Spring Break Ice Cream

My five youngest kids have had spring break this week, and my husband has taken most of the week off. We haven’t done anything extraordinary, but it’s been nice to have a little more relaxed time together.

Yesterday, we drove a couple of  hours south to visit our two oldest children, Sam and Hannah, who are students at Brigham Young University. It was a bright spring day and we enjoyed the visit.

At the Provo City Library

We brought the ingredients to make dinner in Hannah’s apartment and topped it off with homemade ice cream, which was beautiful and very yummy. Here’s how I made it (I did this the night before):

I stemmed about a pound of strawberries and cut them in half. It filled a two cup measure plus a little.

I put the strawberries in the food processor and poured ½ cup sugar over them. I let them sit like that while I heated 1 cup milk, ½ cup sugar, and ¼ teaspoon of salt in a pan on the stove.

I separated two eggs and put the whites in a small container in the refrigerator for some other use.* I put the yolks in a small bowl and stirred them a little, then added a bit of the hot milk mixture into the egg yolks and stirred again, then put in a little more of the milk mixture, stirred more, added more, stirred it up, and then put it all in the pan. (This ‘tempering the eggs’ step is important – if you put the egg yolks directly into the hot milk, it will cook the eggs and you will have “Scrambled Egg Ice Cream" for dessert.)

I cooked and stirred the milk and egg mixture until it became quite thick, and then let it cool. While it was cooling I pureed the strawberries that were sitting in the food processor until they were quite smooth, and then I poured in a cup of cream and pureed some more. (We like our strawberry ice cream smooth; if you like chunks of frozen strawberries you can do less pureeing.)


I started to put the pureed mixture in the pan, but then I thought, “You know what would be good in this? Some cream cheese. I wonder if we have any.”  So I searched the  refrigerator and found some and put a little (maybe 2-3 ounces) in the food processor with what was left in there, and then poured it all, plus another cup of cream and a teaspoon of vanilla, into the poor overworked pan. Almost done! I stirred it up and poured it into jars to take to Provo. After dinner, we put it in the ice cream maker, and ended up with about a quart and a half of really good stuff.

The break will be over on Monday, and we'll go back to the routine of normal life. Is it possible that the lovely day we had will change our lives? Perhaps we'll be a little happier than before. Perhaps we'll weigh a bit more than we did. And I suppose my cholesterol count will be a little higher.

Oh! I do love spring . . .



*Based on previous experience, I expect to forget they are there, and they will sit until they rot and I will throw them away.