Over the summer Miss Sweet Tooth has been making home-made ice-cream with our excess of fruit from the orchards. Never a dull moment.

Her latest experiment was lemon grass ice cream. That was pretty nice. She crushed some lemongrass shoots. Home-grown, organic, free range, lemon grass. It grows wild under the tank stand these days. She boiled it with a couple of tea spoons of sugar to give it a little sweetness. Then, after cooling it down she whisked it together with a 300 ml. jar of our local dairy’s fresh cream. She did it the simple, old-fashioned way, just using a fork.  The mixture has to be put in the freezer and taken out twice or three times during that day to re-whisk it to get it fluffy and light while it is freezing.

She has made all sorts of fruit based ice creams this season. What ever is in excess gets pulped, boiled, sieved, creamed, whisked and frozen.

So far she has made youngberry, yellow plum, peach, red plum, Japanese green tea, cumquat and now lemongrass. If it’s got a nice flavour, if you can boil it and freeze it, then it can be made into ice-cream. Don’t stand still for too long in this kitchen!

Simple and very interesting, tangy, fruity, sweet and delicious stuff. Lovely mouthfeel and with that ultimately satisfying hint of saturated fat on the finish! A lovely way to end a meal on these hot days.

She used to make her icecream using an egg custard base to make the ice cream richer. I believe that this might be the traditional way. However, this straight forward simple recipe is quicker and works well enough for us. The only thing to be carefull of is to not use too much water in the fruit juice syrup, or you will get a lot of ice crysytals forming.

Health warning – don’t eat ice-cream. It contains sugar and saturated fat.

Life advice – Chase more butterflies , eat more ice-cream!