Chocolate Beet Milkshake (#IceCreamWeek)

Welcome to day 2 of Ice Cream Week 2014! This year the event is hosted by Kim of Cravings of a Lunatic and Susan of The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen. We have teamed up with 25 amazing bloggers to bring you ice cream treats all week long. It's an epic week full of frozen treats, beets [wait, what? beets?], and a giveaway!

Go Jacks! Let's get the new school year off to a great start!

Humans crave connection with other humans. Vegetables can forge that connection.

This may seem a strange way to start headnotes on a chocolate beet milkshake recipe, but I'll circle around and it will make sense, I promise. This will be especially true if you're a person who eats seasonally from a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share or one who succumbs to the bright colors of the farmer's market and ends up with way more vegetables than you planned.

A couple of weeks ago I took my son to sled hockey camp. We were fortunate that several Big Names in the sport were in attendance. My son held gold medals from Sochi 2014 and Vancouver 2010 and skated alongside the gracious athletes who earned them. The last morning of camp I met the guest coach. Conversation quickly turned to food, as it always does around me, and he shared memories of the meals he'd eaten while in Sochi and in other international travels. Then I mentioned something about our farm share, and this man said "I'm looking forward to fresh corn".

BOOM! All of a sudden this guy went from, in my eyes, an internationally famous coach (with whom I had little in common) to a fellow seasonal eater. I, too, know the feeling of anticipating the vegetables of the upcoming season. In late winter I crave the fresh greens of Spring, in Summer I crave tomatoes, and in Fall I'm crave sweet potatoes and winter squash [winter is the time of the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve, my freezer, and my pantry].
Local, seasonal vegetables forged a connection.

How to Make an Ice Cream Pie at Home (#IceCreamWeek)

Welcome to Ice Cream Week 2014! This year the event is hosted by Kim of Cravings of a Lunatic and Susan of The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen. We have teamed up with 25 amazing bloggers to bring you ice cream treats and a giveaway all week long. I hope you have as much fun as we are! Break out those stretchy pants and celebrate Ice Cream Week with us.

In my teens I worked at Baskin Robbins. I started out scooping ice cream--making cones, shakes and sundaes. By the time I was in college I was the summer/holiday ice cream cake and pie maker, filling in for the mom who worked full-time during the school year. Having thus established my bona fides, I'd like to share how simple it is to make an ice cream pie at home.

At the ice cream shop I didn't get all Little Red Hen-ish. Instead of raising the cows and planting the wheat, I just assembled the desserts using pre baked cakes, pre churned ice cream, pre made fudge sauce and the like. If you'd like to make your own ice cream, fudge sauce, or pie crust there are recipes from my fellow bloggers below and I'd like to give a special shout out to Beth's Thin Mint Ice Cream, Donalyn's Fresh Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream, and Carla's Homemade Hot Fudge Sauce because they are recipes I've bookmarked to try.

Today I'm not going to show you how to make ice cream--instead, I want to show the techniques I learned while making ice cream pies for a living--and how you can do this in a home kitchen [or at work in a thrift shop--really anywhere with a freezer, a flat surface, and access to clean water will do].

#IceCreamWeek is Coming!

That photo is not a pizza. Nor is it anything involving vegetables. Instead, this is a warning to you. I'd like to announce a radical departure from my usual routine and suggest you consider digging out the stretchy pants. Instead of my typical posting schedule--sharing a vegetable- or fruit-inspired recipe on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I will be sharing 6 recipes [all involving ice cream] over the next week. You could say I've been churning (or no churning--puns totally intended) quite a lot lately.

You know we eat more than just the goodies from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, right? Even though we are walking distance from Graeter's ice cream, I occasionally make ice cream treats at home. In fact, I've wanted to share How to Make an Ice Cream Pie on this blog practically from the start. With my blog's focus--on how to make the most of the produce from your farm share, garden, or farmer's market--I didn't really see how I could include an ice cream pie.

When Kim announced that she and Susan were hosting HashtagIceCreamWeek I knew I had my opportunity. I had a blast participating in HashtagAppetizerWeek, so why not join in the fun? I'm not completely chucking my local produce focus out the window this week--in fact 3 of the 6 recipes I'll be posting use a fruit or vegetable. The others? Well, it's Ice Cream Week and I believe in going big with the flavor--and fat carries flavor, as does chocolate [I'm just guessing here, roll with me].

Six different recipes is a lot of ice cream to crank out [the puns, they keep coming], so it's a good thing that I am training to walk a half marathon next month and shared some of these recipes with my son's marching band and the gals at work. It's hard to share ice cream and take photos, though, so the pies . . . well . . . I had to keep making them to get a decent photo of a slice. I had to. Really.

On Monday I'll share How to Make an Ice Cream Pie at Home. This concept recipe is one I use often, with whatever flavors we're craving at the moment (Chocolate Mint/Grasshopper Pie, Caramel Fudge Pie, and Sea Salt Caramel Pie are big favorites). On Tuesday I'll nod to the vegetable focus of this blog with a Chocolate Beet Milkshake.

I'm sharing a lazy way to use up leftover fruit salad in Lazy Leftover Fruit Salad Ice Cream on Wednesday. Thursday we're getting spicy with Cinnamon Chunk Ice Cream, and on Friday we're turning that ice cream into Snickerdoodle Ice Cream Sandwiches. We'll round out the #IceCreamWeek recipes with Caramel Toffee Apple Parfaits on Saturday.

In addition to a whole host of bloggers churning out ice cream recipes each day, we've got giveaways, too! Stop in and check it out. I'll return to my regular posting schedule [after a good training walk and a nice long nap] on Monday August 25th with Eggplant Walnut Dip.

This is not ice cream. These are vegetables.