Ice Cream! Ice Cream!

Vanilla goes best, we think. This is too simple to post, but in the interests of completeness:

1 cup whole milk, 2 cups heavy cream.

3/4 cup sugar

tsp double strength vanilla

Combine, pour into ice cream freezer. Dump into plastic bowl, cover, place in freezer.

We have one of those small Cuisinart ice cream freezers. It works great! Get the one with the extra freezer bowl so you can make ice cream every day. I usually make this earlier in the day, because straight out of the ice cream freezer it's more like soft-serve. Nothing wrong with that, but for the crostata...

Also, I save the vanilla beans from the Penzeys bottles, along with any others I might use, dry them and dump them in a special jar. I have quite the collection of dry vanilla beans going now, and I keep them with sugar. After several weeks, I sieve that jar into another, and then refill the special jar with plain sugar and the dry vanilla beans in the sieve. Presto! Vanilla sugar. Great for ice cream. (or cookies, or...)

When summer gets closer, I'll tell you more about the ice cream that I cook first, and how to make chocolate or strawberry ice cream...