A Purpose for the Vanilla Bean!

I told you that I would blog about whatever ended up becoming of the vanilla bean I purchased so, here it is! I made vanilla bean ice cream! It was delicious, I must say. I made it for my dear friend, Beth's birthday because there was truly no better occasion for such things. The process was pretty awesome. First of all, making homemade ice cream is fun enough as I have discovered since my brother got me an ice cream maker for my birthday. But, add a vanilla bean into the mix and it's just tons of fun!
Apparently the part of the vanilla bean that you use is all inside.. so you must first slice it open.

So I laid it out on the cutting board and sliced it open long ways, revealing the lovely, tiny seeds inside. Then, using the knife, I scraped the seeds out into the rest of the ice cream mix. It got kind of messy!

Then I put the husk of the vanilla bean that I had scraped clean into the mix also to boil out the rest of the flavor. It was removed later on when it was all cleaned out and used up.

Then everything was put into the ice cream maker until it was thick and creamy. It was so delicious and the flavor of vanilla beans is really quite different than the flavor of imitation vanilla extract that we are used to. This was one of the best ice cream recipes yet and definitely a lot of fun to make!