Who doesn’t like the refreshing taste of creamy, cooling, frozen desserts during the heat of summer or the dog days of Autumn in Arizona?  (I know some of you like frozen desserts all year round, even if you don’t live in Arizona.)

Imagine a frozen dessert that you can enjoy within seconds that you make at home using frozen fruit and a lightweight, easy to operate, easy to clean machine. You use peeled, sliced or unsliced frozen bananas with or without other fruits. You can also make banana-free frozen desserts with this machine. You get all the fiber, vitamins, and antioxidants found in fresh and frozen fruits with the look, taste, and mouth-feel of ice cream.

You can make sorbets, popsicles, and terrines. You can add spices, chopped, dark chocolate chips or bits, nuts, crumbled cookies, or Frinkles––tiny bits of freeze-dried 100% dried fruit bits, sold by Yonanas corporation. You can swirl in frozen nut butter or put homemade nut milk cubes through the chute.

The company’s website has drool-worthy pictures of some of the treats you can make with this incredible appliance, including Cranberry Orange Yonanas, Green Tea, Key Lime, Pecan Pie, Pear Raspberry, Pistachio, Pumpkin Pie, and Chai Spice Yonanas, along with Mango and Mango Avocado Sorbet.

If you have kids, have a sweet tooth, include fruit in your daily or weekly diet, or want to include more of it, and you’re looking for a great, real, fresh, whole foods ice cream alternative without the preservatives, additives, colorings, emulsifiers, chemicals, milk produts, and added sugars and oils found in store bought frozen desserts, this could be the machine for you.

It is smaller and quieter than a VitaMix, easier to clean than a food processor, and safe enough for kids to use. It’s been all over You Tube, endorsed by Dr. Oz, Good Morning America, and featured in hundreds of magazines, on blogs, on TV and radio shows. Even Martha Stewart has endorsed it!

The Yonanas Machine comes in several styles and colors. I have the basic Yonanas Maker. It retails for $49.99 U.S.D. It also comes in an elite model ($100 to $129 with accessories). You can watch free instructional videos and print out recipes from the company’s web site or buy their two Yonanas recipe books (Amazon only sells one of the cookbooks), popsicle molds, and other accessories, or buy a model that comes with one or more of these. Here’s how the machine works.

I’ve had a machine for about a year. When I first got it, I was making treats with my neighbor, Abby. We loved them––banana-berry, banana-peach-pistachio, cherry-peach with frozen coconut cream. I didn’t have it for long when the weather got much cooler and I didn’t want to eat anything frozen. Then I started reducing my carbohydrate intake. Then I was off fruit altogether, other than very small amounts of berries, once in a while. When it got hot again, Abbey had moved away, so she wasn’t around to make the desserts for.

I loaned my Yonanas machine to my office assistant/book keeper and she and her family loved it. She wants one now! I’m still following a very low-carb (ketogenic) diet but I wanted to make a fresh batch for my neighbors––hoping for a good shot but the lighting was off and I ran out of frozen fruits! One of them said the banana-berry version tasted like frozen yogurt, even though I didn’t add any yogurt. My pictures were not impressive, so I’ll leave you to look at the Yonanas website online.