Peach Ice Cream

Hello, everybody!!

Edna was yearning for some goodies. I caught her reading this old book. It's so old, it says 'COOKY' on the front. Heehee! We love Betty Crocker. She has very lovely hairstyles. And aprons. Ok, and the recipes are good, too.

I swapped out Eda's 'cooky' book for a few other dessert books. She was having a good old time. but what she chose wasn't from these, but rather an old recipe we have for ice cream... because we have peaches!!

The thing about having your own peach trees: they all start to ripen at once. So, two trees equals lots of peaches! We're handing them over the fences on each side, throwing twenty pounds at a time at our neighbors but still... we're barely keeping up with the peaches.

I made a few batches of mint peach compote and it was tasty. But this was the winner: vanilla bean peaches. YUMMY. (See my vintage Kerr jar? Whee!) It was out of a batch of jars my dad brought over.

Here it is before it was stuffed with peaches. Oooooo!

There were a few of these ATLAS giant jars. I mean, what am I supposed to put in these?? The glass is wavy and ancient, even has little bubbles trapped in it. Lovely!

There were lots of those blue Ball jars so I sent them to facebook friends across the US last week. They got jars and I got the peace of mind that my kids would not be destroying those babies. So pretty!

 Ok, so Edna wanted to make some ice cream, the old fashioned way.
NOTE: I doubled this recipe so the pictures will look like a lot more than the recipe should be. :) The amounts I give are for a single batch.
3/4 cup sugar

2 tablespoons cornstarch

1/8 teaspoon table salt

2 cups milk                               

1 cup heavy whipping cream

1 egg yolk                               

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1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla     

 So, let's start on the base. Mix sugar, corn starch and salt in a pan and whisk together. Pour in the milk and cream, whisking constantly. Heat until thickened, stirring constantly over medium heat. After it's thickened, set aside to cool for about ten minutes.

Separate one egg. Beat the yolk.

 Pour one cup of the cooled milk mixture into the eggs, stirring constantly. Add the egg/milk mix back to the pan and heat again until a pudding-like consistency.

 Oh, our grapes are ready! Seedless sweet grapes... Except for the multitude of spiders, we're in heaven over here!

So that's the recipe for plain vanilla. Most of the kids just wanted vanilla, so that was fine. but we had all these peaches! And I found this awesome recipe for peach and pecan ice cream!                      

1 cup peeled and coarsely chopped peaches                                                              

1 1/2 tablespoons butter                               

1 cup coarsely chopped pecans

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

 Here is some of the vanilla bean peaches, mashed. Mmmmmmmm.

 Add the butter, salt, and pecans to a pan and toast on medium for about 8-9 minutes.

 I split the vanilla ice cream into two bowls, so I could add what I wanted to the parents' batch.

 Stir in mashed peaches, about 1 cup. (This looks like more, and it was. And it was delicious. but the recipe says one cup.)

 Add toasted pecans. Later, I thought these tasted more like walnuts. Oh well. They were still good.

 Put the vanilla into the deep freeze to solidify. (Oh, see? Pecans in the background! I knew there were some... Hey, and rhubarb, too!)

 While it was chilling, I noticed Edna had struck up a conversation with this strange, leather box. He seemed sort of old and musty. I wasn't really excited about looking inside. But she was whirring and making little happy noises, so...

 There were all sorts of little leather packages inside. My favorite had its own retractable tape measure... and lenses!

 Once I figured out how to open it, the flat metal camera opened to this! How handsome is this guy?? He and Edna had a great time talking about the height of investigative journalism in the fifties and sixties. Walter (or Wally, as the kids called him) smelled faintly of cigars and vermouth.

 He'd spent a lot of his time taking Polaroid snaps of celebrities at boring cocktail parties, but his heart was in the newspapers. Sadly, he'd been in that box quite a while because they didn't even make film for Walter anymore.

Plus, he'd never seen the internet. Of course, right after the VMA's, he decided it wasn't worth trying to follow celebrities anymore. He's going to be very happy as a showpiece. Retirement might not be that bad, after all.

 Peach ice cream... melllllllting!! It was delicious!

This was definitely the hands down winner. Crunchy sweet/salty pecans with tart/sweet peaches were the perfect combination. You can tell how hot it is in my kitchen because it was slushy within minutes of hitting the bowl. But it was still GOOD.

 

 

 Ok, everybody! Have a wonderful week. We're headed off on vacation in a few days and I just found out that our place at the lake has no electricity. (Um, WHAT???) Now, how am I supposed to write without a plug in for the laptop?! Maybe it will be a real vacation after all!
Or maybe I'll go nutty.
Until next Wednesday!

P.S. I also have Tina Russo Radcliffe over on my blog today, talking about her new book The Rosetti Curse! Pop on by and chat! She's giving away free e-books to any that are interested in giving it a try and leaving a review.

Garden goodness and Black Cherry ice cream

 We thought we were over the heatwave, but then the triple digits came back. Ugh! We just returned from the county fair and we're all hot, sweaty, and dirty.... but with happy smiles and bellies full of fair food! 

But first, a silly picture. (I'm wondering if this will be the screen grab for the post, haha. That would be great!) Anyway, we walk along the river in the evenings and came upon this field of... toilets. 

Apparently, this retirement home is renovating, but the image was so funny, especially to our elementary aged boys. "Ahhh, summer, when toilets are finally ripe for the picking."

  I also have to share this funny picture of my seven year old reading. It's so "summer" to read in an inner tube with goggles. LOL

 So, our peaches are ripe!
                                             
For a while, every day he'd go out with a basket and come back with a few tomatoes and peaches. Now, we need about five grocery bags.
                                            
We leave them on the tree as long as possible so that friends can come and pick what they like.

 We had old friends from Idaho visit this past weekend and my fifteen year old made a peach cobbler...

 And a huckleberry one (that was my favorite!)...

 And a blueberry one. It looks like all the fruit sunk to the middle, but it was nicely distributed.
                                  
Oh, it was delicious. I forget how amazing huckleberries are. We have blueberries most of the time, but huckleberries have such a unique flavor.

 We also made pasta salad. Only sharing because it's sooo prettttyyyyyyy. We also made a roast chicken with potatoes, gravy, corn, fruit salad, etc. Good food and great friends over, can it get any better?

 Random pictures of the garden before I get to the ice cream. Black bell peppers! They tasted pretty good once they ripened. I had one before it was done and thought it was bitter. But they were actually okay.

 Purple tomatoes. They're really called "black beauties" or some such but they're not exactly black. :D

 The tomatillos are growing! This is the source of all our salsa verde and green chile pork stew through the winter. MMMMMM....

 I'm excited to pick these banana peppers and stuff them with herbed cream cheese, then fry!

 It's been a great year for cantaloupe. Not anything like Ruthy's farm but I'm proud of these little guys.

 I'm not actually sure what this is...

 Pumpkins!!

 Little guys wanted me to take this picture of a "beauty" hidden under a spider web.

 I can't remember what heirloom variety this is but it's getting interesting.

 And the sunflowers! I love these giant sunflowers that grow bigger than your head!

 OK... so finally to the recipe! And there was something awry with my camera so it's a bit fuzzy. This is the final photo and it was so hot the ice cream was melting as I took the picture. The recipe is a general ice cream recipe tweaked for maximum deliciousness!

Ingredients:
one and a half cups chopped and pitted Bing or other sweet cherry
1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup milk
1 1/3 cup heavy cream (I used half and half, still good!)
1/2 cup sugar
dash of lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped dark chocolate (I used chips)

Some add the chopped fruit directly to the cream, sugar, milk mixture, or they heat the cream and cherries altogether to make a dark purple ice cream (very pretty!). We've done it both ways, but I like this way the best: I like to make it into a syrup first. Add 1/4 cup sugar, cherries, and lemon juice to a sauce pan on medium heat (stirring constantly) until cherries are semi dissolved and the mixture is thick and bubbly. Let cool for about 30 minutes.

Mix the cream, milk, 1/2 cup sugar in a pan and heat on low until the sugar is combined. Pour into a form or mold. Place into the freezer for one hour or until lightly set. Fold the cherry mixture in, letting it fall gently into the ice cream. Let freeze overnight. Each slice should have a delicious ribbon of cherry goodness!

 That's all for now! A few last photos of my grandfather's typewriter. He was raised on the border of Arizona, the son of a border patrolman and fluent in Spanish from childhood. He knew from his teens that he wanted to be a veterinarian and to raise money for school, he wrote and translated letters for the illiterate city residents.

Note how there are the "enya" and upside down question mark keys! So wonderful to see this and remember how much he loved typing out stories. I have dozens of letters from him from my college years and early on in my marriage.

Enjoy the ice cream!