#1 Fresh Garden Mint

This is Herbert, a mint plant I acquired last Sunday at a local Farmers' Market. Herbert is the inspiration for the first ice cream of 2011: Fresh Garden Mint. Herbert is still too young to provide all of the mint necessary for the ice cream, so I purchased fresh mint from a local grocery store. Maybe that means I shouldn't call this ice cream fresh "garden" mint, but I'm going to call it that anyway because this was a trial run for the day when Herbert can begin producing abundant and tasty mint leaves for use in many ice creams.

Fresh Garden Mint came into being late last night. When I arrived home from work I began steeping the mint leaves in milk and sugar. Then after some intense heating and whipping and chilling I went out to dinner at Casa Sanchez and had the most amazing molé chicken enchiladas ever. After getting home from dinner I put the chilled ice cream mixture into the ice cream maker and then, finally, the final product emerged...and sprouted a sprig of mint itself! Okay, I put that mint leaf on there to make the scoop look more appealing. Did it work?

(Mint Moon Rising...)
Having made a mint ice cream previously using mint extract, I have to say that the flavor of this ice cream is not a strong as I personally would have liked. But then again I absolutely LOVE mint... mint chocolate chip ice cream has always been my favorite flavor. There has never been another. The mint taste in this ice cream is fresh, mild, and lasting - it's a very natural flavor. In the future I plan to steep the mint leaves for an hour or more so that all their delicious minty flavors are set free. I may also try using an immersion blender to blend them into the ice cream mixture, then strain the mixture to remove any stray leaf particles. I used this procedure last year with a basil ice cream, which turned out amazing. We'll probably be visiting minty ice creams a lot throughout the year for the obvious reason mentioned previously.

One more thing: this ice cream turned out to be a very slight barely noticeable shade of green. Okay, maybe it's white. I would have liked it to be green, though, because green ice cream just screams, "MINT!" Or sometimes "Pistachio"...