Confession of a Lapsing Environmentalist

We own a chest freezer, and I love it! We didn’t buy it new, we weren’t even looking for one. It found us. Our neighbors were moving to Colorado and didn’t want to take it with them, so they asked if we wanted to buy it at 30% of the price (it was only 2 years old).

Yes, I feel ashamed to revel in such wanton energy use, but I can’t deny that the freezer is darn useful. I rationalize that thanks to the freezer, we can buy ORGANIC frozen vegetables in bulk through our buying club, we always have ORGANIC frozen dinners on hand, we can buy our ORGANIC nuts and flour in bulk and they won’t go rancid, and we no longer have bread that goes bad because some loaves can’t make it through the week (we go through 4 or 5 per week).

But really, I love it because we can finally make homemade ice cream that WORKS! Our freezer compartment never froze the bowl completely, so the finished product would be more of a slushy than soft-serve ice cream. And when we would try to harden the ice cream by keeping it in the freezer, it would harden into a big clump.

But no longer – nay, now what comes out of the 20-minute ice cream process is soft-serve ice cream, and a brief stay in the freezer produces real, honest-to-goodness, ice cream!

Last night we made candy cane peppermint ice cream. Deeeelicious! (and the peppermint was, yup, you guessed it – ORGANIC [so that ain't so bad, right?])