Cookies and ice cream

Tish has been trying to find a decent cookie recipe for ages now, with not much success. Then I went to my sister's house and she had made the most yummy chocolate chip cookies, which she found on the BBC site (so go there and try them). I was craving cookies again last night so invested in a bar of Green and Blacks this morning and made some myself. I had been reading in the New Internationalist recently about the use of child slave labour in cocoa bean production and have since been trying to only buy any chocolate that is fair trade. It is a subject very close to my heart. It seems an easy thing to do; to see a situation that is plainly exploitative and to be able to do something simple and direct about it. I have been drinking the same Tanzanian tea from Traidcraft for about 25 years now. I used to have to go specially to one of their shops to get it, now it is great to see fair trade products on supermarket shelves or to simply order a box online every couple of months.

Anyway the cookies have lasted about five minutes so there is some ice cream gently freezing ready for supper. We had some rhubarb given to us by Dunk's son Haydn last week, which was supposed to become a crumble, but instead has become some ice cream.

So here's what I did:

4/5 big stalks of rhubarb, stewed with a splash of water and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, then cooled and whizzed in the liquidiser.

1/2 pint of custard, not too thick, cooled.

1/2 pint of double cream, whipped with a couple of teaspoons of castor sugar.

Stir it all together. Put in a nice clean old ice cream carton. Whack it in the freezer. I keep putting the timer on for 30 minutes and go back and stir it thoroughly (we don't have a fancy machine for doing this part) for the next few hours. I am guesssing it will probably be 4/5 hours until it is set.