Friday Favorite: Homemade Ice Cream
I have fond memories from my childhood of Saturdays at the family cabin with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. All of us kids would spend our days running around the acres of woods, collecting rocks, feathers, bones, and all kinds of things children find fascinating. We built dams in the little creek, caught crawdads and gathered berries along the edges of the woods.
The best part of the day was evening when the old fashioned ice cream makers would come out. My grandma would make custard and we’d all have a turn cranking until it got too hard for us kids. Then we’d wait by with bowls in hand for the finished ice cream.
We still make homemade ice cream on special occasions. This past Sunday we celebrated my dad’s birthday and a belated Easter since he just arrived home from Colombia. We enjoyed a delicious meal of ham and other side and had to finish it off with homemade raw milk ice cream.
The kids wanted to help of course, but quickly tired of turning the crank. They played happily nearby while asking “is it done yet?” every couple minutes.
After 20 minutes or so it was done and we dished it up. We all enjoyed a bowl of fresh homemade ice cream with a piece of my mom’s famous pound cake. It was the perfect ending to a family meal.
My ice cream recipe is fairly simple, warm some whole milk with vanilla beans, let steep for 30 minutes. Mix a few egg yolks with some sugar and a dash of salt. Slowly pour in hot milk while whisking. Add some cream and chill for a few hours. Freeze in an ice cream maker, old fashioned or electric. I don’t have specific measurements, I taste and add and taste again and the amount varied depending on which ice cream maker we’re using. Sometimes I add more egg yolks if we can more custardy ice cream, sometimes I add fewer for a lighter ice cream. I also make mine slightly less sweet and with a little less cream than most recipes. This is a great recipe, you can swap the milk/cream to make it less creamy if you want.
It’s nice to know that we’re passing along the love of homemade ice cream to the next generation. I’m sure our nieces and nephew will have fond memories of making old fashioned ice cream just like my brother, sister and I do!
Do you ever make homemade ice cream? What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?
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So Long Winter – Hello Spring
Yesterday I washed up all of our hats, mittens and scarfs to put them away for the year. They’ll be replaced in the organizer by the back door by gardening and work gloves. We’ll still have some cold weather here in NE Ohio, so I saved one pair of thin gloves and a hat for each of us, but all the heavy woolen items were stowed away in the cedar chest.
We have one of those shoe organizers on the back of the door in our laundry room, which is the main door we use for coming and going. In the winter it’s stocked with woolen and fleece mittens, hats and scarves. During spring/summer/fall it’s stocked with work gloves, gardening gloves, and a few garden tools that I don’t want to store in the garage (like my nice pruners).
It always makes me happy to do this. Kind of a final goodbye to winter and the official start of spring/summer and the gardening season. I’m always happy to replace my woolen mittens with a pair of Ethel gloves!
Do you have seasonal items that you swap in your coat closet?
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On the Cover
I opened my mailbox last week to find the newest issue of Horticulture Magazine. This issue is special because it has my photo of a Dr Wyche’s heirloom tomatoes on the front cover! This image first appeared on my blog back in 2009, it’s my last tomato harvest of the season.
They contacted me about using one of my images a few months ago. They were going to use this image for the article on the inside, but then decided it made a great cover for their special edibles issue. It’s quite funny to see my name and blog in print inside the magazine! It’s quite exciting that people are starting to use my images in their magazines, it certainly help pay the bills associated with my blog. Since I don’t want to have ads on my blog I need to find a way to pay the bills associated with it.
I’m quite happy to see that Horticulture is doing a special issue on edible gardening. It is an area that is becoming more and more popular. I think it’s important for everyone to grow even just a few edible things in their gardens.
I’m especially happy that the article my photos were used for was about heirloom vegetables, something I’m passionate about. I love that a magazine like Horticulture is covering this topic. I hope it encourages a few more gardeners to give heirloom vegetable gardening a try.
I usually get all my magazines from the local library as I don’t subscribe to them. I really enjoy reading Horticulture, Mother Earth News, Grit, and Hobby Farms.
Do you have any great magazines you enjoy reading?
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Making Wild Violet Syrup
I mentioned yesterday that the wild violets were in full bloom and we’d been harvesting the blooms and the leaves for our salads. Since I don’t treat my lawn in any way, the violets have slowly taken over and now my entire lawn is dotted with beautiful purple blooms.
I decided to make some violet syrup this year. The syrup is a good source of vitamin C and is supposed to be a great cough syrup. It’s also said to help you fall asleep without making your drowsy. Since I can be a bit of an insomniac, this sounds wonderful to me!
Making violet syrup is no small feat, you need 8 oz of violet blossoms. At first this may not seem like a lot, until you start picking. I harvested a pint of blossoms and they weighed in at 1.2 oz. Out came the big half gallon mason jar and I spent some time sitting on the front lawn harvesting those tiny purple beauties. I’m sure my neighbors were wondering what in the world I was doing. It was quite relaxing though, I enjoyed myself. Mr Chiots saw me through the window and had to come out and get a photo.
It took me about an hour to pick a half gallon jar full of blossoms, which happened to weigh 8 oz. If you have kids this would be a great project for them to do, they would not doubt love this chore!
Pour 2 cups of boiling water over the blossoms and use a wooden spoon to slightly mash the blossoms down into the water. If you need a little more water to cover the blossoms add just enough to cover. I added an extra half cup of water. Let sit overnight on the counter. In the morning, strain out the blossoms and you’ll be left with a beautiful violet liquid. I bet this would be a wonderful natural dye for Easter eggs, or fabric.
Pour the violet water into a saucepan and add 2 cups of honey. Simmer for about 30 minutes until slightly thick and syrupy (keep an eye on it in the beginning as it can foam up and boil over). Pour into jar and store in the fridge. You can waterbath can this for 10 minutes if you’d like to make larger batches. I ended up with about two and a half cups of syrup.
I’m looking forward to using this syrup throughout the year. It tastes like honey and smells of violets and is a beautiful lavender color. It would taste wonderful on ice cream or in tea and as far as cough syrup goes, it’s so much better than the mediciny stuff you’d buy at the store.
Do you make any of your own herbal syrups?
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Beautiful Wild Violets
This time of year our lawn is flush with tiny purple blossoms from all the wild violets. They are quite beautiful, definitely a great reason to not spray!
Wild violets aren’t just a pretty face either, they’re quite healthy. Violets are loaded with vitamin C and all kinds of other goodness (read a great article about them here). You can eat the flowers, leaves and the tubers (although tubers should be eaten in moderation).
There are all kinds of things you can do with them, candy them, make jelly, tincture them, make syrup. We mostly pick them and add them to our salads. I’ll be making violet syrup this year as well (recipe and info on that tomorrow). I may also try to make a tincture to use in my ears. I have tinnitus on occasion and it’s supposed to be helpful for that, I’ll let you know if it works.
In addition to violets, we’ve been picking dandelions and garlic mustard blooms for our salads. Spring is truly a beautiful time, both in the garden and on my plate!
Do you have wild violets in your garden? Do you harvest any flowers to eat?
