My husband really is the greatest guy!
For years, I had been wanting a compressor-style ice cream maker. Unlike machines that require the bowl to be frozen, those with their own compressor have a built-in freezer. This offers several advantages. For one, they can keep up with the Arizona heat and crank out a batch of firm ice cream even on the hottest summer days. More importantly, they can make batch after batch, without the bowl having to be frozen overnight. A major boon when feeding 9 eager mouths hungry for ice cream.
Anyhow, several weeks ago, I found a commercial gelato maker on Craigslist. I just love commercial anything, because they have greater capacity and there are so many of us. Plus, commercial stuff usually holds up much better. The price was ridiculously low, just a small fraction of what this puppy costs new. The only problem was that the people selling it lived a couple of hours away in the sticks, which must have been why they kept lowering the price. (By comparison, someone was selling a BROKEN unit for three times that price here in the city.)
I had mentioned it to my husband, but there was no way I was willing or able to go that far to pick it up, with Boaz still being little and not liking to ride in the car. Later that week, I was having a particularly rough day. My husband came home from the office that night, and realizing I'd had a long day, asked what he could do to cheer me up. To myself, I thought "I would really like that ice cream maker right now!" but of course didn't say so.
Well, he walked back out to the van, and walked back in - with my new (to me) gelato maker! I thought he had been at the office all afternoon, but he had, in fact, driven for hours to get it for me. I had not seen that coming, at all! Ever since then, we have made "ice cream" part of our family's daily food pyramid :) So many possibilities!! Just check out my Pinterest board for ice cream recipes :)
View the Original article
