Yogurt Ice Cream

Whenever Monte and me are in Ft Collins Colorado, visiting our son Travis, wife Sarah, and now little Emery, we always want to visit a family operated Yogurt Ice Cream place. They sell by the weight and there's lots of flavors and topping choices. The mechanism instantly freezes fresh yogurt, and it's not too sweet (unless you add tons of sweet topping). So I got to thinking ...

YOGURT ICE CREAM

Why not make our own yogurt ice cream. I make yogurt all the time. So with the last making, before even refrigerating it, I mixed

- 4 cups of the yogurt with

- 3/4 cup of sugar till it dissolved and refrigerated it till ready to make ice cream

- (I suppose a bit of vanilla flavoring would be good too)

For years we had a hand-crank ice cream maker - not the kind needing ice and salt - but an insert you keep in the freezer. We still have it for an extra, but it doesn't work as well (dented or something for an improper fit). Now we still have one with an insert for the freezer, but it's electric. While the guys were still enjoying sitting on the deck talking and watching the birds, and I was putting away pizza and salad makings, I dumped the yogurt mixture into the machine and let it run till it was frozen thick. We ate it along with the fresh strawberry grilled dessert pizza.

Our favorite frozen desserts have been pureed fruits - like mango and lime juice. Last year we did some with our garden's currents and greenhouse grapes. Lazy me no longer likes to make up the cooked ice cream bases. Last night's yogurt ice cream was fantastic! We'll be doing it all the time now. Monte often likes to cook up older fruit sitting about and old jam jar bottoms into what he calls a Swedish word for a fruit sauce- 'crem'. This would be good on the yogurt ice cream. The next time I make this I'm going to try substituting the sugar with 1/2 the amount using Agave Nectar.