September 4, 2006...3:06 am

Homemade ice cream: an end of summer treat

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My father-in-law was known for his amazingly creative homemade ice cream recipes. He combined flavors that most people never thought to combine and came up with delicious treats. In the early years of our marriage, every time Dave and I visited his boyhood home, Jim was waiting with another new ice cream flavor for us to try.


Once, Jim promised us Carnation ice cream, because perhaps we had grown weary of his more exotic combinations. (Carnation ice cream was a well-known high quality dairy and brand of ice cream. There were even Carnation ice cream parlours.) He proudly dished up bowls of vanilla ice cream; and the ice cream was liberally laced with shredded snippets of red carnation flowers. On another occasion, Dave’s folks met us for a weekend of camping and rock-climbing. Their capacious ice chest contained several different varieties of homemade ice cream chilling on dry ice. After a day of rock-climbing, nothing could have tasted better. In fact, the next morning, the leftover ice cream tasted fantastic on campfire-toasted English muffins!

Today, I was planning for tomorrow’s Labor Day picnic and came across these three recipes for homemade ice cream. All three were written in Jim’s hand. One of the pages has a dark, chocolate-looking stain on it!

Coffee Oreo Ice Cream

1 qt. half-and-half

1 c. sugar

2 t. real vanilla

4 T. instant coffee

1/2 pound oreos, crushed coarsely

Heat the first four ingredients just enough to dissolve the sugar in the half-and-half. Stir in the oreos. Pour mixture into ice cream maker and start cranking.

Jim used several different kinds of ice cream makers. The electric ones seemed to be easiest. The type you stick in the freezer and give a crank to every few minutes seemed most convenient. He also had, and we inherited, a huge ice cream freezer that made about 6 quarts of ice cream at once. That one is a hand-crank, old fashioned kind that works best when you have a lot of kids taking turns on the crank.

It’s best to use store-bought ice and rock salt when making ice cream.

I’ve posted two other Jim Kelley originals here and here.

BK

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