Keeping it cool...with dessert.

It's that kind of day--while fruit's great as dessert, at times, you want something different, a little extra on a scorcher like today. Particularly if you don't have to make it yourself.

Like, say, ice cream and other ice treats. But you're worried about your waistline. Not to fear, Turtle Mountain's got you covered. Its most recent icy creations are coconut-water based sorbets, so they're low in calories, from 100 to 110 calories per serving. (A serving is half cup. Sure.) I got the 'lemonade' flavor from Giant, and boy, it is good. Smooth, soft, and (if you have any left over), doesn't get lots of ice crystals. Yum!

Double yum if you're out and about is the soft-serve soy ice cream at Everlasting Life (in Capitol Heights, near FedEx Stadium). You have to call to find the flavor of the day, which is strawberry today. Sounds good, although my favorites are the rum raisin and sweet potato. Which might go splendidly with one of the cobblers (pictured above is the peach, which I particularly love). Most recently the cobblers were mixed berry and apple, and I just had to have the berry; turned out to be a good choice, full of sloppy fruity juices and such.

Or the guilty pleasure of the soft-serve ice cream from the Miller Farm store in Clinton. I last had the banana nut in a cone, but the flavor changes daily.

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For a decent, large, fruit pie for those days when there's no time to find a farmer's market, scarily enough, you can find a reasonable one at the grocery store (for some reason, Safeway in particular). That's right, good ol' Sara Lee makes a delish cherry pie from the Signature Selections Deep Dish Gourmet pie line). Made with those tart Montmorency, aka "pie," cherries (which hold their shape better than sweet ones, and have higher levels of antioxidants to boot), they are a revelation; not too sweet, and full of plump cherries, instead of crimson-colored cherry cornstarch.

It's big enough, and rich enough, for company, but not too expensive. And, again, not too sweet. Because it's full of cherries, which are, in fact, the first ingredient, which, sadly, is almost unheard of for storebought frozen fruit desserts. In fact, the ingredients are: cherries, enriched flour, vegetable oil, sugar, water, as well as less than 2% of each of the following--modified corn starch, high fructose corn cyrup, salt, soy flour. Now, this is no natural product, as the vegetable oil may contain cottonseed (?) oil, and there's high fructose corn syrup, but again, this isn't an everyday food (as fatty as this is, it shouldn't be).

This is treat-yourself weather, so go ahead and do as The Jacksons used to sing: