Feeding My Passion

I made a delicious salted caramel ice cream with praline yesterday (from David Lebovitz of course). Actually there are a couple things not quite right with that statement. First, I started on the ice cream Wednesday night by making the praline and the custard, and then refrigerating all of it overnight (yes, even the praline. It was a simple praline, just sugar and salt, and my apartment is so warm that it would have sweat itself into a puddle before I got to making the ice cream.).

Then I made the ice cream the next day. Or I should say I tried to make the ice cream. I don’t have an ice cream maker, fancy or plain, so David suggests a method for making it without one. Don’t know if it was just my freezer, but I could only get it slushy, I just couldn’t get it to go even a little firm. Since my intention was to share it (I don’t cook much unless I’m sharing), I got a big bag of ice, chilled a steel bowl, nestled it in the ice, and drove the slushy ice cream to New Buffalo to dole out to friends.

By the time I got to door #2 (of 3), it was soup. Very, very tasty soup, but still soup. I’ve had my eye on an electrical one for a while now (not the first one, the second one), it just hasn’t been a priority. Considering my family’s great fondness for making homemade ice cream (they’re on their 3 or 4th White Mountain hand-cranked machine), I’m surprised I haven’t bought a maker yet. An ice and salt hand-cranked one wouldn’t be practical for me right now. I certainly remember many, hot summer evenings at my grandparent’s ranch, taking my turn at the crank, enjoying bowl after bowl of vanilla ice cream (almost always vanilla), with my mother’s chocolate sauce, rocking away on the their front porch, listening to the crickets at dusk.

Ok, snap out of it.

So I really need to get something, because the no-maker method didn’t work well for me, especially when I needed to transport the end result anywhere except to my own living room.

Mostly it would be cool if my family gave the caramel ice cream a try, it’s really, really good.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 7:26 am and is filed under Family, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.