Strawberry ice cream

“Another prefect day, all jade and sapphire. No place can have more beautiful days than Minnesota when it behaves,” Sinclair Lewis said. Today was one of those very well-behaved days that make you remember why we live here.

After Dave brewed a batch of beer, we wandered down to the sun-soaked patio at Sandcastle, back for more fish tacos and people watching. Then it was time for a spot of gardening, including my favorite kind: Time to pick what passes for a blueberry harvest. It’s small, but it’s ours, and this year we made sure to get to it before the birds and squirrels.

Then we grilled asparagus from the farmers market and pork chops from Jagerstatter Farm, with a side of quinoa tossed with vegetables sautéed in cumin-garlic oil. 

I was in the market for the perfect ending to a pretty much perfect day, so I hauled out the ice cream maker to use up some of the quarts of strawberries we got at the market.

Strawberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream

Adapted from “The Perfect Scoop” by David Lebovitz, a cookbook devoted to ice creams, sorbets, granitas and other such goodies.

Ingredients

3 ½ cups sliced fresh strawberries

¾ cup sugar

1 tablespoon vodka or kirsch (I used vanilla-flavored vodka)

1 cup sour cream

1 cup heavy cream

½ teaspoon fresh lemon juice

Method

Toss sliced berries with sugar and vodka to dissolve sugar. Let macerate for one hour at room temperature. In a food processor, pulse together strawberry mixture, cream, sour cream and lemon juice. Refrigerate for one hour. Process mixture according to ice cream maker’s instructions. Makes just over a quart.

Rating: Wow. This did not disappoint. The recipe says to try to eat this soon after it’s been churned. No worries there. I used low fat sour cream because that’s what I had on hand. If it suffered from the substitution, we didn’t. There may have been some discreet bowl licking involved. Hard to beat fresh market strawberries over homemade vanilla ice cream, but I think this does it. Definite keeper.