Mielie roomys or helado de choclo

Sometimes I really miss mielies. You might call them sweetcorn in your part of the world, and my South American friends from Peru and Colombia call them choclo. But, whatever you call them, the sad reality is that they don't seem to be nearly as widely available here as I expected them to be. There's no shortage of tinned or frozen corn, but it seems that there are only one or two months of the year when we can go to the supermarket and buy fresh corn on the cob.

When I was in Brazil earlier this year, sweetcorn ice cream was a new taste experience for me. This weekend, I decided to get the recipe and try it out for myself. It turned out to be very easy: you just need a litre of milk, a packet of frozen sweetcorn, a carton of cream and the yolk of five eggs. (You can add a little vanilla essence too, if you like.) The hardest part, if you don't have an ice cream machine, is that you need to keep opening the freezer and stirring it around every hour or so for the whole day. But it turned out to be worth the effort. My South American friends were the first to taste the "helado de choclo" and were surprised at how delicious it was. Now they're trying to persuade me to experiment with other flavours too. We'll see.... Tobi (pictured here) thought that salmon ice cream might be worth a try!