31 days: ice cream

I love making homemade ice cream and the store bought variety here can't compete with pretty much any American brand so making would seem like the obvious choice. The problem is milk and cream. You can buy milk 3 ways here: dry milk powder, boxed UHT milk, or fresh. The boxed milk is about $10 per gallon and I think the dry milk powder isn't much different, but fresh milk presents it's own problems. First, you have to find someone with cows to order from. Usually they live farther out of town so by the time the milk gets to you it has gone bad or else they go ahead and cook it (pasteurize it) before they bring it to you which ruins your chances of getting the tiny bit of cream from the milk. It's also hard to get people to deliver it consistently or even at the same time of day. You don't really want to be trying to pasteurize milk when you are in the middle of baths and bedtime routine!
Another problem with the milk and cream is that it sometimes tastes and smells like cow (or so I've been told by people who can smell).
During our time here I've come up with alternatives for making ice cream.
First, I tried out this canned cream.

It worked fine for ice cream, but it's really better suited for things like soup or pasta sauce.
Eventually I started trying coconut cream. Sometimes I buy these little UHT packets.

And sometimes I buy cans of coconut milk, put it in the fridge, and spoon the cream off the top. This works better with some brands than others. I also use the coconut milk in place of at least part of the cow milk.

I've successfully made several flavors using the coconut cream and milk: plain coconut, chocolate coconut, coffee coconut, but the best I think is citrus coconut.

I can't possibly imagine that my last sentence is grammatically correct, but I also can't imagine any other way to write it! It's taken me like 9 hours to finish this post. I'm pretty sure if you look up Mom in the dictionary you  will find the word "distracted"!