"Mom, what's that bucket thing on the top shelf in the garage for?"
"Oh, that. That's actually an ice-cream maker. Dad and I bought it in college."
I saw by the delighted look on Little's face that I was in for it now. A myriad of alternate possible responses filled my head. "It's a foot soaker." "It's a pot for a plant."
"It's..." too late. The secret was out.
That was about a week ago. Every day since then, he's asked if this was the day we'd make homemade vanilla ice cream.
I've actually done a good job of dragging this out in a good way. In The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin describes four stages of happiness. To get the most out of an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness over it, and recall it afterward.
"Oh, that. That's actually an ice-cream maker. Dad and I bought it in college."
I saw by the delighted look on Little's face that I was in for it now. A myriad of alternate possible responses filled my head. "It's a foot soaker." "It's a pot for a plant."
"It's..." too late. The secret was out.
That was about a week ago. Every day since then, he's asked if this was the day we'd make homemade vanilla ice cream.
I've actually done a good job of dragging this out in a good way. In The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin describes four stages of happiness. To get the most out of an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness over it, and recall it afterward.
So the next day, we got the thing down from the shelf (and left it lying around in our front hallway for a week for people to trip over, but that's another blog post). Another day, we found the little recipe book for it and looked at all the recipes. This weekend we picked up the milk and cream we needed for the vanilla recipe. And today I got the salt and ice and we finally made the ice cream.
I really milked the anticipation stage. :-)
To make vanilla ice cream, you heat the milk on the stove, dissolve in the sugar and salt, then add the cream and vanilla and chill it. Then it goes in the covered metal churning bucket which goes in the larger bucket surrounded by crushed ice and salt. (A good science lesson about ice and salt was enjoyed by all.) This particular ice cream maker just needs to be plugged in - it does the churning for you.
As it churned and froze, it expanded and filled the container until it started to leak out the top. The ice cream was really soft, but I remembered it needed to harden in the freezer before it was really ready. While we waited, we heated up an apple pie and Little and I made a blueberry cobbler.
There's nothing like fresh, warm pie and cobbler topped with homemade vanilla ice cream. It was positively delish. I think we did a good job savoring our afternoon's work.
And now I'm expressing my happiness over it, and I expect we'll all have happy memories when we look back on the day in late springtime that we made our own ice cream.
Thinking it would probably taste good with some Kahlua on top....
2 comments:
Yum! You've inspired me to make some room in my freezer for my own ice cream maker! (We have the kind where you have to freeze the canister before you make the ice cream.) I also have to experiment with non-dairy ice creams, which may or may not turn out well. :)
It was quite delicious, especially combined with the cobbler, with dark chocolate brownies, and of course, Kahlua.
How does the baby do when you eat yogurt? We've had good success with homemade frozen yogurt before - we might try that next week.
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