Vanilla Spice Ice Cream

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Preparation time: 15 minutes to prepare, 2–6 hours to chill, and about 22–35 minutes in the ice-cream maker. If you don’t have an ice-cream maker, you can look up instructions online for making ice cream without a maker, or follow our instructions below. This will take about 2–3 more hours in the freezer.

Servings: 6

This is a delicious twist on vanilla with some of your favorite Thanksgiving spices, like cinnamon, allspice, and cardamom. Easy to digest, dairy-free, and sure to delight!

INGREDIENTS:

1 (12-oz.) can of organic coconut milk (get a brand that is BPA free, or make your own by following the directions below)

1½ cups extra-virgin olive oil

10 dates

2 egg yolks

2 Tbsp. vanilla extract

1 Tbsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. cardamom

1 tsp. allspice

1 tsp. sea salt

INSTRUCTIONS:

To make your own coconut milk, get a bag of organic, unsweetened coconut shreds with no sulfites added. Boil 3 cups of water and allow to cool for 1 minute, then pour over 2 cups of shredded coconut. Let this sit until the water is lukewarm. Put it into a blender and blend for a few minutes. Strain with a very fine mesh strainer or through a nut-milk bag. You now have coconut milk! (Save the shreds to use as coconut flour.) Put your coconut milk into a food processor with the S-blade and add the egg yolks. Blend for a couple of minutes, then slowly drizzle the olive oil into the food processor. Do this very slowly–take 2 full minutes to drizzle the oil in, practicing patience!

Once the olive oil is blended in, add the vanilla, sea salt, dates, and spices and continue to blend. Once this is fully blended, put your mixture into a glass container and chill in the refrigerator for at least 6 hours.

After it’s been thoroughly chilled, place the mixture into your ice-cream maker and make the ice cream, according to the manufacturer’s instructions; or follow the instructions for making ice cream without an ice cream maker that you find online. Or try this:

Take a large stainless-steel bowl and fill it halfway with ice. Add in some thick kosher salt or any coarse salt and mix it up. The salt won’t be touching the ice cream–it’s there to transfer cold from the ice into your dish of ice-cream mixture.

Put a smaller stainless-steel or ceramic bowl into the big bowl of ice and salt. Make sure it’s set well into the ice, so that ice is going up the sides of the smaller bowl, but not into the bowl itself. Then fill the smaller bowl halfway up with ice-cream mixture.

Now take a handheld mixer or immersion blender with whisk attachment and mix up the ice-cream mixture for 10 minutes.

Take both bowls and put them in the freezer for 1–2 hours. Take the bowls out and use your hand mixer again for another 10 minutes.

Cover with some natural parchment paper (sitting directly on the mixture), then put a top on the smaller bowl and allow the ice cream to set in your freezer.

Serving suggestions: Serve on its own or with baked apples sprinkled with cinnamon.