South Bend, Indiana isn't the kind of place you'd expect to find a bustling year round farmer's market. Nothing against my hometown, but it becomes something of a frigid winter wonderland between November and March every year.
After arriving amid an ice storm (on a flight that nearly landed twice before finally arriving safely on the ground an hour late), my mom mentioned that we might go to the farmer's market. Farmer's market? Really?
Sure enough, we ventured downtown to the (thankfully) indoor marketplace Saturday morning.
The market becomes something of a craft show/ farmer's market/ other food goods during the winter months. Nevertheless, there were some legitimate farmers selling the usual winter fare: apples, pears, and root vegetables.
My most exciting purchase? A whole dozen Jumbo eggs for a mere $2.00-- half the price of my market eggs in the DC area. I told the farmer that it was a good price, but he seemed unimpressed by my enthusiasm.
My niece seemed to enjoy the farmer's market for another reason: candy corn. Not exactly organic, local, or healthy, but it made her smile anyway.
Back to the local purchases, I was particularly excited about the dozen eggs. One of my Christmas presents for my parents was the Williams Sonoma Ice Cream Book, along with some good quality chocolate, vanilla beans, and lovely glass ice cream dishes. You see, my parents have something that I very much covet for myself (once I dwell in a place larger than the Garden Apartment): an ice cream maker.
My niece and nephew are five and six years old, the perfect ages to act as cooking assistants. Being their first time making ice cream, I thought we'd keep it simple and make vanilla ice cream.
The Williams Sonoma recipe is a very rich custard based recipe. In fact, the custard itself was so delicious that I had to restrain myself from eating it all before putting it into the ice cream maker.
My niece prides herself on her ability to crack eggs. She asked if I'd let her crack the eggs, but in fact, we only needed the yolks for this recipe. I demonstrated how to separate the whites from the yolks. Amazingly, she was able to do the rest of the eggs (5 more) all by herself.
Once the custard was nice and creamy, we ran it through a fine mesh sieve before storing it in the refrigerator for a few hours.
At 7PM, I excitedly announced to the kids that it was time to process the ice cream.
They came running into the kitchen at record speed. We went through the entire process of pouring the custard into the ice-cream maker and then turning the machine on. Alas- after 25 minutes of very eager waiting. . . we found that we still had room temperature custard. Hmm.
At this point, my engineer husband decided to consult the owner's manual. What a novel idea! Upon reading the instructions, we discovered that we actually had to freeze the barrel for up to 22 hours. We apologized to the kids, and sent them to bed with promises of ice cream the next day.
The following day, we again went through the steps of pouring the custard:
Willow was a good helper for Uncle John.
Harrison was a good observer. . .
And Uncle John decided to be a little silly with the remaining custard.
Twenty-five successful minutes later we had real frozen vanilla ice cream. The kids ran around the house providing spoonful samples to all the adults. Then, we made ourselves delicious ice cream sundaes.
If you'd like to try this recipe, check out the Williams Sonoma Ice Cream Book (with lots of other wonderful ice cream recipes), or access the recipe here.
