use real butter

Recipe: peppermint ice cream

I can’t tell you how excited I was to finally try a peppermint ice cream recipe! I’ve been wanting to make peppermint ice cream ever since I left Ithaca, New York 5 years ago. Ithaca was where on occasion, I would buy Purity brand peppermint ice cream which wasn’t that crappy green stuff. It was real peppermint and pinkish and absolutely heavenly. I suppose peppermint ice cream to me is what Coffee Heath Bar Crunch is to Jeremy. But I was never much of a dairy expert and ice cream wasn’t high on my priority list of skills to accomplish. I don’t know why now, but I’m glad!

This recipe comes from David Lebovitz’ The Perfect Scoop. I actually found it on Elise’s terrific site here. I’ve had issues crushing peppermint candies in the past. My favorite peppermint candy is King Leo brand peppermint sticks, but they are so airy they would just dissolve in ice cream. I used those generic red and whites from the store. When I made peppermint bark in the past, there was a lot of swearing and harming of worktable surfaces. I wised up this time and remembered my seldom-used mortar and pestle.

Recipe: peach ice cream

Even though we have an ice cream maker (not the salt and crank kind, but the little Cuisinart brand), we don’t make ice cream very often. Jeremy calculated that the cost of making his favorite Coffee Heath Bar Crunch from scratch was the same as purchasing it in the store – and the store version had much better smoothness to it. For me, being lactose intolerant puts the kibosh on a lot of ice cream. I can take it from the time to time, but things aren’t always happy in the lower GI department. I do make sorbet on occasion. Problem is that I love raw fruit so much I tend to eat the fruit before I can make the sorbet.

But I like peach ice cream and I (still) had peaches and so I gave it a try based on a recipe snarfed off the web, snarfed from David Lebovitz’ The Perfect Scoop (which I just ordered because, how can I not?)

**Jump for more butter**

So far, Whistler has racked up more bad points than good for me, but I’ll get to those later.

This morning Jeremy and I went to hike Joffre Lakes while my parents were at some time share sales pitch. The hike was nice at first and then it became steep and rocky and rooty and muddy and… The humidity was near 100% and it rained on and off (the rain wasn’t so bad, actually). It was warm for my tastes and incredibly buggy. We broke out some DEET and made our way up to the middle lake. It was the stunning aqua color of a glacier-fed alpine lake and the cool breeze coming off the glacier and the lake felt fantastic. This felt a lot like New Zealand – fun #2 with a lot of eye candy.