Vanilla bean ice cream with brown sugar shortbread & blueberry lemon jam

Like many of my friends, I saw Brian David Gilbert's video about ice cream and immediately purchased an ice cream maker. It was early days in the pandemic and I was looking for something, anything to do, and had transcended pepcorn. Ideally I was looking for something to get really into, and then too into, and then out of, and then into again, etc. And so the ice cream maker is great fun!

I spend most of my time with it just throwing shit in to see if it will ice cream. Most often, I am noodling on a recipe from "The Perfect Scoop" by David Lebovitz. One summer I tried to and semi-successfully recreated my favorite-ever Trader Joe's product, their lemon gingersnap ice cream. One time I managed to fit an entire leftover-from-a-friend's-birthday marionberry pie into one batch of ice cream. One time we ran two identical ice cream makers side by side at a beach house to make the best ever Reese's peanut butter cup ice cream. It is a great unitasker, I would also bail on my Instant Pot before giving up the ice cream maker.

My most recent ice cream endeavor was a vanilla bean ice cream with brown sugar shortbread and blueberry lemon jam. A friend invited me over for dinner and I, a totally normal person, was like "can I bring ice cream?" Knowing full well I did not yet have ice cream, and just enjoy creating stressful arbitrary deadlines for myself for fun.

This was set in a vanilla base, except I didn't have a vanilla bean so replaced with vanilla paste. I wanted some slightly savory, buttery crunch, and so I whipped up a batch of Deb's brown sugar brown butter shortbread (and also saved some slabs for tea this week).

I swirled in some blueberry lemon jam, made with Dukes picked at Columbia Farms on Sauvie Island. This is my favorite place to pick berries in Portland! However, the blueberries still don't beat the ones from Rush River Produce in Maiden Rock, Wisconsin.

I don't even know my recipe for blueberry lemon jam at this point, I've been making it for a decade and now just fully wing it. You almost don't even need pectin because blueberries have a lot in their skin, but I usually add some just in case I winged it so hard that I ended up making blueberry syrup accidentally.

This one was pretty dang good but also had a weirdly low melting point! I also hadn't made ice cream in a bit, and totally borked it early on by pouring too-warm liquid into a frozen bowl without the machine running. Ah well, you learn and you grow and you chip a thin layer of milk off a frozen piece of metal with a butter knife sometimes.

I gotta make more this summer, and need to prioritize freezer space for the bowl so I can be especially reckless with it.