All because we had whole milk...

I made a trip to Wright Dairy to take advantage of one of the finer highlights of living in Alabama. Fresh milk, butter and cheese from cows I can see roaming in beautiful pastures. This story came about because I forgot to take a gallon of whole milk home at the request of my parents. I didn't want to waste it, but what do you do with the richest whole milk out there? Make ice cream, of course! And Wedesday was Michelle's birthday, so that gave me a great excuse. I wanted to make real vanilla bean ice cream, so I looked up a recipe online. Never having made ice cream before, I thought 24 egg yolks sounded like a lot, but I went with it. Little did I know I could have made vanilla bean custard too.
Next came 3 cups of sugar, 5 cups of whole milk and about 10 cups of heavy whipping cream....
Splitting open the beans was another exciting new task for me. And with as much as just two beans costs, I had to be veryy carefee...
Michelle was amazed at how little all of the seeds really were-and boy did it smell delicious...
My second mistake (the first being just grabbing the first detailed vanilla bean recipe online I found), was looking on the back of what I now call heavy hipping cream-scary...
If 1 Tbsp.=1 point (Weight Watchers-wise), then I refuse to do any further math regarding this recipe...
George is helping me beat sugar into all of the eggs yolks...the story inside the story is that after you split eggs to get 24 yolks, you have 24 whites left over. What to do with these? Make merangue cookies, of course. During all of the stirring that had to take place to make the ice cream base, I made mint chocolate merangue and almond merangue cookies...and because the oven racks were close together, I sizzled the top of my hand on one while trying to pull a cookie sheet of beautifully whipped and puffy merengues out:(
Just keep stirring, just keep stirring, stirring, stirring, stirring, stirring, stirring...what do we do? we stirrrr!
While all the stirring was taking place, I found our reflections in the tea pot and found that more interesting for a little while...
Right before the base becomes custard, we put it in a sink full of ice water to stop the cooking process...
After that, the base must sleep overnight in the fridge for ultimate steeping action...
The next evening when we got home from work we set up the ice cream maker...
Step 1: put in the base
Step 2: add ice and rock salt in layers
Step 3: plug in outside
Step 4: run quickly inside to avoid the neighbors coming out to complain about the rattling noise

Step 5: Eat and enjoy!!!......

Step 6: Maybe you go run a couple miles after your overnight rest