Winter … the mere thought of it sends shivers up and down my spine. Not from the cold, but from the pure delight of the thought. With glee, each year I drag out the big box packed with winter-time treasures—big wool sweaters, down comforters and long underwear. Then it’s out to the wood pile to stock up the wood bin by the fireplace.

I revel as the old North wind begins to blow crisp, frosty breaths and the first few flakes of snow merrily dance from the sky, gracefully floating down to the ground. Soon the barren remnants of fall become a crystalline winter wonderland.

But then, sometimes, only rarely mind you, I am reminded of the drawbacks to winter. I am reminded when gray, mushy slush covers the ground where once the white fluff lay and sub-zero wind chills blow me back three steps for every one I take forward. But what’s worse are the long stretches of time when the days seem like months and the sun goes to the Bahamas for a vacation.

During this time I am confronted with the worst part of winter: the times when the farthest walk I want to make is from my couch to the refrigerator and back. My motivation is not one of hunger, but instead the thought, the craving, the desire … OK, my obsession with ice cream.

As strange as it may seem, I eat more ice cream when the winter winds blow than when the summer sun shines.

Not this winter though. This winter, ice cream has been banned from my apartment, but it’s not so bad. I’ve been introduced to a substitute … frozen yogurt.

Now all you yogurt haters out there, don’t wrinkle up your noses and say “yuck!” Frozen yogurt tastes nothing like regular yogurt in the grocery store. Frozen yogurt is more like soft-serve ice cream, the kind you can buy at Dairy Queen or McDonald’s. It’s sweet and creamy and oozes and drips and sticks just like ice cream, but actually it’s better for you—with 30 percent fewer calories, less cholesterol, less sodium and more nutritional value.

Any flavor you can imagine is available from the old stand-bys—strawberry, vanilla and chocolate—to more exotic choices of egg-nog, maple nut or pina colada.

The whole frozen yogurt thing became sort of a trend. Beginning in the mid-seventies, small shops began to pop up across the country, from New York to California, Texas to Minnesota. But of course, living in the Midwest we’re always the last (except for presidential caucuses) to find out. In 1975 around 900,000,000 cups of frozen yogurt were sold across the country, and the number is going up still.

Some people keep their distance from frozen yogurt shops because they view them as trendy, yuppie creations. Not at all—yogurt was around long before yuppies.

The history of yogurt goes so far back that no one is really sure how it was discovered or where it originated, but experts are sure that it has been around for more than 4,000 years. What they do know is around the turn of the century a bacteriologist and Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Metchinkoff, gave yogurt it’s present day reputation. His research allowed for the production of all types of yogurt on a commercial basis.

Metchinkoff decided he wanted to live to be at least 100. In his search for the evasive Fountain of Youth, he found that the Bulgarians in Russia had an unusually high number of people in their population that lived to be over 100. After doing some research Metchinkoff found that yogurt was hailed as a miracle cure-all that would cleanse the body and purge the soul of evil spirits. Studying the Bulgarians’ dietary habits, he found they consumed about seven pounds of yogurt a day. He concluded it was the consumption of yogurt that accounted for the unusually long life-span of the Bulgarians.

Well, I’m not looking for miracle cure-alls to purge my soul or even to live to be 100, but peanut butter frozen yogurt has got to be one of the best ways I’ve found to make it through the gray days of winter.