Although there’s food in the press box at the Celebration, I often like to stretch my legs and pick up something from one of the civic club food booths. Tonight, I wanted ice cream, and one of my old high school classmates was working outside the noon Rotary booth.
The trouble is, today was payday, and I hadn’t had a chance to run by an ATM. I had exactly $2 in my wallet, and the ice cream bar was $3. I sheepishly had to turn it down.
I walked around a bit, and decided to see how much ice cream was at the Civitan booth. A small ice cream was $2; I ordered peach.
If that was the “small” serving, I would not have wanted the large one. It was plenty, and it was delicious. With all due respect to my many friends in noon Rotary, I think the peach ice cream ended up being a lot better than the chocolate-covered Hagen Dazs bar I couldn’t afford.
Well, I couldn’t wait to make the ice cream — even though I won’t eat any until later today, I went ahead and put it in the freezer first thing this morning. It’s done churning, and now it’s resting in the freezer for a half hour or so. I’ll transfer it to a plastic container after that.
I have to admit that I cheated for the first batch. Next to the freezer on the shelf were some ice cream mixes from the same company. I got the “cookies and cream” flavor — just add milk. Of course, the mix contains all kinds of additives, which kind of takes away one of the reasons for making your own ice cream, but I knew that the consistency of that first batch would be just right — and if it wasn’t, the fault would be the freezer’s, not the ice cream mix.
As I posted the other day, I wanted to step up from my 1-quart tabletop ice cream maker to a larger model. I was lusting after a 1 1/2-quart Cuisinart but it was out of my price range. And I couldn’t find any ice cream makers of any sort at my local W*l-M*rt.
Well, on our way to Nashville tonight to pick up my brother from the airport, my parents stopped at a W*l-M*rt in Antioch, and I found something that seems to be just the ticket. It’s a 1 1/2-quart Rival tabletop unit. I like several things about the design, and I think the added quantity will help the consistency of the finished ice cream. And it was just $29.92 - far less than the Cuisinart, and $10 or more less than I’d seen similar Rival models selling for on Amazon.
The two-part freezer bowl (it collapses for easier storage) is in the freezer getting cold, and I’ll make my first batch with the unit on Saturday. I can’t wait.
I’ve had a small tabletop ice cream freezer for several years now — the kind which requires you to freeze a liner rather than using ice and salt. It’s not bad, but sometimes I have trouble getting just the right consistency with it.
Yesterday, I used it to make two batches of blueberry ice cream to take to our church chicken dinner today. I don’t know if it was the recipe, the freezer or the operator, but the ice cream was a little too hard and had to be scraped, rather than scooped, out of its container after sitting in the freezer overnight.
I want a new ice cream freezer. What I really want is a big Cuisinart model which is a larger version of what I already have — I think working with a slightly larger quantity of ice cream would actually be helpful, in this case — but I even thought yesterday about buying an old-fashioned ice-and-salt model (electric — I’m not quite that old-fashioned). Believe it or not, I couldn’t find a single ice cream maker, of any sort, at Wal-Mart yesterday, even after asking two different employees for help.
I probably won’t end up doing anything — I don’t need to spend the $50 for the Cuisinart right now.
I haven’t made ice cream in quite a while, but for some reason I got the urge to do so this weekend. I scalded the half-and-half with sugar and cocoa powder this morning, and it’s been cooling down in the fridge ever since. I have a table-top ice cream maker — the kind where you keep the liner in the freezer. I think the recipe I used (actually, adapted — I just wanted to get the sugar-to-liquid ratio right) is too much for my ice cream maker, but I’m assuming I can keep the excess mix in the fridge and just make another batch from it in a day or two, after the liner has re-frozen.
or 
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