Ice Cream!  First one of the year and very excited about it.  My wife loves mint chocolate chip ice cream and my parents visited last weekend love ice cream as well.  So, I decided to multi-task by making ice cream that would please my wife and parents as well as serve as a springboard for the St. Patrick’s Day festivities this week.  This recipe turned out great.  The recipe I used can be found here.  I really like the technique used to extract the mint flavor in this recipe.  The good news is that this particular recipe uses low fat milk and half and half in lieu of whole milk and cream, so you can certainly use it as written for a nice, lighter ice cream.  The bad news is that I used whole milk and cream in exact increments as indicated for the milk and half n half in the recipe.  I mean I don’t make desserts very often so I decided not to skimp.  So, use the lighter version or my version…your choice.

Cacao nibs is a nutrient rich super food when eaten in its raw, natural state.  It has a slight cocoa flavor but really imparts a nice woody bitterness.  This may not appeal to you but it really helped to balance the sweetness of the ice cream while still maintaining that characteristic crunch found in traditional mint chocolate chip recipes.  To add them to the original mint ice cream recipe referenced above, simply take 1 cup of cacao nibs and slowly add them to the ice cream about mid way through the cycle of your ice cream maker.