Green Tea Ice Cream

I love green tea ice cream.  I first tasted it at a Japanese restaurant in the area only a few years ago, and I couldn’t believe that such a wonderful flavor wasn’t sold at the supermarket along with the vanilla and chocolate.  It turns out that in our small town, if you want green tea ice cream (and you didn’t want to go to a restaurant with four young children), you’d have to make your own.

My only problem was that the Japanese green tea/matcha powder isn’t sold locally either.  Fortunately, our friend Miss Behaving sent us some genuine matcha powder all the way from Japan this summer.  You know it’s real matcha when you can’t even read the writing on the package!  Isaac, who is very much into Nintendo, Pokemon, Bakugan, and all things Japanese, was very impressed.  He eagerly volunteered to help me make some green tea ice cream.

This was my first attempt at making any kind of ice cream.  I found this recipe online and I doubled the amounts.  It turned out to be really simple to make.

We dissolved the matcha powder in some hot water, made some custard out of sugar, egg yolks, milk and cream…

…combined everything and cooled it…

…and churned it in our trusty Kitchen Aid.

It turned out really well!  It was simply delicious, and the entire container was eaten in less than a week by Mark, Isaac and myself.  OK, maybe I had more than my fair share!  😉

Thank you, Miss Behaving, for a real treat!

Giveaway: I Can’t Believe I Never Knew These Existed!

I love iced tea. The only problem is that I didn’t have a good place to make 1-3 servings of it at a time. We do own an old-fashioned kettle, but it’s too big to be practical. I used to use a small pitcher (think: one of those receptacles for holding your cream for coffee), but Mark accidentally broke it. Since then, I had been managing the best I can using coffee mugs and the microwave, and I usually ended up with a big mess since mugs don’t pour well into iced tea glasses.

But not anymore! About a week and a half ago, I was online looking for a recipe for green tea ice cream (if you’ve never had it, it’s GREAT!) I need something called “matcha powder” to be able to make some at home. I found a couple of websites that sell different teas, and that’s when I found this!

It’s called an “IngenuiTEA”. It works great with both tea bags and loose leaf tea. It comes in a small 16 oz size, and a larger 32 oz size. It’s microwave and dishwasher safe! After about 15 minutes, I realized I had to have one. I ordered the 32 oz one along with a 40 oz glass pitcher to make that iced tea I mentioned before. It arrived in 2 days!!! Here’s a demonstration of how it works; I am brewing a pitcher of my favorite organic Red Rooibos loose leaf tea:

The result is a perfect pitcher of iced tea, and all the loose tea leaves are left behind in the IngenuiTEA. It’s very easy to clean – it has a filter that pops out quite easily. I’ve been drinking lots more tea lately! Even Isaac likes it (but I never give him anything that’s caffeinated, of course). Jonny’s not such a big fan of tea.

So I’m giving one of these away. If you are interested, leave a comment. You can tell me about a gadget you can’t live without, share a good recipe you’ve made recently (maybe one for green tea ice cream?), or perhaps an idea to keep kids occupied over the summer. The winner will be chosen at random, and will get to pick what size tea maker s/he would like. Good luck!

Blueberry Muffins

Even though I miss Trinidad, there are some truly awesome things about living in Central PA at this time of year. Fresh local blueberries are high on my list.

And one of my favorite things to make with fresh blueberries is…blueberry muffins!  We use this recipe from the King Arthur flour website.  Normally I wouldn’t break out the Kitchen Aid for muffins, but this isn’t your typical quick bread recipe.  To me it’s more like a cupcake recipe.   Even though blueberry muffins are great, Jonny refuses to eat them.  So I had to make a couple of “plain” muffins for him.

Both Jonny and Isaac helped to make these, but my the time this photo was taken Jonny was upstairs in a time-out for shouting, hitting, and not taking turns.

The muffins turned out great!  Here’s to summer!