It finally caught up to me.

... my inability to follow a recipe, that is.

I was making a batch of mint chip ice cream last weekend, and I actually measured the ingredients with some degree of precision.  I didn't eyeball any of the quantities, so I was pretty proud of myself.  I'd made the same recipe a few weeks prior, and I thought I remembered the process well enough to recreate it without reading carefully.

I thought wrong.

I tempered the eggs with scalding milk just shy of boiling, then incorporated them back into the saucepan.  I whisked and whisked and whisked, smiling smugly to myself over the nice workout my arm muscles were getting while I cooked. I did not, however, turn down the heat under the saucepan.  When the froth cleared, I had six servings of sweet, minty scrambled eggs to show for it.

Whoops.

what. EVer!

Sometimes I feel like Cecil looks right here.

To myself (and anyone else who needs it, 'cause I'm generous like that), an especially important reminder: don't take anything too seriously today.

Happy Friday, everyone!

The recipe cards are piling up...

There was another successful homemade ice cream project over the weekend, so we have a new recipe card filed away.  (In light of all the ice cream we've been making, I suppose it's a good thing that there was a 5k over the weekend too, but I digress.)

My dad requested "something with blueberries" for a Father's Day dessert.  We had blueberries in the freezer, and we've been keeping general ice cream ingredients in the house for weeks, so the what-to-make decision was simple.  We alllso had a bottle of this blueberry vodka in the freezer, which helped with the flavor as well as the consistency (the alcohol content keeps the ice cream from freezing too solidly).

Now, I'm not a huge fan of fruit ice cream.  Given the opportunity, I'll choose chocolate (or caramel... or peanut butter... or coffee... or or or) any day.  But lemme tell ya, this was GOOD. 

Blueberry Ice Cream
(adapted from this recipe)

2.5 c 2% milk
.5 c sugar
pinch of salt
2 t vanilla extract
3 T cornstarch
.5 oz blueberry vodka
.5 c blueberries, fresh or frozen

Mix 2 cups of the milk with the salt and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat until steaming.  In a separate bowl, whisk the remaining milk with the cornstarch, then add it gradually to the saucepan, stirring constantly.  Keep stirring over medium-high heat, just until boiling, when the mixture starts to thicken.  Reduce heat to low and keep stirring another 5 minutes.  Remove from heat and stir in vanilla, then chill.  Once it's cooled completely, stir in the vodka and put it all in an ice cream maker, adding the blueberries at the end.

I'll be trying this out in different variations, for sure.  Up next is either cinnamon or coconut...

From the Front Yard

Obligatory "first strawberries of the season" shot.

lovely weekend

Once again, the weekend wasn't as productive as I'd have liked. Really, isn't that always the way? Perhaps I should have posted an ATDL (warning: that is one boring bunch of posts there) for the sake of accountability. The outdoor agenda items got rained out, so gardening, vacuuming the cars, and kayaking will have to wait.

As it was, I cleaned the fridge and sorted through about 80% of my clothes to put the winter ones in storage and send a fair amount of them on their merry way to Goodwill. I vacuumed Saturday morning -- and lamented the pet hair covering the carpet on Sunday evening, so thank goodness the pets are cute -- and did several loads of laundry.

I also woke up Saturday morning to find Senor Terrific standing at the stove, flipping pancakes.



And I put the finishing touches on a sweater I knit.



(It's getting a mention instead of its own post because I don't love it. It's cotton, and it's pretty heavy, so the weight of the sleeves causes the neckline to slip off my shoulders. I might re-knit it at some point in a different kind of yarn.)

Perhaps most exciting, we were able to take Mr. Cecil on walks over the weekend. He got clearance for 10-minute walks as of Wednesday. I didn't get any shots of us actually walking (or, um, exuberantly jumping around with excitement and trying to keep the heart patient calm, respectively), but I do have this one, which I'll use just because I like it so:

In bloom: chives

The irises I posted about last week are, to an extent, out of character for me.  Which is to say: I'm a utilitarian gardener.  I typically direct my efforts to usable vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Even then, the focus is on items we use a lot, with bonus points for things that are particularly expensive or high on the pesticide quotient when purchased at the grocery store. 

I gained a bit of an appreciation for growing flowers last year when we were growing them for our wedding, but I still gravitate toward low-maintenance, nearly foolproof flowers.  Irises fit the bill nicely.

What I like even better is that rare trifecta of functionality, visual interest, and the ability to be successful after putting in almost no effort. Enter: chives.  I've done nothing since I put them in the ground a couple years ago.  They're cute as a button, and if I can remember to harvest them, they're darn tasty.

Hmm. So... what's your favorite way to use chives?

Easy Peasy Kabobs and Time Consuming Ice Cream

Like I mentioned yesterday, one of the highlights of my weekend was an excellent meal: grilled shish kabobs and homemade mint chip ice cream. The ice cream was a bit labor-intensive -- it was worth it, for sure, but it involved more effort and time and steps and containers than I'm used to.

The kabobs, on the other hand, were right up my alley:

Easy Peasy Shish Kabobs
red wine vinegar (I think I used about a cup, but it depends on how much stuff you're marinating)
extra virgin olive oil (a few tablespoons, again, depending on how much vinegar you used)
worcestershire sauce (um... there was maybe two tablespoons left in the bottle, so that's what I used)
garlic powder (several vigorous shakes)
beef, cubed, though I bet this would work with chicken as well
zucchini, cut in generous slices (maybe an inch)
green peppers, cut in inch-ish squares
vidalia or other sweet onion, cut in similarly sized pieces

Mix the first four ingredients in a bowl that's big enough to fit everything else as well. Add in the beef and veggies, then toss to coat. Toss a few more times over the course of (at least) an hour, to distribute the marinade and let it soak in, then skewerize it all. Grill over charcoal until the beef is done; we used the briquettes from Trader Joe's that apparently are made with fewer chemicals, and we were really pleased.

And the ice cream, which was adapted from this recipe:

Mint Chip Ice Cream
.5 c (it's what we had left) 2% milk
2.5 c (or whatever will get you to 3 cups total dairy liquids) whole milk
.75 cup granulated sugar
7 egg yolks
Fresh mint leaves -- I used several sprigs, or maybe .25 c packed
.25 c chocolate chips, chopped

Stir together everything except the egg yolks and .25 c of the sugar in a large-ish saucepan, over medium heat. Once it simmers, remove it from the heat and let the mint steep (the recipe says half an hour, but 15 minutes was just fine), then simmer again.

Add the remaining .25 c of sugar to the egg yolks and whisk in a large heat-proof bowl. Add the newly-re-simmered milk to the bowl gradually, whisking continuously. Once it's all incorporated, pour it back into the saucepan and continue heating and whisking until it thickens enough that it coats the back of a spoon: if you draw your finger across said spoon, the milk should stay where it is and not fill in the line you traced.

Take the ice-cream-to-be off the heat and chill it. The recipe suggested using a larger bowl of ice, but I had a rare moment of patience, I suppose, so I just used the fridge and waited. Once it's cold, put it in your ice cream maker of choice and let it do its thing.

At this point, I contemplated making Mint Fudge Swirl ice cream, because I don't always like having crunchy things added to my ice cream. Mint Chip won out, however, because it's much easier to chop up a handful of chocolate chips than it is to dirty yet another saucepan to make chocolate sauce. Even though I make the best chocolate sauce ever. The chopped up chocolate chips got stirred in at the end.

Sorry, no photos of the finished product. Just these:

Balance. Balance is good.

I utterly failed to tackle three projects I wanted to work on this weekend: cleaning out the fridge, vacuuming out the cars, and sorting through all my clothes to put winter items in storage.

But you know what? I'm totally ok with that.

It certainly wasn't an unproductive weekend. I went for a really great 3.5 mile run Saturday morning, which for me is a great way to kick off (and ensure) a great day.  The Awesome Husband and I wandered through our local farmers' market and picked up tomato and cucumber plants for our garden, as the seeds we started indoors a couple months ago have done pathetically.  And that's being generous.

We also rocked out some gift cards I'd been given over the past year to snag some even more exciting vegetation for the yard: a blueberry bush and a couple of mint plants.  Now, I say "more exciting" mainly because they're new and novel (I've grown tomatoes and cukes for years), and because they're perennials. A plant I don't have to replace every year is a good plant in my book. Plus, the mint plants are a variety called chocolate mint (seriously, you should smell this stuff).  The cukes are decidedly not chocolatey (and if they were, ew), so the mint wins, hands down.

The other thing we bought that I'm irrationally psyched about is a watering can.  We have a rain barrel (haven't had to turn on the outdoor faucet yet this year = conservation and frugality for the win!), and the ability to carry 8 liters instead of 1 with our old watering pitcher is marvelous.  I may have done a happy dance.

When we weren't increasing the awesomeness quotient of the garden, we were likely to be found making or eating some of the best food I've eaten in a good long while.  We stumbled on an amazingly simple and delicious marinade for steak and vegetable shish kabobs that'll be repeated throughout the summer for sure, and we made a batch of mint chip ice cream that I miiiight even like better than last week's chocolate peanut butter (I know, right?  People, this stuff is GOOD). 

Oh, and we revamped an old coffee table.  More on that later.

So yeah, I'm ok with the fact that there's still a bunch of dirt and dog hair on the floors of our cars. It'll wait. I wouldn't trade this past weekend for anything.

gifted spectacles

I have new glasses!

I still have my old glasses, but now I can swap them out some days for these guys.  A friend of mine (who doesn't post nearly as often as I wish she would, but is still all kinds of awesome) gave me the frames nearly a year ago, and I just recently got around to getting lenses put in them.  Thanks, lady!  The time for which I dragged my feet in no way correlates to my opinion of said frames.  Love them.

And a quick note on that photo: there's no alteration, piknik or otherwise. The hazy effect is purely the result of using a camera phone with a scratched up lens cover. That, apparently, is how I roll.

The KitchenAid has landed!

Back in September, The Awesome Husband and I (when the husband part went into effect) were given a KitchenAid stand mixer and an ice cream maker attachment for it.  Both have been sitting in their respective packaging in our basement since then.  For the long Memorial Day weekend, we set as our only goals finding a proper home for the mixer in the kitchen and taking the ice cream maker attachment for a spin.

The inaugural batch was, to be honest, a little disappointing, though I suspect it's my own fault.  Apparently some flavors allow for lower fat dairy components and others do not. Pumpkin ice cream made with 2% milk, for instance, was underwhelming, and really more like a pumpkin sorbet. Not horrible, but not really what I, at least, was expecting.

Undaunted (well, that, and we were staring at a bunch of 2% milk to use up), we forged ahead.  I suspected that a flavor incorporating fat via other ingredients would be more forgiving of us not using cream or half and half, and I was right.  Chocolate peanut butter worked like a dream.

We used this recipe, but with 2% milk (obviously).  I'd almost hesitate to ever use a richer dairy base for this one, because it's plenty rich as it is.

Somehow, The Awesome Husband and I managed to only eat half of this batch yesterday and save the remainder for today... which is fortuitous because looking forward to it is getting. me. through. my. afternoon.

Not bad for a Wednesday

So far today I've:

- been awoken by a flock of geese flying (rather low, it sounded like) over my house, which was pretty cool but definitely would have been substantially more cool if it hadn't been at 5:00 in the morning.

- gone running on a trail next to the ocean.  These were not the easiest 2.5 miles I've ever done (who put bricks in my shoes?), but I ran them anyway. You know you're sluggish when even Rob Zombie in your earbuds won't get you sprinting.

- eaten guacamole and tortilla chips (breakfast of champions) with a cup of coffee and a spinach-fruit smoothie.

- done a bunch of work stuff that I don't have any desire to blog about.

Later today I'll:

- eat grilled, marinated chicken (and hopefully some vegetables. details.) for dinner with my wonderful chef of a husband, either sitting in our backyard or watching a thunderstorm through the kitchen window.

- make a batch of chocolate peanut butter ice cream with our new ice cream maker (hurrah!)

- finish up a garter stitch sweater I've been working on and figure out what I should knit next. Maybe.

Who else is having a pretty-good day?