Quite some time ago, I came across a recipe in a magazine that I didn’t subscribe to but magically ended up in my mailbox each month, addressed to me.  It didn’t take long to realize the publication’s advertisements outweighed its content, but a two page piece featuring a local chef caught my eye as did his recipe for honey ricotta ice cream.   I’m more in the chocolate camp when it comes to ice cream, but once in a great while, a lighter flavor will temp me.  Rarely, if ever, will it be plain vanilla, however.  Sweet cream?  Yes.  Cream cheese?  Definitely.  It made sense that ricotta and honey would appeal to me, so I tore out the recipe and recycled the magazine.

The recipe sat among the other bits and pieces of paper that manage to hover near our telephone in the kitchen.  When looking for someone’s number, or trying to locate a coupon, I’d see the recipe and think, “I should make this…” and place it on the counter hoping that its presence would coerce me,  but it would get shoved back into the stack I removed it from, so never did.  There was the small matter of not owning an ice cream maker that could also be the culprit.  Not the old-fashioned hand-crank model my mother and I found at a garage sale for five bucks and which lost its novelty long ago.  No, I needed an electric model I could plug in and forget.

Years passed (honestly!) and I finally bought a Cuisinart with an extra freezing bowl so we could enjoy home made ice cream whenever we felt like it.  Ironically, the honey ricotta recipe disappeared, most likely falling victim to one too many sessions of being shoved into a drawer and out of sight when guests were expected, and then not retrieved.  It figures.

But I’ve not forgotten the idea of those flavors, and so finding myself with leftover ricotta from a recent gnocchi making session, I finally decided I’d try to recreate my lost recipe.  Of course all that entails is typing “honey ricotta ice cream” into my Google search box and voila!  A few hundred thousand ideas are at my fingertips.  Ah, but at some point, I’d decided to make gelato, so that reduced my options to just under 30,ooo.  What would we do without Google?

In the end, I compared three or four recipes merging a honey vanilla gelato with a ricotta gelato.  And guess what?

My gelato ended up with absolutely no honey in it.

Go figure.

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