Ice Cream Sundays - {balsamic strawberry}

With all those strawberries from our last strawberry picking venture, I figured it would be a good time to try a new recipe (we also made strawberry milkshakes - here's the post).  And I had just the recipe waiting: balsamic strawberry from one of my favorite books, Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones.

I think it was meant to be, because not only did we go a little crazy with our strawberry picking & ended up with a ton, but our grocery store had just put a bunch of unique balsamic vinegars on clearance.  I love it when a recipe just comes together like that!

Anyway, this was a very easy recipe: cook the strawberries, cook the base, mix it all up and churn.  I like that the recipe calls for you to puree the cooked strawberries: that's really important because the tiny chunks are much less likely to get icy and if they do - they're so tiny you won't notice.

One thing I will make sure to do next time is to taste the strawberries before cooking them, or during cooking.  In our enthusiasm at the strawberry field, we just might have picked a few pink strawberries, and those slightly underripe berries just might have made it into the recipe because I just might have been thinking that the added sugar would help.  But, lesson learned, taste as you go because our ice cream is not-so-sweet.  Which, for some, that might be a nice change of pace.  For us, we would have preferred a little bit more sweetness.

I've been making lots of salad dressings with balsamic vinegar lately, and now I know how well strawberries and balsamic vinegar compliment one another.  I think I'll throw in some sliced strawberries into my salads from now on.  And then I'll have balsamic strawberry ice cream for dessert!

-Cheryl