Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream In A Bag...

2:20 pm - 61 degrees - mostly cloudy, light wind...

This past weekend we went camping at the beach and we made some homemade vanilla ice cream in a bag to go along with our Dutch Oven Peach Cobbler.  Let me just say... it was an amazingly simple and delicious camping dessert!

Everyone made their own individual servings of ice cream, in their own baggies and it took maybe 15 minutes... or less.  The hardest part of the whole process was shaking the gallon sized bag, half filled with ice for about 10 minutes.

~ Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream ~

2 Tbsp Sugar

1 Cup Half & Half

½ tsp Vanilla Extract

½ Cup Coarse/Canning Salt

Ice

Pint – size Ziploc Bag

Gallon – size Ziploc Bag

Mix the sugar, half & half and vanilla extract together.  Pour into a pint-sized Ziploc baggie.  Make sure it seals tightly.

Take the gallon-size Ziploc bag and fill it up halfway with ice and pour the salt over the ice.  Now place the cream filled bag into the ice filled bag.  Make sure it is sealed tightly and start shaking. 

Shake constantly for about 5-10 minutes.

Open the gallon-size bag and check to see if the ice cream is hard, if not keep shaking.  Once the ice cream is finished, quickly run the closed pint-size baggie under cold water to quickly clean the salt off the baggie.

Open the baggie and pop in a spoon and enjoy! 

Firewood Cutting Is Underway...

12:43 pm - 60 degrees - lightly raining...

A wood-burning fireplace is one of the simplest joys of the winter months.  It’s also a lot of work.

For us, our wood burning fireplace is currently our only source of heat, so falling, cutting, splitting and stacking firewood is an important skill for us to know and do.

  

Tony does all the falling of trees and cutting those logs into rounds.  Thankfully we live on many acres of wooded forest so we are able to start at the source.

  

I help Tony with the splitting.  Even when log rounds are small in diameter, it makes sense to split them.  Splitting speeds along the drying process and improves the burning qualities.

And we all pitch in to do the stacking.

Even though the ideal time to cut firewood is in the late winter and early spring months (this allows for the maximum drying time), we usually have so much going on, that we don’t get around to cutting, splitting and stacking our firewood until the end of July, beginning of August.

So firewood cutting for this coming winter is underway.  Tony spent last weekend cutting this pile of logs...

...into this pile of rounds. 

Now the splitting and stacking starts.  How much wood could a wood stacker stack if a wood stacker could stack wood?  We’ll soon find out...