Frozen Wonderfulness

First off, you have to know that we have an ice-cream maker. We had a Donvier years ago, and used to make a terrific apricot sorbet by throwing a chilled canned apricots into the food processor and then into the Donvier. But it only made a pint of ice cream, and it was hand-cranked, and so two summers ago I bought myself a Cuisinart ice cream maker. And even though I hardly ever use it, I always keep the bowl in the freezer because you just never know when inspiration will strike. I remember making something one day last summer, and Miss M. tasted it and looked up at me, full of wonder, you made this for me, Mama?

The other night, my in-laws came over for dinner on the spur of the moment. W. ran out and got ground beef and buns, and we made a salad, but there was nothing for dessert – until a light bulb went off in my head.

Wait, I have to backtrack again. After one too many times in which a container of milk¹ went bad before it expired, or worse, was bad when it came home from the supermarket, we got a milkman. It’s heaven, and I don’t even drink milk. They deliver three half gallons of 2% milk in glass bottles² every Monday morning, along with occasional butter or eggs or yogurt. It’s there before we get downstairs in the morning, before the newspaper even shows up.

Even in heaven, nothing’s perfect, and a couple of weeks ago, they delivered the wrong kind of yogurt. I like it plain, to doctor up as I wish with unsweetened fruit, or to use as an ingredient in other stuff. But what we got that day was a quart of low-fat vanilla yogurt. It sat around while I wondered what to do with it – until Saturday night.

I remembered a recipe I’d seen at 101 Cookbooks, a recipe for vanilla frozen yogurt. Heidi uses plain yogurt and sugar and vanilla (and nothing else), but I figured I could make do with the already flavored and sweetened vanilla yogurt. So I strained it for about 20 minutes to thicken it up a bit, tossed in a random container of mascarpone that was in the fridge about to go bad, added a couple of tablespoons of sugar and a bit more vanilla, and whirled it up in the ice cream maker while we were eating the hamburgers. It made just enough pure, clean, easy deliciousness for four grown-ups and one four year old. Yum.








1. Horizon organic milk, to add insult to injury, given the price of organic dairy products.

2. Not organic, but hormone-free and pretty local.