Homemade dulce de leche ice cream. It’s a shitty, shitty June.

Last June was sooooooooo hot. Our apartment was like a saunna. I love saunna (imagine sweating but not smelling or feeling all sticky and gross? oh yes, yes it is wonderful), but I do not want to live in a saunna! This June, however, is shitty. Ok, maybe not – it’s pleasant enough, hovering around 60-70. But what’s the point??? It’s fucking summer! It’s SUPPOSED to be super, super hot, to counter the miserable New England winter that we have to endure. Now it’s raining, all the time. It’s as if June thought it wasn’t shitting enough, so now it’s peeing all over the place…The only great thing about that is I don’t have to water my plants and that the annoying drilling from that factory/some kind of construction company next door will stop for a while.

We did get a few days of heat at the beginning (IT WAS ALL A LIIIIIIIEEEE!!), and we made ice-cream every other day or so. There was AVOCADO ICE-CREAM, mango sorbet, pistachio ice-cream, and dulce de leche ice-cream,which I’m addicted to, and it’s…bad. Just look at the ingredients and tell me you think it’s the healthiest ice-cream in the world:

Ingredients: (makes 1 1/2 quart)

1 can of condensed dulce de leche (like condensed milk but the sugar inside has been caramelized)

1 cup of whole milk

1 cup heavy cream (!)

1/2 can of hot water (use the dulce the leche can)

A pinch of salt

2 tsp instant coffee

2 tsp good ground/powdered chocolate

Step 1: Mix the hot water with the dulce the leche, until all the dulce de leche is dissolved.

Step 2: Mix in the milk, heavy cream, coffee and chocolate.

Step 3: Pour into ice-cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions * (I know this is totally anti-climatic – I thought so too, when I read homemade ice cream recipes. Use a machine, at home, and it’s homemade! Well, you really don’t want to do it by hand, trust me.)

I added the coffee and chocolate for kicks, and man was it awesome. It’s like eating caramel in cream form – in other words, perfection. We used to make custard-base ice-cream by hand (meaning stirring the damn thing every 45 mins for a few times), but I broke down and got an ice-cream maker. Most wonderful invention after the telephone! This thing comforts me on rainy days like this.

Now gotta go to sleep, and hope that I won’t wake up to the sound of our neighbors drilling into the ground again. How hard must their life be, you think? Do they just wake up and like, “I can’t wait to shove that machine down some concrete and make some terrible, incessant, loud noise today!”?