Suddenly, your ice cream maker rebels and quits working. Maybe it started well, and has just been churning for the past 2 hours and now all you have in the bowl is a soupy mixture. Of course it had to be on the day you are hosting the annual family meet-up, and you had spent weeks promising everyone hearty scoops of your newly discovered recipe.

What now? Just before you panic and start to rip your hair out, run through these 5 checks and see if the machine starts to work again.
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America’s Test Kitchen is a popular half hour cooking show that airs in the US and Canada. Its is affiliated to the well-known Cooks Illustrated magazine. It is also hosted mainly by Chad Kimball, the editor-in-chief of Cooks Illustrated.

Like many other TV shows, during the course of the show, you are walked through the process of making a delicious meal in the comfort of your kitchen, with a couple of tips from professional cooks.

Unlike other shows though, America’s Test Kitchen has a couple of other segments such as:-
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You plan a picnic or maybe its someone’s birthday and your younger kids insist on being a part of the preparation.

How do you tell them that, contrary to what many cartoons show, fire is really REALLY hot and can hurt badly, or that you cant stop a whirring blade with your bare hands like Tom can, in the Tom and Jerry kids’ cartoon?

You are going to have to think of something, and fast. Kids get to that stage when they are absolutely not going to listen to any stories you tell them. They want to do things and not with dolls and play sets either.

By the time you finish reading this article, I hope to have sparked an idea or two in you.

One way out is to have them prepare stuff that doesn’t involve electricity, flames or sharp blades. While this really limits the amount of things they can thus help with, you still have a few options.

One such option is having them prepare the ice cream. No, I don’t mean you should have them heat up the ice cream base. NO! They can help with other parts of the process such as scooping out of the ice cream, the loading of the ice, the washing up afterwards.

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Lets’ face it, going camping, you want to experience the relative calm of the woods, and ‘disconnect’ from the bustle of towns. This means you probably won’t be really interested in having to find electrical outlets with which to power some appliances.

In the world of today, this doesn’t stop you from doing a number of things such as cook without a proper flame using solar powered cookers; to find your way in the dark with a high powered torch that doesn’t even use batteries; to keep in touch with all the news in the world using a wind-up radio.

Luckily for us, ice cream lovers, the nerds who invent these things have also made an ice cream maker that requires NO ELECTRICITY to produce creamy delights.

While cooking may be possible using a a solar cooker, making ice cream outdoors without power will require that you have a gadget that:-
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‘What the heck is vegan ice cream?’ I can hear you say. Well, vegans will not use or consume anything that involves the use of animal products in its preparation. Fur, leather, silk or wool in clothes, seafood, poultry, dairy, honey; they don’t want ANY of that.

Other people want to try vegan ice cream due to dietary intolerance to some animal products such as milk and eggs. Others, still, may simply want a different flavor and feel from their ice cream.

The sub-culture of being vegan has spawned a ton of vegan themed meals, restaurants, cook books. You may think it’s practically impossible to eat healthy without eating milk, fish, eggs, dairy; but I can bet you that a quick glance through any of these vegan cook books will pleasantly surprise you.

Vegan ice cream is ice cream produced without any dairy products in it. Mind boggling, isn’t it? No milk, no eggs…. how then do you make your favorite frozen dessert if you have to avoid these? Well, vegans are quite inventive and have come up with many alternatives to using milk. These include, but are not limited to:-

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