Now that he has his very own ice-cream maker, he occasionally feels the urge to experiment. When we had serial episodes of house guests, apportioning everyone their share of freshly-made ice cream it represented as a most nicely-complementing end to a meal. Now that we're just the two of us again, it means that at least half of the new ice-cream produced goes into a container to be kept in the freezer for later use.

The occasions to make a fresh batch consequently are fewer and far between. Which, although I truly do appreciate the taste of the product that he comes out with, is fine with me. Truth is, having ice-cream is less of a treat when it's so readily and too-frequently available. With the ice-cream maker right at hand and the needed ingredients for basic vanilla ice cream (whole milk, sugar, heavy cream, vanilla) at his disposal, we could end up eating too much of the delicacy, far too often.

Yesterday, he decided he would like to try making butter-pecan ice-cream. All we had in the baking pantry was a quarter of the amount of half-pecans he needed, and a lot of crushed pecan, which wouldn't serve the purpose. He decided to improvise and use cashew nuts instead; we had plenty of those, as well as lots of walnuts. The idea was to brown the nuts in butter until they were dark and crispy, to be thrown into the emerging ice-cream during the last few minutes of mixing.

The ice-cream was excellent, quite delicious, but what a whack of (scrumptious) calories!