The Home Front
The month of June in Alabama ushers in the hot, humid, sticky days of summer. Being the resourceful people that we Southerners are, we have passed down unique and delicious ways to cool off in the Alabama sun. When you pull up at a large family gathering, you will always find a big making of homemade ice cream sitting in the ice cream freezer and a bunch of watermelons cooling under the big shade tree in the yard. And you just know – it’s about to get good!
Now, the homemade ice cream is always a highlight and the cooks in the family pull out their best ice cream recipes to cool off the crew. Of course, the larger the gathering, the more ice cream freezers will be dusted off and pulled out of the pantry, and the more intense the rivalry among the cooks will be to make the very best bite of the cool concoction. Back in the day, we kids were a big part of the ice cream making. Our moms would mix up their very best recipe and hand it off to our dads who would work their magic with the ice and the salt to bring it together. And, we children would take turns sitting atop the hand-cranked ice cream freezers to help hold them steady as our fathers and older brothers took a turn at the crank. We would perch atop the newspapers placed atop the ice cream freezer and listen to the family stories and stay there till we got too cold, then another eager cousin would take our place. So, the ice cream cooled us off in more ways than one!
If we didn’t get sticky enough with the ice cream, the watermelons would surely do the trick. The dads would cut them in wedges and parcel them out so we could enjoy the best watermelon of the year. The beautiful red juice would drip down our arms as we tasted the sweet delight that only a bite of watermelon can give on a hot summer day. To treat your family to this local tradition, you can find the very best Alabama watermelons, milk, or cream from local farms, by checking out www.sweetgrownalabama.org.
-Danna Standridge
Author of Happiness is Homemade Y’all! and 2024 Sweet Grown Alabama Ambassador
Join her in the kitchen on Facebook and YouTube.
Enjoy this very easy recipe to my family’s favorite ice cream. You can find it in my cookbook, Happiness is Homemade, Y’all! It’s available on Amazon.
Danna’s Frosty Homemade Ice Cream
Ingredients:
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 small cool whip
½ gallon chocolate milk
½ cup whipping cream
Milk
Ice
Salt
Equipment:
Ice cream maker
Instructions:
*Do not mix this in a bowl. Add it directly to your freeze container. It will not freeze correctly if you premix it. You don’t even have to stir it. Let the freezer do the work for you. Add the first four ingredients to the freezer. Add enough milk to the fill line. Follow your ice cream maker directions. Enjoy!
