I Scream For Ice Cream.

There are two things I grew up loving about summer: swimming and that once or twice a year we got to have homemade ice cream.  My grandma or mom used to ask my grandpa what kind of ice cream he wanted them to make, and he always had the same answer. "Anything as long as it's banana."

So of course, we usually had banana, but I didn't mind because I loved it, too.

Now that I'm all grown up, there are two things I love about summer: swimming and making homemade ice cream.  This summer, I've made far more ice cream that I have in the past, but I think it's because it's so simple.  Plus, it's great because we can make pretty much anything we can think up.  This base is a simple vanilla, but I added Oreos to make cookies and cream or bananas to make banana.  (I'm toying with making peanut butter banana or replacing some of the sugar with brown sugar and adding peach...) The recipe I use as a base has been in my family longer than I have.  My mom actually put it in a recipe box she made in her high school home economics class.  It only has 6 ingredients, so it's a great go-to recipe for us.

I use a counter top electric ice cream maker from Hamilton Beach.  I got it for around $30, and it's totally worth the investment.  (You can get it here!)  It has a canister that is removable that you will freeze for 24 hours or so before you actually start the ice cream, but we leave ours in our freezer so it's always ready to go.  This recipe will fit that ice cream maker (1.5 quarts), but you can easily adapt it for a gallon ice cream maker that uses ice and rock salt.

What you'll need:
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups of sugar
1 1/2 tbsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
2 cups heavy cream
milk

What you'll do:

Start with the eggs in a bowl of an electric mixer.  With the whisk attachment, beat the eggs until they are frothy.  This will take a minute or two.

Next, with the mixer running, slowly pour in your sugar.  Let the mixer do its thing for about 5 minutes, and what results is a smooth, thick, creamy pale yellow beautiful thing.

Once you've hit this stage, add in the rest of the ingredients and mix.  In these pictures, I'm just making plain vanilla ice cream, but if I wanted to make something else, I'd add in the extra stuff now.

Refrigerate for a few hours so your mixture is nicely chilled before it goes into the ice cream maker.

During this time, the flavors of anything you add will infuse into the ice cream.

After the base has chilled, put together your ice cream maker and pour in your deliciousness.

See how it's not full?  It needs milk.  I have no idea how much milk I add.  Maybe a cup...?

Turn that sucker on and let it do its thing.

After the machine turns off, it's finished churning, and it needs to be frozen for a few hours to set.

I did learn that when I'm churning the ice cream, the big pieces of extra things, like Oreos, that I added got really broken up, so after I've finished I like to add more just so there's more texture to the final product.

So that's it.  And then you can enjoy the best ice cream ever.