HOLIDAY RECIPES: Pumpkin ice cream simple treat

DANIEL CLIFTON • PICAYUNE EDITOR

MARBLE FALLS — I’m going to admit this right off. I kind of took the easy way out this week for my cooking — well, in this case, mixing — endeavor. Burnet County AgriLife Extension Agent Linda Sue Wells provided me with what must be the most challenging recipe yet: pumpkin stew.

Now, it’s not actually “pumpkin” stew but a stew you cook in a pumpkin. It sounded great, especially considering the cool weather setting up across the Highland Lakes. At least it sounded interesting.

But then the weekend came and everything along with it.

Saturday turned into Sunday afternoon, and I hadn’t even rounded up the ingredients. Linda, however, did provide me with two pie pumpkins to give my “experiment” a try. She laughed as she said “experiment.”

Still, as Sunday afternoon rolled around, I faced the distinct possibility that I might not cook something up this weekend. Fortunately, Linda tagged on a back-up recipe on the second sheet.

Pumpkin ice cream.

Yeah, that’s right. I know what you’re thinking. “Why would I make pumpkin ice cream when I can buy it in the store?” Well, because it’s a lot of fun, and unlike other baked goods, you can actually lick the bowl and spoon after this because you don’t use any raw eggs.

I can see everybody in your house lining up for “clean-up” duty now.

When I say this one is pretty simple, I’m not kidding. Oh, but the rewards waiting for you at the end, well, you’ll just have to try it yourself.

In previous recipes, my wife, Sheri, took a look at the amount of ingredients and recommended halving them to make a smaller quantity.

There was no such discussion this time. You just can’t halve pumpkin ice cream — or any ice cream at that matter.

So, with a half-gallon of ice cream, a large bowl, a bag of ginger snap cookies and assorted ingredients — including pumpkin — I was off and mixing. And mixing really is the bulk of this creation. You let the ice cream soften until you can mix it up fairly easily. Then, after combining the sugar, salt (I still haven’t figured out putting salt in a sweet treat), ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and pumpkin, you drop that all into the soft ice cream and keep mixing.

The second mixture causes the ice cream to soften even more, to the consistency of a shake. Now one thing my wife did recommend was adding a large dollop of Cool Whip or whipped cream into the mix. This is something her mom does when making a version of cookies-and-cream ice cream to make it a bit lighter.

So, I did. But if you want to stick with the original recipe, that’s fine. One of the fun things about cooking and baking is tweaking recipes a bit to give them a personal touch.

After stirring it up thoroughly, I poured it into a baking dish lined with gingersnap cookie crumbs. Now, I did sample the gingersnaps for quality-assurance purposes only. Then I poured half the pumpkin ice cream over those crumbs; added another layer of crumbs; and topped it off with the rest of the ice cream.

Now, you’re going to be tempted to just dig in at this point, but you’d be lucky to keep any on the spoon since it isn’t much thicker than a shake. So Linda’s recipe calls for chilling it in the freezer for about five hours.

I’ll admit that took some self-discipline on my part. But once it was frozen, we cut it up and added a little more whipped cream. Then the second bit of self-discipline came into play: not eating the entire thing in one sitting.

daniel@thepicayune.com

Pumpkin Ice Cream

(from Linda Sue Wells)

• 1 (16 oz.) can pumpkin
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ginger
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 cup chopped pecans, toasted
• ½ gallon vanilla ice cream, softened
• 36 gingersnap cookies (broken into crumbs)

DIRECTIONS: Let ice cream soften. Combine sugar, salt, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and pumpkin and then mix into ice cream. Line baking dish with gingersnap cookie crumbs and pour half of ice cream mixture on top. Add another layer of cookie crumbs and then rest of ice cream mixture. Add whole gingersnap cookies on top for presentation. Freeze for about five hours before serving.