Mint Chocolate Ice Cream

So, one of my favorite bloggers out there, Anna at Cookie Madness, made ice cream over the weekend!  Who cares?  Me!  Anna hardly ever makes ice cream.  In fact, I don’t recall in the more than 2 years I’ve been reading her blog her ever posting ice cream before.  So I loved her post about her favorite mint chocolate ice cream.  And me being on the big ice cream kick I have been lately decided I just had to make THAT ice cream—today.

We love mint chocolate chip ice cream ‘round here.  I’m always up for trying new recipes.  And what I liked about this recipe that Anna made, which is a recipe from The Ultimate Ice Cream Book, is that it doesn’t have a BUNCH of egg yolks, but it’s still a super creamy custard based ice cream.  It uses two whole eggs as well as cream and whole milk.  This might be the best mint ice cream I’ve ever made.  (Though I do also really like the Fresh Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream I made a few months ago.)

I plan to try some other flavors with this same recipe for the custard/cream because I really liked the creaminess and texture of it.  I’ll start with just a vanilla.  Sam is begging for Root Beer Floats.

I don’t like how the pictures turned out, since it was dark by the time I took them.  I need some photography lighting equipment.

Don’t let the photos scare you away from making this ice cream if you are a mint chocolate chip ice cream lover.  It’s worth it!  Check out Anna’s post for this great recipe.  Get this—I followed the recipe exactly!  (I only had imitation peppermint extract, but it seems to have worked just fine.)

Thanks, Anna!  I’ll have to add that book to my wish list.

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We had a huge wind storm here tonight, they’re saying micro bursts with some wind rotation, all over Salt Lake and Utah County.  The news showed tons of uprooted trees and all kinds of damage.  We saw someone’s small blue kiddie pool flying by in the sagebrush out back.  (I thought we left that weather behind in Kansas?)

You can barely see the pool out there a little to the left center.  Of course, it was just rolling away, until I got the camera, then it stopped.  Sigh.  Apparently there were winds over 75 mph, the airport was closed and power lines down over I-80 West of SLC.

Here’s Taylor and Sam playing with my camera.

This is a really cute shot Taylor took of Sam, posing in the “window” to the play room.

(A little glimpse into our front door/entryway and living room.  The stairs go up to an area for our someday dream grand piano.  Our pretty-nice electric piano doesn’t look too bad up there. 

School starts for the boys this week.  Scott starts on Tuesday and the others start on Wednesday.  Wouldn’t you know it, Sam’s had a cold for a few days now.  Taylor woke up in the night with cold/nose issues as well.  The three of us stayed home from church today.  They WILL be better by Wednesday. ;)

We went to This Is The Place Monument Park last week with Grandpa Smith and a few other cousins and Aunt Debbie.  It was pretty fun with lots of things to do and see in remembrance of what it was like back in the days when the pioneers came and settled in the Salt Lake valley.  There was a little, tiny one room house that we were told a family with 10 kids lived in.  Oh my goodness—we are SO blessed!  There was a petting zoo.  Parker really liked the sheep.

Here’s how exciting Scott thought it was---

Parker and Sam rode on some horses.  Taylor and Scott didn’t want to.  There was a huge cloud burst with pouring rain right at that time.  I stood there watching them and trying to take some pictures while getting soaked.  Didn’t even compare to what the pioneers when through to cross the plains and get here!

We had a lot of fun.  Thanks, Grandpa!