Six quarts of strawberries, just picked by my neighborhood farmer!

I roasted some with a bit of vanilla bean paste. The vanilla revs up the strawberry flavor and the result is a wonderful compote/syrup. It would take just a bit of pectin to jell this…maybe just a kiwi. Did you know kiwi has pectin and if you add it to strawberries, they jell? Well, it is true, but I wanted more of a syrup which is a good thing as I didn’t have any kiwi!

So pretty and now sitting in my refrigerator to be drizzled over yogurt and maybe a Sunday morning waffle.

And though it is not of jam or jelly consistency, that did not stop me from drizzling a bit on this morning’s toast with goat cheese.

So.

After the roasting, I still had plenty of berries. Some I froze, but some I mixed with some rhubarb and made a variation of Magda’s Rhubarb Ice Cream recipe.

I was very intrigued by the technique of making the ice cream without a machine since I don’t have an ice cream machine. Basically, I become the machine…doing the churning and air incorporating by whisking and/or blending the mix every 30 minutes until it gets to a soft serve consistency.

I think a key to this working is also to use metal bowl and utensils – all kept very cold.

That’s what I did.

Aaack!! – blurry, but you can kind of sort of see the texture coming together. This is the third “stir”.

One more and then I left it alone for 2 more hours to harden to regular ice cream consistency.

It worked! The texture is perfect.

This recipe was heavy cream (a lot of fat and not much going for it nutritionally ), fruit and sugar. I want to try the technique with a custard based recipe and see what happens.

But, no complaints about this version for an occasional treat.

For my variation, I roasted some rhubarb, strawberries and vanilla bean paste, reduced the sugar from the above linked recipe and I did not do the crumble addition.

Even Bob agrees that it was a berry good day!