurt! Stay tuned for future episodes of My Mission to Accept Yogut Into My Life.