For as long as my (now) wife and I have been living together, a cubic foot of our shared space has been occupied by a forlorn ice cream maker. What kind? The kind that keeps company with similarly useless objects at thrift shops, on curbs, or at garage sales. If you don’t know the one, you probably don’t spend a lot of time looking at the FREE listings on CraigsList (and more power to you for that). My wife’s unit lives in our hot water tank closet, where per code, the water tank is lifted off the ground by just enough inches to provide the Cuisinart appliance its own cozy little garage. I originally put it there to see if it would be missed from where it had otherwise been taking up space. It wasn’t missed and over a couple years of uninterrupted dormancy, it ended up developing a significant grime layer similar to those cars you see in “barn find” stories online.
Since it had not been used in over a decade, I made the executive decision that the ice cream maker should be… moved off-site. Before it went elsewhere, I thought it might be fun to clean it up and give it a whirl with/for the kids. I hit it with the magic eraser and garden hose, chilled the freezer bowl in the freezer for the requisite days, and got my dairy supplies together. The boy twin had a doctor’s appointment and stayed home from daycare Tuesday giving us a perfect window of time (and tolerable 1:1 parent/child ratio) for the vanilla ice cream project.
Holy shit that’s good ice cream. The ice cream maker can stay.
