Make your own ice cream

Hello – on this fine Sunday morning we wanted to do something fun and have a special treat.  Nava had made her own ice cream at camp – and so we tried it ourselves.  It is easy and a yummy (relatively) healthy treat.  And we got our new Nikon CoolPix P7000 – like I know what that means, however, we have the camera and we can take pictures.  Uploading seems to be a challenge, so we have pictures, but I can’t show you yet….

Ice Cream Ingredients:

• 1 cup milk (skim, 1 %, or whole, or cream for that matter)
• 2 tablespoons sugar (you can reduce this, depending on your preferences)
• 1/4 teaspoon mint extract (or vanilla, or whatever extract you would like) NOTE: for some mint extracts this ended up being too much.  So start with less – eagle eyed reader SD suggested 2 drops.  My extract just isn’t very strong.

– For making the milk turn into a frozen treat:

• 6 tablespoons kosher coarse salt
• Ice

Take a small zip lock bag and put the milk, sugar and mint extract (you can use vanilla, or any extract you like.  You can also make a chocolate version.  Add 1 tablespoon cocoa and add 2 additional tablespoons of sugar).  Then in the gallon size zip lock bag put 6 tablespoons (or so, can be less, can be more) and add ice about half full. Then put the smaller bag with milk (zipped) into the larger bag and zip.  Then shake!  It will take about 10 minutes for the milk to become ice cream consistency.

This ice cream, while delicious, isn’t super smooth, because the shaking (I’m guessing) is a little inconsistent.  However, you end up with ice cream at the end and it’s great fun to do it yourself.  You can halve this recipe, but doubling might make it heavy for little hands to hold.

After you finish shaking and you want to eat your ice cream – rinse off the smaller bag in cold water – so that you don’t accidentally get some of that kosher salt into your ice cream.

Nava declared this recipe a winner and we put the ice cream into a cone and she has been very intently eating it while I’ve typed this out.

PS – we froze the ice cream we did not eat – and it froze into a very icy clump.  I would recommend eating all of it as soon as you make it.  Also, you can add fruit before you shake – cut up peaches, pomegranates, blueberries – whatever you might have around.

Enjoy!

Let me know if you try it.