Two years ago I planted a few tiny mint sprigs in my garden. Today they are the dominant plant in our yard (note to self: contain mint in sunken pots). What to do with all of this mint? Daily mint water, drying for tea… Then yesterday the kids and I had yet another taste for ice cream and we decided fresh mint ice cream sounded dreamy. We found a recipe online and set to work.
As an experiment for those of you who don't have an ice cream maker we tried Ice Cream in a Bag. The concept is that you create an ice cream maker with a zip bag of ice cream custard tucked inside of a zip bag of ice and salt. You shake and massage and it transforms into ice cream.
Full disclosure – we had done it at a birthday party a couple of years ago and it worked awesome (Comilla – share your suggestions in the comments field about how to make this work as well as it did that day!). On this day it worked okay, but we failed and making thick ice cream. We made glorified milkshakes.
The remainder of the batch we put in our trusty thrift store ice cream
maker. And it was nothing short of amazing. You can find the recipe here. Two ice cream posts in one week? I think that's over the top. But whatever. Its August.
P.S. For those of you who left comments yesterday: You can leave up to three comments (one for the heck of it, and an optional second and third for becoming a fan of Clean and Original Tree Swing on Facebook). And please note that the giveaway is for the items described at the bottom – not a tree swing. I hope that wasn't confusing yesterday. To find us on Facebook just search for LuSa Organics and choose the Clean option and search for Original Tree Swing.
Mmmmm….mint ice cream. I am never going to lose a few pounds with all of these ice cream thoughts! Ha!
We made ice cream in a bag for the first time last night, using our freshly picked blackberries. Delicious! The kids said they never want to buy regular ice cream again…I totally agree:) Thanks for the mint suggestion…I have a ton of mint that I don’t know what to do with 🙂
Jordan,
So glad you were inspired! And fresh mint has a completely different flavor than mint extract ice cream. So very good!
Rachel
We are so in love with homemade ice cream here, too! We got the ice cream maker attachment with our stand mixer — looooove.
Old Fashioned vanilla with real vanilla beans was the best!
Wanted to add that the next batch we make is going to be green tea ice cream….my personal favorite!
Casey, I made green tea ice cream last summer. LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!
Rachel
Rachel — did you use green tea powder, or something else?? Trying to figure out the best recipe…
THANK GOODNESS I splurged on an ice cream maker of our own after no luck watching the thrift stores. Just yesterday, in fact. I’ve got a batch right now cooling in the fridge, with lemon balm instead of mint. Same recipe – will report back. I don’t have much mint (yet) but lemon balm is growing like crazy.
Reading yet another ice cream post in blogland would have killed me if I couldn’t try it myself.
Another timely blog post. We just got our kitchen aid ice cream maker in the mail and I sat down to look for recipes! How cool!
Inspiring. I would hop to it, only I’m back in southern hem cool temps. Instead this wonderful veggie chili is what’s going on in our kitchen this weekend…
Billie,
Fall is on my mind lately (being a small-business owner I have to think one season out). Cool temps and veggie chili will be a treat as well… in due time.
~ Rachel
Mary Jo,
Sounds amazing!
~Rachel
I’m definitely going to try this. We don’t have an ice cream maker so hopefully the bag method will work for us. We too have so much spearmint and chocolate mint this year. Feels like I’m harvesting oodles everyday.
Emmy,
How are you using your abundant harvest? Im looking for more ideas!
~ Rachel
We made mint ice cream last night and it was delicious! Thanks for the inspiration. Also for the bug spray I bought Saturday morning in Madison. We delivered our neighborhood newsletters yesterday afternoon and must have applied your insect repellent 4 times; the mosquitoes were really bad but I didn’t get too many bites.
Hooray! And Im glad the bug spray is working, though with frequent reapplication. Pete found the same to be true when he was fishing in a cloud of skeeters last night. Frequent reapplication was needed but he didnt get bit much.
Blessings,
Rachel