Roasted strawberry banana ice cream

I had been thinking of making roasted strawberry beet ice cream, but, as I've actually been craving ice cream recently, I decided to go a route with a higher chance of creating something actually palatable.

I started by cleaning a pint of strawberries and cutting them into equally-sized small pieces. I added two medium bananas, sliced in half and roughly chopped, tossed them in a Tablespoon or two of demerara sugar, [For those unfamiliar, demerara sugar is essentially old-fashioned brown sugar. Modern brown sugar is made by returning some molasses to refined sugar. Demerara is made by leaving the molasses in.] and roasted at 375 degrees for 1 hour, with one stir in the middle.

I used a fairly large pan and a fairly high temperature to make sure the juices would evaporate. The point here is to concentrate the flavors into a smaller volume so the final ice cream will pack more punch per spoonful.

I blended the results with:

1/2 cup demerara sugar

1 pinch salt

juice from 1/2 lime

2 Tablespoon rum

2 teaspoons vanilla, and

1 1/2 cups cream.

Without the juice to thin the cream out, the result was rather thicker at this stage than the other fruit ice creams mixtures I've made. To compensate, I added 3/4 cup milk.

I was happy with the texture then, but it thickened up in the refrigerator overnight and it didn't seem quite sweet enough at that temperature. So, to thin it some more and adjust the sweetness back up without modifying the flavor balance too much, I added 1/4 cup agave nectar.

That all went into the churn. My kitchen was hotter than I would have liked which have have affected the thickening, but the alcohol and fructose worked against that too. Either way, it was rather softer than I would have preferred when I ran out of cold 25 minutes into churning and it wasn't able to hold on to a lot of churned in air, so it's kind of dense. Well, it'll have to do.

Since I had some on hand, I swirled in some Hershey's strawberry syrup. It's 100% artificial so it the flavor is less Strawberry than it is just Pink, really, so there's some contrast with the ice cream.

Here it is after ripening:

The texture is a little dense, but not hard even straight out of the freezer. If you're not going to have super-premium fat levels, denseness is a good second choice texturewise. I should have blended the mixture either a little more or a little less as there is the occasional tiny bit of fruit or maybe it's a little curdling from the citric acid in the cream. It's a minor unpleasantness. Roasting the fruit let me replace a lot of water with cream so it's richer than other fruit ice creams I've made and the tendency towards crystalization seems to be lower.

Straight out of the freezer the tart berry flavor really pops. After letting the ice cream soften a little, a more rounded fruit flavor emerges. The strawberry syrup brings the berry out above the banana a little bit. The result is reminiscent of the good quality strawberry syrup with pieces of fruit in it you get in ice cream parlors. And that inspired me to add chocolate syrup which creates a passable approximation to a banana split. If I had known it was going to work out that way, I would have roasted some pineapple too and added some candied walnuts. But it's just dandy as is.

CSA week ten - strawberry honey basil ice cream

Not too enormously innovative of a flavor this time around. You get a couple pages of results if you Google for strawberry basil ice cream before you start to hit the sorbets. Adding honey seems to be an unusual twist, though, and I think it adds something.

Ingredients:
1 pound strawberries, cleaned, hulled and chopped or sliced
8 ounces by volume (about 10 ounces by weight) modestly well-flavored honey, wildflower or generic supermarket honey would work fine
1 pinch salt
2 Tablespoons vodka
2 cups cream
2 small handfuls fresh basil leaves, bruised
2 teaspoons dried basil leaves, also roughed up a little
up to 1/4 cup sugar

1. Combine the strawberries, honey, salt and vodka in a medium bowl and let macerate 1 hour at room temperature or longer in the refrigerator. What with the honey, it's hard to tell when the berries released their juices so judge by when they soften. Move strawberry mixture to a blender and blend until only slightly chunky. [Now that I think about it, there's no reason you couldn't macerate in the blender container. You should do that.] Remove to the lidded container you'll be cooling the ice cream mix in.

2. Combine the cream with 1 handful of fresh basil and the dried basil. Bring to a boil and gently simmer for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit for 15 minutes. [Normally I cover the pot at this stage, but I want to reduce the cream a little so let it evaporate. Break the skin that forms on top to let the steam out.]

3. Strain the cream into a blender and discard the used basil. Add the second handful of basil to the cream and blend until the cream turns green and the specks of intact basil are quite small. [I also added an egg yolk at this point since I had a spare handy. I didn't bother to reheat the cream so it would have a thickening effect so it just added a bit of richness.] Add to the strawberry mixture and combine.

4. Chill overnight, adjust sweetness by adding sugar if necessary, churn [this recipe makes a lot so I churned in two small batches. Neither got too very solid. The vodka and all that fructose keeps it soft.], ripen and serve.


As I said up top, strawberries and basil are a well-known combination so it's no surprise that they make for a nice ice cream. I managed to get a lot of basil flavor into the cream so it's well balanced with the strawberries, tempering their sweetness with herbal flowery notes and a slight bitterness. The honey is less prominent, coming out more as the ice cream melts, but it rounds out the combined berry-basil flavor. One person who tried it likened the result to guava; I could see that.

The texture isn't as creamy as some ice creams I've made, but pretty good considering that it's half fruit.

CSA week 14 wrap-up, week 15 start-up

After a couple weeks without, I've finally got something worth mentioning in the wrap-up section of this post.

I said I was thinking of pickling the broccoli in last week's post and I found a few different recipes out there. I decided to try a particularly simple one instead of over-accessorizing the broccoli with spices. It called for tossing peeled thin-sliced stems in a little salt, letting them sit overnight and pouring off the expressed liquid, dressing them in two parts olive oil to one part vinegar plus a few crushed cloves of garlic (I added a couple shots of hot sauce) and letting it sit overnight again. So, more a simple broccoli salad than a proper pickle. Mighty tasty, though. Well worth a try.

The broccoli crowns I served over penne as I often do. I tried cooking them along with the pasta this time but too much of the flavor ended up in the water so I'm going back to a quick blanch and cook-down in a pan with plenty garlic and olive oil.

The strawberries were disappointingly tart again this week so I cooked them down into a syrup and, along with the previously week's ice cream, made milkshakes. Also, mixed with a bit of raspberry jam and heated up a little, it made a lovely filling for buckwheat crêpes.

I was going to braise the celery with tomatoes and olives, but the recipe was annoyingly fussy and I wasn't feeling it. I could have simplified, but I ended up making a pretty good celery and smoked salmon salad and ate it with crackers instead. Still half the head left, but it was a small head so I can probably consider it an herb and not worry about it, just like I'm not worrying about the thyme, sage and rosemary I've got lurking in my refrigerator.

I've still got the cabbage too, but it's hodling up well so I'll just use it as the need arises.

As for this week...


We've got dandelion greens again (on the left). I'm not making the mistake of trying to use them without proper preparation to leach their bitterness. A recipe I made last year called for simmering them with baking soda. I might try that method again. Actually, I may well make that full recipe again. I wrote that I quite liked it.

The little squash I've already cooked, along with some mushrooms, onions and the remaining broccoli crowns in a macaroni and cheese. A good combination of flavors, but I overcooked the noodles a little so I'm not happy with the texture.

The spring onion, I'm just going to use in recipes calling for onion/shallot/scallion. If there was a second in the extras bin, I'd have had enough to make a savory tarte tatin that I've had in the back of my head for a while. I think spring onions would be particularly well-suited.

The bok choy is versitile, but only within a narrow range. I mean to say that it's only really good for stir fries and east Asian soups, but it'll work in just about any stir fry or east Asian soup. There's nothing else here that shouts out for a either one of those, though. I do have an unusual, but tradtional, recipe for creamed bok choy I might try. It might be the only recipe in the world that calls for both milk and dried shrimp.

The radish tops were past their prime so I've trashed them. The radishes themselves are the sort better cooked. I can see them working well with the dandelion greens.

The mint I'll ignore and then throw out in a month as ususal.

The garlic chives are an herb too, but one I have more use for. I want to use them in something where they're the primary seasoning, not just one more ingredient thrown in the mix. Just what, I'll have to think about.

The green beans I think I'd like to find a central Asian recipe for. I've made a lot of green bean recipes, but I don't think I've ever used them in something from that area. There's probably something; they're used on either side. I'll have to do some research.

The collards I want to do anything but cook Southern-style since I still got an enormous amout of gumbo z'herbes in the freezer. I tried wrapping sticky rice in collards last year but had some difficulty. In retrospect, I should have cut out less stem and steamed the leaves for a minute or two to get them flexible. And, as long as I'm switching in collards for lotus leaves, there's no reason to stick with Chinese fillings in the rice (other than the fact that that tastes really good). Maybe I'll try mixing that up a bit.

That's quite a bit to deal with. I wouldn't be surprised if some of this ends up in the freezer instead.

CSA week 13 - Strawberry lavender ice cream

This ice cream was supposed to have a lot more flavor notes in it, as you can see from the list of ingredients, but at the end it was just the strawberries and four tiny drops of lavender extract that come through. Not that anyone was complaining, mind you. This is based on a more straightforward strawberry ice cream from Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop book.

Ingredients:
1 pint strawberries
1 banana, frozen and defrosted
1/2 cup chopped mango
1/2 cup plus a bit more sugar
1 Tablespoon vodka
1/2 cup Possum Trot cas guava and passion fruit sauce [There was plenty leftover after the Potato Pandemonium dinner and Robert let us pack some up doggie bags. It was very nice with buckwheat crêpes, but I thought it freeze up well too so I threw it in. And the chopped mango that was floating in it too.]
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup cream
1 squeeze lemon
4 drops lavender extract
1 pinch of salt

I cleaned and sliced the strawberries and put them in a bowl with the banana, the sugar and the vodka and set it out on the counter for an hour to macerate. I blended the bowl of fruit with the rest of the ingredients in the food processor until the fruit was in little flecks but not completely pulped. I checked for sweetness and drizzled in a Tablespoon or two of agave nectar to bring it up to par.

Then I chilled it in the refrigerator overnight and churned. Unlike a lot of other ice creams I've made recently, this one just wouldn't harden up. After 20 minutes it was starting to overflow the churn and it had reached about a soft serve consistency (which is when you're supposed to be removing ice cream from the churn anyway) so I got it out then.


The texture is very soft and creamy right out of the freezer and a little lighter than usual from the extra air churned in. It's a remarkable texture from an ice cream without a custard or corn starch. There isn't enough banana in there to account for it, but I think the vodka and the fructose in the agave nectar help too. The ice cream melts away in the mouth pretty quickly, like a bargain over churned ice cream, but it coats the mouth the way premium ice creams do. Kind of an odd combination of sensations. The coating carries a lot of flavor so it's still there when you're chewing on the little bits of strawberry and mango.

Because there's only half the strawberries you'd find in a batch of proper strawberry ice cream this size, the flavor is balanced with the slightly tangy cream and the aromatic lavender. Luckily, unlike my last attempt, the light touch with the lavender leaves it floral, not chemical, and it enhances the berry flavor in a lovely way.

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. Now I know you can't reproduce the recipe as written without access to leftover Possum Trot cas guava and passion fruit sauce, but a little more sour cream and a little more mango or guava should substitute in well enough, I think. It was a big hit around the office so, if you've got the strawberries and the ice cream churn, you really ought to consider giving it a try.

CSA week 19 - Strawberry kalamata ice cream

If you didn't read all the way to the end of my post on the Coral Gables Food and Wine Festival (and I wouldn't blame you a bit if you didn't), you missed the strawberry/tomato/black olive parfait that was being offered by the Miccosukee resort. I liked the flavor combination a lot so stole it for an ice cream recipe.

The parfait didn't have any pieces of olive in it and, at first, I wanted to infuse the flavor they way they did, but, not really knowing how to do that, I thought it would add an extra layer of uncertainty to an already risky recipe.

Instead I just took a simple strawberry ice cream recipe and mixed in some chopped olives. I can go for elegant next time once I know what I'm doing. I chose kalamata because I wanted a black olive that a) I could reliable get and b) was unmistakably fruity in flavor and had a substantial meaty texture. All I did was give them a good rinse to get the brine off, but I just found a video cooking demo for an olive cobbler that simmers them in port and sugar to get a more cherry-like flavor out of them. Interesting idea, but it kind of seems like cheating.

The ice cream recipe comes from the Perfect Scoop, and like I said, it's really simple. Slice up one pound of strawberries (two pints exactly, I found) and macerate them in 3/4 sugar and a Tablespoon of vodka or kirsch for an hour. Then put the berries and the expressed juices into a food processor with two cups of cream and a good squeeze of lemon. (Lebovitz actually uses one cup cream and one cup sour cream which would be dandy if I was just making strawberry ice cream. But sour cream plus black olives equals topping for bad nachos to me which I hoped to avoid evoking here.) Process until not quite smooth, chill and churn. This actually makes more than would fit into my standard-sized churn so I had to do it in two batches. Once that was done, I mixed in a good-sized handful of chopped olives, gave it a night in the freezer and here you go:



As you can see, the texture isn't as creamy as I usually get. This is more of a Philadelphia style ice cream so that's to be expected. You can also see lots of olives. I think I went a little overboard. With the strawberry flavor damped down by the cold, the olive is a little more prominent that I wanted. That said, the flavors do work very nicely. Actually, I seem to be the least happy with it of everyone whose tried to so far as it's getting rave reviews. I should have taken some notes when I had some this afternoon as I'm having trouble describing the flavors evocatively at this remove. I'm going to have to get technical instead. You've had strawberry ice cream--I don't have to describe that. This is a fairly mild rendition that supplies mainly low notes with a deep berry flavor and the rich creaminess. The olives themselves have fruity middle notes with salty highlights here and there. Does that make sense? Maybe I'll try again later.

CSA week 14 wrap-up, week 15 start-up

A lovely day for a walk today so I went my pick up spot on foot. As I expected, it was a little awkward carrying the box back, but the wagon I thought I'd need is probably overkill. I have a shoulder strap I think I can clip on that should make things a little easier for next week.

But, before next, there's last week. I'm pretty happy with my efficiency as I managed to use just about all of my CSA vegetables and didn't have to buy much to supplement them--just some mushrooms for the kale soup.


The green peppers went into the simple beef with black bean sauce stir fry I mentioned a week ago. It looks pretty good in that pictures, but I think I should have made the effort to get the fermented black beans and make the sauce from scratch. The pre-made didn't have the punch I was looking for. Lee Kum Kee is usually such a reliable brand, too. Maybe it was just the lack of MSG.


I also said I was thinking of finally doing something with the strawberries. I thought about making a sorbet, but instead I decided to try making a sabayon to top them. Pretty simple stuff, really. Take two egg yolks, 2 Tablespoons of powdered sugar, 4 Tablespoons of dry white wine, whisk them for ten minutes over gentle heat and you've got sweet, wine-flavored foamy egg yolks which actually are a pretty nice topping for berries--no argument here. I've read that you can fold in whipped cream and then put it under a broiler for a "glaze". I'm really not sure what that means, but I saved half to try that later today.


That brings us to this week's share.

Normally, I start in the corner and work my way around the picture, but the elephant in the room is a bunch of rainbow chard big enough to feed an elephant. I think maybe I'll try a gratin again as the first one I made back in January could use some improvement. Should be enough for a second dish too.

And speaking of reworking disappointing dishes, I wouldn't mind making turnip cakes again with the daikon. Since the browned outer bits were the best part last time I might make them again but much thinner. I seem to recall thin disc-shaped turnip cakes I've had as dim sum that were a somewhat different recipe but a quick search isn't turning up a recipe.

The squash isn't enough to do much with. I've been meaning to cook a chicken to create enough bones and scraps so I can make my next batch of chicken stock so maybe I'll roast the squash along with that. It might be nice with a pesto, too. I bought pinenuts to make one with last week's parsley but didn't get around to it so that's still a possibility.

The mizuna is best raw or lightly steamed so want to go minimalistic with it. I might just use it and the lettuce in a salad or two or as a rice substitute under the various leftover saucy dishes I've got in the freezer. It would be obvious to use the grape tomatoes in that salad, but I'd like to find something a little more interesting to do with them. I'll have to give that some thought.

That leaves the grapefruit. Plenty there for a sorbet, but I'd have to add some other flavors to keep things interesting. There are a couple intriguing recipes for grapefruit ice cream out there, too. Maybe a sherbet with coconut milk...I'm not entirely certain of that flavor combination. I'll have to do some testing on that.

Strawberry banana sorbet

[Note: I recently made a strawberry banana ice cream that turned out quite well. If you're not dead set on a sorbet, you might take a look at that recipe too.]

Strawberries were on sale this week so I bought them without any immediate idea of what to do with them. Once it became clear that I wasn't going to snack my way through the entire carton I looked around for ways to use them in ice cream. There were a lot of not-terribly-exciting options. I did notice an interesting lack of chocolate/strawberry ice cream recipes, though, which I may follow up on later. I also considered taking another shot at the basalmic strawberry ice cream I made to try to fix the textural problems I encountered. (Probably by using all real sugar instead of Splenda blend and by excluding the vinegar from the strawberry maceration instead just drizzling it in during churning.) But this week, it's strawberry banana sorbet. Given the magical psuedo-custard properties of bananas, I was curious how it would affect a sorbet's texture.

Also, I wanted to try using red bananas. Most people in the US only have access to the standard supermarket Cavendish banana. In Miami we're lucky to be able to get a few other varietals. Red bananas are the second most common banana and I understand that they have a more berry-like flavor than Cavendishes. (Yes, I know bananas are berries and, by the way, strawberries aren't, but you know what I mean.) Unfortunately I'll never find out myself as I've had these red bananas for two weeks now and they're just as rock solid under-ripe as the day I bought them. So I went out and bought some Cavendishes so I can make this before my strawberries start to rot.

Most of the recipes I found on-line for strawberry banana sorbet were actually sherbets (with milk or cream as an ingredient) or extra-thick smoothies so I decided to cobble together a version from a banana sorbet and a strawberry sorbet in Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop recipe book along with some standard sorbet tricks he didn't use.

1 large banana, as ripe as available
2 pints strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 Tablespoons light rum
1 pinch salt

1. Peel banana and place in freezer.

2. Hull and slice strawberries. Toss with sugar and let macerate for 1 hour at room temperature.

3. Add all ingredients to blender (breaking up banana). Blend until smooth.

4. Cool mixture in refrigerator at least four hours until 40 degrees F. Churn and then ripen in the freezer.


That includes a couple refinements I thought of after I made the recipe myself. I neglected to freeze the banana (which breaks down the bananas' cells and gets it goopy. The blender probably does a fair job of this as well, but the freezer is more thorough.) or add the salt (which brings out the sweetness), but it turned out fine anyway. Here it is straight out of the churn. That's rather thicker than I've seen most of my sorbets get, but my new churn provides a full 25 minutes of freeziness and for a change it isn't over 90 degrees in my kitchen today so it could just be the extra cold and not the banana causing it. The real test will be the mouthfeel after ripening. I'll see tomorrow...

It's tomorrow and I'm quite happy with the creamy texture. If you didn't know, you'd swear there was milk in there (but not cream; let's not go nuts here.). And you'd think it was artificially colored with its vibrant strawberry red. Unfortunately, you might also be wrong about it including banana as that flavor is a bit subtle. On the other hand, the strawberry flavor is bright and clear and yummy. Let's just say the banana is there for textural support.

I'd like to try it again with a different berry and a larger riper banana to see how how the extra refinements I didn't put in this time work out.

Balsamic strawberry ice cream with black pepper

I wanted to make a strawberry ice cream while strawberries were still in season (They are still in season, right? I picked them up at the farmer's market, but that particular stall had a suspiciously broad range of produce and no farm name on a placard. I found the corn especially suspicious. Does anyone grow corn in south Florida? Can you grow corn in south Florida?), and, as usual, I had to do something to ruin the simple pleasure of a classic ice cream flavor.

Going into this I expected balsamic strawberry ice cream to be an overdone cliché on the foodie blogosphere (there are lots of folks who do stretches of slightly exotic ice cream recipes during the Summer), but I couldn't find more than one or two versions out there so there's still some point to adding my recipe.

After tossing the few groddy strawberries and eating a few of the others, my pint was down to 12 oz. Most strawberry ice cream recipes go with a full pound for three cups of dairy so I cut down to one cup of milk and a cup and a half of heavy cream.

As these were good quality fresh strawberries, I didn't want to cook them. Instead, I sliced them up and tossed them with a few splashes (1 1/2 Tablespoons?) of ten year old balsamic vinegar and a quarter cup of Splenda blend. Even if it wasn't the only bottle I have in the house at the moment, I think ten year aged balsamic would be the right choice for this recipe. It has some depth and richness of flavor but it isn't something fabulous that will get lost in the mix. As for the Splenda blend, I think I've mentioned before that I'm accommodating a diabetic coworker and I've found that the off-taste is undetectable in ice cream (although it does come out in simpler sorbets). A quarter cup is as sweet as a half cup of real sugar. Some strawberry ice cream recipes call for as much as three-quarters of a cup, but the strawberries and the vinegar are sweet too so I didn't want to overdo it. After tossing those ingredients together I let them macerate for a half hour or so.

Next I scalded the milk and cream and let it cool down to around 140 degrees F. Then I whipped two egg yolks with a third cup of the strawberry-balsamic liquid holding back any solids. I tempered the egg mixture, mixed it together with the dairy and brought it all back up to 170 degrees to create a custard. I was worried about the vinegar causing the milk to curdle, but in such small quantities it only helped in the thickening process. Many strawberry ice cream recipes call for lemon juice which has a similar effect. After cooling the mix in the refrigerator overnight I did notice some clumps at the bottom, but not a lot and they mixed back in easily in the churn. (This is in contrast to the black sapote sherbet I made a while back that had significant amounts of milk and orange juice. There were definitely gummy little bits in that. Not enough to ruin it, but it wasn't an ideal texture.) To avoid any problems along those lines I kept the rest of the strawberry mixture separate from the dairy until they went into the churn.

Before it went into the refrigerator for the night, I gave the strawberry mixture a quick turn in the blender. Not long enough to get it smooth, but enough to release more liquid. I only added about half of it to the dairy mixture for the final churning and reserved the rest for a topping. I also coarsely ground pepper into the churn as it was starting out. It's hard to say how much went in total; no more than a couple teaspoons at the outside I'd guess. It's supposed to be subtle.

The mix thickened up quite quickly and is one of the few mixes that actually succeeded in stopping the churn's motor. The motor was making some really unpleasant noises, though, so it may not have been working at full strength. I think it also helped that I turned down the thermostat in the refrigerator so both the mix and the bucket were extra cold to start out.

The texture and flavors were very nice right out of the churn. A strong strawberry flavor with unmistakable notes of balsamic and a slow burn from the pepper. That may mean that it will be too mild when fully ripened, though. I just tried a bit out of the freezer and discovered that it's frozen very solidly. I'll have to let a bowl sit out for a few minutes for a fair test after dinner.

OK, it's later now and I tried a bowl. The flavor wakes up after only a minute or two out of the freezer, but the texture isn't great. It goes straight from a crunchy solid to liquid without a creamy intermediate. I recall having this problem with homemade strawberry ice cream when I was a kid, too. Maybe it's because of the pectin in the fruit giving extra firmness to the mix? Or possibly the Splenda as sugar does have structural properties in ice cream. Microwaving the bowlful for ten seconds might defrost it more evenly and give a better result. I'll have to try that later. On the other hand, texturally, I like how you bite into a strawberry seed or two in each spoonful and then occasionally into a peppercorn. So, on the whole a success with reservations. It needs some tweaking for the ripened version but it was just fine as soft serve.

Ice Cream Experiment # 11 - With other fruit flavors

Most other food blog posts start with some sort of scene setting--a dinner party or a wretchedly hot day requiring a refreshing adult beverage or some such--but mine generally start with background research. In this particular case, research on guava sorbet recipes. Most of them start with guava nectar or frozen guava puree, but I did find one that called for fresh guava which seemed like a decent enough starting point as I had some guavas I had to do something with.

What it didn't mention is that guavas are full of tooth-crackingly hard tiny little seeds. I suppose they might blend out, but I decided to pass it all through a sieve instead.


That took a fair while. At the end, I had guava nectar, but at least mine was 100% guava. Since I had a bit less than a cup of it, I had to see what other fruit I had around to bring it up to a full two cups. I had about a half cup of frozen strawberries I had sprinkled with sugar to draw out the juices. I had a nearly-overripe apririne or nectarcot or some other odd hybrid which I chopped up and tossed in and a quarter cup of frozen pineapple. Then a couple tablespoons of rum, a tablespoon or so of lime juice and a teaspoon of vanilla to finish it off. So, lots of different flavors in there, but I think the guava remains notably on top.

Simple enough at this point. Add all that mess to a cup of water and a 1/4 cup of Splenda/sugar blend, simmer for 15 minutes and blend smooth.



Then chill, churn and freeze. I got a really nice texture this time around.



That's partly from the alcohol in the rum, but also because I've started scraping down the sides of the ice cream machine bucket every few minutes.

You know, other than deciding to add strawberries and then padding it out with every fruit in the house this was actually a pretty boring recipe. Sorry about that. I've got a few more interesting things lined up for coming weeks.