Think Pink

I grew up drinking lots of Kool-Aid. Black cherry was my favorite, I seem to recall, when I was a kid, before soda got ridiculously cheap thanks to high fructose corn syrup and I moved on to guzzling lots of Dr. Pepper. However, often during the summer when I was in high school and largely responsible for acquiring the family's weekly groceries, I'd snag a few packets of regular and pink lemonade. I'll admit to being more partial to pink lemonade because it's sweeter, but when it comes to Kool-Aid lemonade, who the hell can really tell the difference? One is sugary yellow water that looks a bit too much like urine, and the other's sugary pink water.

And those Kool-Aid packets, Gentle Reader, were not the sugar-free stuff. No, I went for the full-on sugar hit represented by the Kool-Aid Man busting through a wall--and I always added just a bit more sugar (about an eighth of a cup more) than necessary.

To quote the Kool-Aid Man himself, Oh, yeaahh! I likes my teeth-rooting Kool-Aid lemonade extra sweet, Gentle Reader.

To my delight, I came across a lemonade frogurt recipe that seemed pretty simple, even if it did require me to buy half-and-half, a product for which I have no other use aside from specific and infrequently made recipes in a quantity that would require me to buy a larger carton. I showed the recipe to the husband, and he got quite anxious to try it.

Two months later, on a blessedly rainy Friday, I finally got around to making it.

Lemonade Frozen Yogurt32 oz. low-fat vanilla yogurt
12 oz. frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed
1 C half-and-half
1/4 C lemon juice
1/2 C sugar

1. In a bowl, whisk together the yogurt, lemonade concentrate, half-and-half, lemon juice and sugar until the sugar dissolves.
   
2. Cover the mixture and chill until cold (about 30 min.).
   
3. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream maker (1 1/2-qt. capacity) according to the manufacturer's instructions, until motor stops or the dasher is hard to turn. [What the hell is a dasher? -The Faudie]
   
4. Transfer the frozen yogurt to an airtight container and freeze until firm enough to scoop (about 2 hrs.).

Yield: About 1 1/2 quarts (serving size is 1/2 cup)

Nutritional Info
Calories: 190
Protein: 4.4 g
Fat: 3.3 g
Sat fat: 2.1 g
Carbs: 37 g
Fiber: 0.1 g
Sodium: 61 mg
Cholesterol: 11 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
Since I'm an admitted fan of pink lemonade, I bought Minute Maid pink lemonade concentrate. And since I'm The Faudie, I had to make a few other changes:

• I used fat-free vanilla yogurt.
  
• I used fat-free half-and-half.
  
• I used Clabber Girl sugar replacer.
  
• I used freshly squeezed lemon juice. Hey, I need to do some work for this recipe!

The whisked-together concoction in and of itself was damn tasty, Gentle Reader. I had half a mind to just...I don't know, not put it in the Queasy Art ice cream freezer I have because, well, said freezer isn't really much of an ice cream-making appliance. The bowl has to be frozen well in advance of use, and it spins around the churning blade. If you're using the device in a hot kitchen, your bowl isn't going to stay cold long, and you and your ice cream are screwed. There's nothing worse than being disappointed by ice cream.

But I'd had the bowl for my ice cream freezer in the deep freeze for two months, taking up valuable real estate, so by the FSM's great spaghetti bowl I was going to use the damn thing.

Unfortunately, my freezer's claim to make up to 1.5 quarts is greatly exaggerated. I poured in my chilled mixture well past the fill line, slurped down some of what remained, then poured the rest into the empty yogurt carton, which I stuck in the 'fridge for later consumption. But my slurping didn't end there, Gentle Reader. Damn but that sugary concoction was good! so of course I had to...remove some of the swirling, slowly freezing mixture as it churned around and around and around in a hypnotizing pink swirl.

Even Bucket found the pink swirl hypnotizing.

I wish I could tell you how long I let the ice cream freezer do it's thing, but the yogurt mixture never reached that point of solidity specified in the recipe. I knew going in that it wouldn't because my freezer just isn't capable of that feat. Perhaps I let the thing churn and swirl for 25 minutes, which was just about long enough for a good portion of the yogurt to get thicker and semisolid, sort of like ice cream that you've just brought home from the grocery store after a 10-minute car trip on a hot summer's day.

Because of my...removal of some of the swirling pink concoction, I wound up with maybe a quart, but probably less. The container I got out to stow the finished product in was far too large for the job, but I used it nevertheless because I was in a hurry to transfer the semisolid finished product and get it into the freezer.

I will say this: Two hours in the freezer is, at least for my ice cream maker, not enough to freeze the churned stuff really solid. About two and a half hours after I put my semisolid frogurt into the refrigerator's freezer, I served up a scoop to the boy, who'd tasted the mixture both before it went into the maker and while it was churning and declared he loved it. While the concoction around the outer edges of the too-big bowl was pretty solid, the stuff in the center was still in the same semisolid state.

The boy still loved the stuff nevertheless.

After sampling some of the frogurt after its time in the freezer, I also tried (i.e., polished off) the leftover mixture that hadn't fit into the ice cream maker. There was no difference in the flavor of the two, and the small leftover portion was more solid. However, when I use the term solid, I don't mean it in the same sense that ice cream out of a carton is solid. When you pop a liquidy concoction such as this lemonade frozen yogurt into the freezer, you just wind up with a solid mass that you have to chip away at with a spoon or some other utensil with some weight.

Getting back to the flavor, I'll say that my take on the recipe does indeed capture the sugary sweetness and acidic tartness of pink lemonade. If you don't like your pink lemonade as sugary sweet as I do, Gentle Reader, you could probably use less sugar and maybe even use plain yogurt while adding in a bit of vanilla extract to counter the sourness of plain yogurt. Since I have so damn much half-and-half left over, perhaps I'll whip up another batch or three and do some experimenting.