Ice Cream

Just recently my mother asked me to pick up some vanilla ice cream she wanted to serve with a pie she had made. I came home with a gallon of 'Pet' vanilla ice cream. She asked me why, out of all the brands at the grocery store, would I choose 'Pet?' I told her   grocery store ice cream,whether it be Ben and Jerry's, Hagen Daaz or Pet all tasted the same to me and that Pet was the cheapest. 

When I was growing up, my mother would make homemade ice cream in the summer from the local peaches using a hand-cranked ice cream churn. We would take turns "churning" and adding endless amounts of rock salt for what seemed like hours until it was ready. That is what ice cream is supposed to taste like and if you've never had homemade ice cream, do yourself a favor a buy an ice cream churn. They make electric ones now with no hand crank churning required.

We've got a few ice cream machines in our house. Two of them we've had for years. They're identical with their big plastic tub that holds a can with a paddle inside of it, with plenty of room between the can and the sides of the tub to pack in lots of ice and salt.

And then there is the Cuisinart machine with its ice cream can insert that needs to be frozen before you can make ice cream. I have two inserts. I store both in the freezer so they are ready to go whenever I have a sudden urge for something sweet and frozen.

I use my old machines for making ice cream, preferring the creamy consistency that results. I use the Cuisinart machine for making sorbet.

Earlier this week I plucked leaves from my lemon verbena plant out in my garden. It was the first time I was using the bright, fresh lemon-scented leaves. For the last couple of years I had searched local nurseries for lemon verbena plants and always came out empty-handed until this spring. There are so many ways I want to use lemon verbena and I am so excited to finally have a plant of my own. I'm told it is a perennial, and if it comes back each year, it becomes a nice shrub. We'll see if it can survive a cold Minnesota winter. I hope so.

For most of my dad’s young life, he lived above and worked at Felcher’s, his parents’ candy store/ neighborhood lunch counter, tucked between P and G's Bar and Grill and Simpson's Hardware Store on Amsterdam Avenue between 73 and 74th Streets. Christopher Morely, imagined the man of the future while watching my dad as a tiny boy play in front of that store and immortalized him in his novel Kitty Foyle.

Throughout college and law school my dad scooped ice cream and served meals at this lunch counter, as his then girlfriend, my mother, perched herself on a stool out front, eating fudgicles and enticing much of the passing parade, including Frank Gifford and his pals, the other NY Giants. I can still see the scoop my father kept from Felcher’s with its well-worn wooden handle and the scored thumb press that pushed a slim metal band, which would release the perfect scoop every time.

A few weeks back, Patricia and I made this angel food cake which was delicious. It also left me with 9 egg yolks. 9 I say! I gave Eli the choice of what to do with the yolks; pot de creme, lemon curd, custard, ice cream. He, of course, chose the ice cream. He and I sifted through David’s book, The Perfect Scoop and it was a toss up between two flavors. I have made a lot of David’s ice creams and I really didn’t want to repeat a recipe. The Butterscotch Pecan got the final vote. And I am so glad it did.

The key word in this recipe is “butter”. The butter mixed with the brown sugar is the flavor profile that resonates on the back of your tongue, long after the ice cream has left your mouth. Mind you, I am not a huge ice cream fan. Generally, I pass on this decadent dessert and go for the apple tart with caramel sauce or a piece of chocolate or the gourmet doughnut (fried-yes, I love a really, really good doughnut). This ice cream is like no other. It is in a class all by itself and this ice cream could send me to a Weight Watchers meeting each week: confessing that my daily points were consumed with a scoop of this ice cream.