If at all possible, I try to avoid investing in a product that can only do one thing. Hence, I have no ice cream maker. I do however, have a Vitamix, and while this is not a product placement ad, the following recipe needs a blender with a bit of power because – and here’s the cool revelation – you can use your powerful blender to make ice cream!

Or ice milk, or buttermilk ice – we haven’t really come up with a name for it. But it takes only three ingredients: 3 cups frozen fruit, 1 cup buttermilk, and 1/3 cup sugar. The original recipe called for peaches, which sounds divine. But we don’t have a lot of peaches in the PNW. What I do have in my freezer are lots and lots of berries. So I substituted strawberries. Yum! The buttermilk makes for a great mouth-feel, and the fresh strawberry flavor just leaps out. And so simple! Blend it up, scrape into a container (my pyrex bread pan lends a gelato look, no?), and freeze for a couple of hours. The nice thing about this recipe is that you can refreeze what you don’t consume right away and the texture doesn’t suffer. Other similar recipes I’ve tried have ended up a block of ice once fully frozen.

This time, I added some fresh thyme from the garden – just because, you know, why not be creative?  A great resource is Erica Strauss’s blog NW Edible Life, and even though we don’t make much jam, I find her jam flavor chart to be super-helpful for a myriad of other things, from baking to popsicles.

Enjoy!