Vanilla Ice Cream

We didn't do much for Labor Day, but we did make ice cream!  We made ice cream all the time when I was growing up, but it had been a while.  The recipes my parents have use eggs, and I didn't want to have uncooked eggs in the ice cream, since I'm pregnant and all, so I found a great "Philadelphia style" ice cream recipe here.

The boys helped a little at first, but weren't as excited about it as I had hoped they would be.  Andy and I churned away, and the ice cream set up much faster than I thought it would.  We dished it up and it was delicious!  It was really really sweet and the vanilla flavor was pretty strong.  We added some mini oreos and oreo crumbs and that was fantastic!  I also had some fresh peaches that ripened up just in time to chop up and mix in with a bowl of ice cream one night.  That was the best!

Oh, the ice cream is really soft.  We put it in the freezer to firm it up a bit, but it still melted really fast.

Here's the recipe:

2 cups heavy cream (we used half and half)
1 cup milk (we used 2%)
3/4 cup sugar (It was really sweet.  I might cut it back to 1/2 cup next time.)
1 Tbs. vanilla (It was STRONG.  I'll use slightly less vanilla next time.)

We doubled the recipe.  I'm not certain of the real directions, but we combined the ingredients, put them in my parent's good old fashioned ice cream maker, put ice and rock salt around the outside and mixed it up until it looked like soft serve ice cream.