We all scream for snowcream

I talked about how a snow day was a day for me to make some money as a kid and maybe get a hot toddy from Charlie, but it was also a day that mom would send one of us out to get some snow.

She would give us the biggest pot we had and a huge cooking spoon. Most of the time we could just open the front door and scoop all we needed, that is unless Bootsy or Dusty, the two collies we had growing up, had not walked all over it. If they had, she usually instructed us to get it off the car, but "Don't go all the way down! That car is dirty!!" There was also the thought that we could not use the first snow of winter, that it was full of all the dirt in the air. Or, you didn't want to use the first couple of inches that fell.

So, we would come back with a pot full and piled high with snow. She would get out the big blue mixing bowl, vanilla, sugar, and a can of evaporated milk, or as we called it "canned milk". She would count the scoops of snow into the bowl, but I'm not sure why. She would end up adding more if it turned soupy. Then she covered it in sugar, poured in a little bit of vanilla, and then cut a hole in the top of the canned milk and poured most of it in and got to stirring. I don't think we got to help much with that because it would move around and fall out as she tried to keep folding it over. In just a minute or two she began to scoop it out into our collection of plastic butter bowls. You know, the kind you kept as cereal bowls that came in a variety of colors and the outside either had ridges around it or a pattern?

We would dig right in and immediately get the worst case of brain freeze. Then as we swallowed the last spoonful, we would turn our bowls up and get all the snowcream that melted in the bottom. There is nothing like the taste of it. I have seen several recipes where some tell you to add pasteurized eggs and some suggest pouring chocolate syrup on it. No, just no. It is perfect just the way it is. I don't even like the idea of using sweetened condensed milk instead of our regular old canned milk. I love the crunch of the sugar. Every now and then you would get a lump of sugar and it was awesome.

It snowed this morning and I really had to struggle to get enough snow to make a batch because we only got a couple of inches. I did have to go to the back of the truck to find it deep enough to scoop. Since it's just Mick and me, we have some in the freezer to have tonight too.