Ice Cream, Pasta Primavera, and Vegetable Tagine

Hey all, time for the next installment of Gina and Zach's Culinary Adventures. So it was my birthday recently, and I got plenty of food related gifts! My mom bought me an Ice Cream Maker (Cusinart too!!). I was very excited to make my first batch. My grandma and grandpa also got me some cool stuff including a set of microplane graters which work great for lemon zest, cheeses, vegetables, and other stuff. I'm also looking forward to making some meatballs since they also got me the Meatball Cookbook Bible which has every type of meatball you could imagine (beef, pork, lamb, veggie, fish, and dessert!). We're planning on doing a recipe from it next week (which we'll post here as well). Anyways, on with the ice cream:

Here is a picture of the new ice cream maker:

We decided to start with strawberry ice cream (since the local grocery store had fresh strawberries on sale). This particular recipe, which came with the ice cream maker, had us macerate the strawberries in lemon juice with sugar for a few hours prior to using. Overall, the whole process was very straightforward, and I am looking forward to making many other yummy flavors this summer!

The ingredients:

3 c of fresh strawberries, stemmed and sliced

4 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 1/2 c sugar

1 1/2 c skim milk

2 3/4 c heavy cream

1 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

The recipe: Macerate strawberries in lemon juice w/ half a cup of sugar for ~2 hours. Strain the berries, keep the juices. Mash or puree half of the berries. In a medium mixing bowl, combine milk and remaining sugar until dissolved (with a hand mixer on low). Stir in heavy cream, reserved strawberry juice, and vanilla. Put it in the ice cream maker, add the remaining strawberries with ~5 mins left. Then I let it sit in the freezer to firm up. Good stuff!

We also made two vegetarian dishes from Gina's vegetarian cookbook. First: the pasta primavera (which we've already made and blogged about before, but it was soooo good that we had to do it again!)

It's pretty simple: first, we cooked onions, yellow squash, and zucchini, and garlic in some oil for a few minutes.

 Then, we put in some fresh tomatoes, broccoli, carrots and cooked for a few more minutes. 

 Meanwhile, we cooked some pasta and defrosted some frozen peas. Threw it all together, with some milk and Parmesan cheese. Very good! and so simple. Also, pretty healthy I imagine.

We did another vegetarian recipe. Gina's been wanting to make this vegetable tagine for a while. It's basically a medley of eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash, green pepper, carrots, onions (and of course garlic). Here's a picture of the ingredients:

It was pretty much as simple as cooking these ingredients (started w/ cooking the onions and squash, then threw in the eggplant, a can of tomatoes, and garbanzo beans). It's important to note that we added some cinnamon, cumin, and red pepper flakes: these spices really made the final product very nice. We served it with some couscous and were very satisfied. We made quite a bit, so we'll be eating this for a few days! Sounds good to me.

:)