Apple Pie Ice Cream

So we had Chris, Alwen, and Ms. Jadyn up for pizza and games on Friday. We ordered up some Blackjack and played some Pandemic (which is harder with 4 people) while Finding Nemo played in the background. My favorite part though, was the unveiling of the ice cream. Building off of the spice cream I made a while ago, I followed through on the threat of trying to make apple pie ice cream. I thought it turned out wonderfully. I chopped up some apples with the food processor and made a batch of apple crisp topping to use as crust.

So, in order to make apple pie ice cream the way I did, take the recipe from before, double it (I also made the cloves and cinnamon measures heaping ones), finely chop one and a half small apples, and then use half a recipe of apple crisp topping. Break up the topping and along with the apples and spices, put that in the cream before you mix with the custard base. It turned out lovely.

Here's the recipe for the apple crisp topping I used:

1/3 C. flour

1/3 C. oats

1/3 C. granulated sugar

4 T. cold butter

Mix the dry ingredients together, then blend in the butter with a pastry blender or two table knives held together. Once it is thoroughly blended, put into a pie plate and bake at 375° for 30 minutes. I got the recipe for the topping from this apple crisp recipe.

Bird Sighting

Ever since I moved up to Boulder and abandoned my bike commuting ways, I haven't seen the interesting bits of Cherry Creek and the Platte River. However, on Wednesday I was meeting my folks and Jen for a birthday dinner at the Icehouse Tavern near Union Station, so I walked from work over through Commons Park. Since I had time to kill, I went down by the Platte to make sure the river was in working order. While I was along the banks, I startled another visitor to the river's edge.

It's the night heron! (You can click on the image for a larger version.) I've mentioned this fellow many times in this blog, but I've never been able to get a picture of him, as I've been riding my bike. So here's a crappy cell phone picture of this bird. Well. There you have it. Oh, the Icehouse Tavern was quite yummy, too.

I Spy

When I was young, I thought that I was going to grow up to be a proofreader. I was good at spotting mistakes in text, and I enjoyed it well enough. Then I started to find out what dreary and soul-crushing lives many proofreaders lived, and decided to head elsewhere.

My proofreading skills have come in handy in other jobs: a prepress technician, a small town newspaper employee, and certainly as a programmer. I still can use that eye to catch out-of-place semicolons or missing equal signs. I was surprised, though, by what I used it for the other day.

We've been working on a website for a client who sells a wide variety of products, including some they brand themselves. As I was doing some testing of the website, I was looking at a page for some soup that had an interesting old school label. I zoomed in on the picture to get a closer look and noticed that the label had the word "genuine" misspelled as "geniune." I thought that surely they had caught this and it was an old image. Just in case, though, I passed this along to my project manager, who contacted the client.

They had not caught the error. In fact, all the labels on their soup were misspelled. That's a lot of labels to correct. It boggles my mind that something like that could go through so many people and never get caught. I got a hearty thanks from the client. It feels good to have caught something like that and to know I still got my proofreading chops. Of course, I bet I will have misspelled something in the post. I just know it...

More House Photos

So, we had the inspection for the house recently. Things are looking pretty good and the house buying process is going along smoothly. We are pretty darn excited. During the inspection, I took a few pictures of the interior of the house to provide a little more insight into our future home. I added them into the existing album of house pictures, so why don't you check them out?

31 and Counting

I'm 31 now. I've made it. I'm sure you (at least if you are younger than me) are impressed by the wisdom and dignity I've achieved. Or something like that ... or not like that at all. Anyway, suffice to say, I've had a birthday and I'm going to tell you about it. So, there!

Actually, the tale of my weekend doesn't start with my birthday, but the birthday of my friend Tirzah. Jen and I went up to Fort Collins on Friday to celebrate Tirzah's birthday with a nocturnal pool party. Cupcakes were had and I was able to jump in water and float on my back looking up at stars. Quite nice, really.

On Saturday, Jen and I went down to Toast in Littleton for a gargantuan breakfast. On the way back, Jen directed me to Das Meyer to pick up a lovely birthday cake. Later we went up into Eldorado Canyon and dipped our feet in the water and peered up at the amazing cliffs. Later we went to dinner with Jen's parents at Carelli's and then gorged ourselves on delicious cake.

Sunday, we continued our church shopping and went out to lunch with Josh and Kara. Jen had a meeting to go to, so I played games, napped and felt hedonistic in general. Later that evening we went down to Pasquini's in Denver and met up with some of my friends for dinner. I had one of the lovely chocolate candles. Their desserts are so good.

So, now I'm 31. Back to our regularly scheduled lifecast.

Filing and Looking

Jen and I have bought a filing cabinet. This is because we are exciting people with wild, crazy lives who are larger than life and live on the edge constantly. Also, we have a lot of papers. So, we're filing them.

Last night I was going through all the paper I've toted back and forth across this country. I had tax records back to 1999. I have 30 year savings bonds that still have 14 years on them until they are worth $50. I have employee manuals I never looked at after I filed them, but inexplicably brought with me from past residences. I have letters from a child I sponsored through Compassion International who died after falling down a well. I have mysterious statements for accounts I don't remember. I have photos from my brother's wedding. I have pay stubs galore.

It was an interesting evening of personal paleontology bringing moments of poignancy as well as amazement at my own pack rat tendencies. Seriously, why do I have FAFSA manuals from 1999? Tonight will be part two.

The other thing I might note is that we had our house inspected yesterday and then had a sewer scope today, which is a bit like a colonoscopy for our house. Fortunately there was nothing major or worrisome. The sewer got a very clean bill of health ... well, as clean as a sewer line can be. There are few things like gutters that need replacing and a pump we may need to install, but nothing that should deter us. We're getting closer and closer to having a house of our own!

Spice Cream

My friends Amanda and Mark gave Jen and me an ice cream maker as a wedding gift. We hadn't registered for it, but it is proving to be a delightful gift. They also included some of their favorite ice cream recipes. We've made the candied ginger ice cream a couple of times, and it was good (other than my inability to get the ginger in the second batch to a good size, resulting in gummi bear sized chunks).

Of course, I already want to experiment. So I took the candied ginger ice cream recipe base and put in my own flavors instead of the crystallized ginger. Here's the original recipe:

Candied Ginger Ice Cream

• 1/2 C. water
• 6 T. granulated sugar
• 2/3 C. candied ginger, finely chopped
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 1/4 C. heavy whipping cream

Place water and sugar in a sauce pan and heat gently, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Increase the heat and boil until the syrup reaches thread stage (225° F on candy thermometer).

Place egg yolks in a heatproof bowl and whip until frothy. Put bowl over simmering water and gradually whip in hot sugar syrup. Whip until creamy. Take bowl off heat and continue whipping until cool.

Mix the candied ginger into the cream, then fold into the thick and creamy mixture. Turn into an ice cream maker and churn according to the manufacturer's instructions.

This recipe makes about 4 dainty servings, 2 large servings, or 1 Nils-size serving. I like ice cream. What can I say? So anyway, I replaced the ginger in this recipe with the following:

• 1/8 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/8 tsp. nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. vanilla extract

The results were quite delicious. The flavor is not bold, but it is definitely there and definitely good. Jen wanted a bit more cinnamon and I wanted a bit more cloves (careful there!). We also thought that if you put in some finely chopped apples or apple puree, you'd pretty much have apple pie ice cream. Ohhh, and we could add in some crust pieces, like Umpqua does with their huckleberry pie ice cream. Mmmm. This wedding gift will continue to give both enjoyment and calories.

Still Kicking

Today Jen and I decided to take a break. The last week has been so crazy hectic, and the people we had invited to do things with ended up not making it any way, so God must have known the week we'd have and scheduled a day of rest for us.

Things are still moving with the house. Everything's okay so far. We have our inspection on Monday. The thing that made this week real crazy is that I had a little health emergency. I'm not going to post my medical woes online, but suffice to say it was a potentially life-threatening condition that we were very blessed to have caught in time. I'm on medication that seems to be working well, and honestly, for having been in peril, I felt fine. God really blessed me in being able to catch it soon, and get done the myriad medical errands I needed to get done all in one day.

So anyway, it's a good thing we're taking it slow today. We've done chores around the house and then took a break to see the movie Ponyo. I was excited about it because it is a Hayao Miyazaki film, and I've loved his Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Unfortunately, it was really truly a kids' movie. It had some really nice visuals, but the story was directionless and characters unreal in their reactions. It was nice, but not what I was expecting from a modern Miyazaki film. Even the animation was retro, looking more like his very early films. It's a cute one for kids, but as an adult fan of anime, I was left disappointed.

But I'm still alive, and that is convenient.

Offer Accepted!

Woot! The offer we put in on the house has been accepted! So, now we head into the inspection, appraisal, insurance business. We are thrilled and nervous simultaneously. We're giving thanks to God and asking for His guidance through the rest of this process.

Here's the property listing. Now you can see the gorgeous interior!

The House

So, as mentioned in the previous post, we made an offer on an awesome house in Lafayette. We're supposed to hear back about it tomorrow. We are excited and anxious all at once. Until we hear whether or not we are going forward with the house, we're going to keep this one close to the vest before ya'll get as emotionally invested as we are. But it'd be mean to not show some pictures.

So here you go:

So, as you can see, it's close to nature. It's about 7 by 6, making it about 42 square feet, the significance of which should be obvious. It's made out of nylon and was built this year. It's nice and portable, so our acreage can be very good. Plus, if we get tired of the yard work we can just pick up and move. It has two doors and a new roof (well, rain fly). The plumbing needs some work, though...

Or maybe this is the house we offered on. Could be.

HouseWeddingCampingBabyBaseball Type Weekend

Whew! What a weekend. Here's the very brief synopsis, helpfully condensed into ordered list format:

1. Friday, we went to tour a house, and ostensibly look at another we were interested in making an offer on. That house, however, went under contract that day. The other house we looked at, however, was awesome. So we postponed going down to Chatfield for camping with my parents to contemplate making an offer.
2. Saturday, we made an offer on the house. More on that very soon. That took all Saturday morning.
3. Later, we went to a wedding for one of Jen's friends, Katie, who married Jeff. They had burritos, bocci, a bouncy castle, and more. It was pretty darn awesome.
4. That night we went down to Chatfield where my parents are camp hosts and spent the night with them, trying out all our new camp gear. It was pretty great.
5. Sunay, we went back to my old church Aspen Grove for worship and saying howdy to folks.
6. Then we went and saw Jill and Dean and their new baby Riley, who is cute at a rate of 2 kilobuttons. It was great to see the excited new parents too!
7. Next we went to a baseball game with Mike, Tirzah, Sheryl, Steve, Matt, and Misty. We watched the Rockies whallop the Cubs, which was fine by me, because I could root for either team. WGN being one of the few channels we got growing up, my brother Andy has been an avid Cubs fan.
8. We came home and collapsed.

You can also see this weekend in pictorial format. That means pictures, you know.

I Want My 8,000 Dollars!

Well crap. Looks like getting married cost us an unexpected $8,000.

S4. If husband and wife wanted to sell the home that the wife owned when they got married, and the husband had not owned a home within the past three years, could he qualify as a first-time homebuyer for the credit even though the wife would not qualify?

A. No. The purchase date determines whether a taxpayer is a first-time homebuyer. Since the wife had ownership interest in a principal residence within the prior three years, neither taxpayer may take the first-time homebuyer credit. Section 36(c)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code requires that the taxpayer and the taxpayer's spouse not have an ownership interest in a principal residence within the prior three years from the date of purchase. The husband may not take the credit even if he filed on a separate return.
Internal Revenue Service, First-Time Homebuyer Credit: Scenarios

Good thing she is totally worth it and more. Still it is a bit disheartening to learn that the 8K we were planning on using to allow us to do a bigger down payment (not directly) is now out of reach. Though, I certainly would not have wanted to try to wedding plan and buy a house at the same time, with a time limit. Not having to do that is worth $8,000.

But still: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

We went house hunting again today. We found a house we'd be interested in buying. Of course, it already is under contract. The other ones we saw were decent, but nothing that stole our hearts. Well, at least we no longer are under pressure to be in a house by December! Tiiiiiiiiiime is on our side, our side!

House Hunting: The First Sortie

Jen and I did a marathon home hunting session yesterday, testing both the energy level of ourselves and our realtor, Chris Carter. We saw 13 different houses across Louisville, Lafayette, and Superior.

Unfortunately there were none that really leapt out as a super good option. There was one that was just really perfect, but about 200 square feet too small. There was one that had a good feel, nice lawn, and good downstairs, but a kitchen built with despair. Another one was fantastic, but had barely any lawn and exposure to neighbors and sun everywhere, giving the outside that suburban parking lot feel. There was another that was gigantic, beautiful, and amazing, but smooshed with its face up against the ass of a grocery store with no back yard, so it really would have felt like living in a parking lot; one that abuts a penitentary. There was a fun one I really liked that had a kitchen smaller than many SUVs. There was one where the kitchen and main living area were all upstairs, making for an odd-feeling house. It's not wrong, but there's just this cognitive dissonance in our heads about it and the idea of taking groceries up a big flight of stairs for the rest of our lives. There was, of course, also the one that was brilliant, wonderful, excellent ... and $30,000 too expensive. Of course, there were ones that I would have broken out a 10-foot or longer pole before I'd think about touching them, but other than laughing at their flaws, there is not much to say about them.

So, all in all, there's nothing that I'd put an offer out on right now, but we've almost exhausted the pool of houses in our price range. Please be praying for us in this process. We have found, shockingly enough, that though our tastes are similar, they don't perfectly align. It'll be an interesting process of compromise and God's providence to find one we both can live with (and in). It can be quite overwhelming to be thinking about where we want to be 30 years from now, and how kids would fit in and whether our souls would die there or if we'd have to spend thousands renovating to feel like we live there and all that. The future is compacting itself and showing up all at once on our doorstep. Knock, knock! Hi! I'm the future, and I'm intimidating!