Fruit Soup and Vanilla ice Cream

There's a Spanish restaurant around here that we love and it has this incredible dessert. It's a fruit soup with scoop of cheese ice cream, sprigs of mint, and fresh berries. Well, since we have a bunch of fruit hanging around and a brand-new ice cream maker that's still crying out to be used, I decided to experiment.

Fruit Soup

1 peach
2 small red plums
1 apricot
cherries (1 c. or so)
strawberries (maybe 1/2 cup?)
blueberries (probably around 1 or 2 cups)
freshly ground nutmeg (probably came to around 1 tsp)
fresh ginger (1/2 an inch or so)
sugar
water

I had some of the medium syrup left over from trying strawberry sorbet and watermelon yogurt ice a week or so before, so I just used that, but it probably would have been about 1/2 c. sugar and a cup or so of water. Anyway, peel, core and slice the fruit (you can use this particular combination of fruit, or whatever similar ones you have on hand) as necessary and put it in the pot with the sugar, water, and spices (feel free to adjust the spices as you desire and use ground/dried if you don't have fresh stuff). Simmer for 15 or 20 minutes until the fruit has fallen apart and practically dissolved. Puree it, then strain it through a sieve. The soup from the restaurant is more like a broth - they obviously just used the strained juices, but we tossed some of the pureed fruit back in for texture (and because I only have a very tiny strainer and stuff fell over the sides). Put in the fridge to cool.

Vanilla Ice Cream

2 c. half and half or milk
1/2 c. sugar
6 egg yolks
1 c. heavy cream, more milk, or half and half
1-2 tsp vanilla

I'd found a recipe for chocolate ice cream, and basically left out the chocolate, and I'd been reading several other ice cream recipes, so I kind of mentally combined them all to make this.

Combine dairy product (we ended up using about 1 1/2 cups each of whole milk and half and half total in the recipe) of your choosing, with 1/2 c. sugar in saucepan. Heat until steam is coming off the milk but it's not boiling yet. Remove from heat.

With a whisk or mixer, combine the egg yolks with the other 1/4 c of sugar until it's all yellowy and frothy (the recipe said 2-4 minutes, but I did it just a bit longer). Temper the eggs by adding about 1/2 cup of the warm half and half slowly while mixing it up. Add the tempered eggs to the rest of the milk, and cook it over medium-low heat until it's a bit thicker. Don't boil it!

Strain it into a bowl, add the last cup of dairy product. Add more sugar if you want, and this is when I added the vanilla. Chill it in the fridge, then make it into ice cream using your ice cream machine!

Once we finally got the ice cream to freeze (I'm not sure whether our ice cream machine bowl wasn't cold enough, it was too hot, or the ice cream mixture wasn't cool enough, but it didn't set up at all the first time we tried it, so we gave it another shot the next day after everything went back into the fridge/freezer), we served it up and it was yummy! Not adding the pureed fruit back in would make it much smoother obviously, but it was good this way, too. All in all, a success!

Sorry no pictures - I would have taken one of the finished, dished-up product but my stinker of a son was having a bad night.

Thyme (Formerly known as A - see, it only took me like a month to pick a spicy nickname)