Easy as Ice Cream

Usually the saying is easy as pie. Ice cream is not easy to make. At least, that's how it has been for me. The recipes I have start with you boiling sugar to a certain phase, mix it into a custard, whisk it until your arm starts to detach and then churn it for a long while. That does make good ice cream.

You know what else makes good ice cream? This fantastic and wonderfully easy recipe from the Stone Soup Inn by way of Sunset. It's sour cream chamomile ice cream, which probably doesn't sound that great, but it really, really is. Best of all, you just mix the ingredients together and throw it in an ice cream maker. No messy boiling sugar water. No endless stirring. Just half-n-half, sour cream, and flavoring.

I used Celestial Seasoning's Honey Vanilla Chamomile tea, which really packs a flavorful punch. I took the ice cream to a friend's birthday party and was commissioned to take some leftover cake and make it into ice cream. Since it is now so freaking easy, I made some Black Forest ice cream with cherries, almond flavoring, and cake. I had more left over, so tonight I made orange spice cake ice cream, with Celestial Seasoning's Mandarin Orange Spice tea, orange zest, toasted almonds, cake, and too much cloves. When will I ever learn with cloves? Bitter aftertaste! Bitter aftertaste! Remember that. It's freezing right now, so hopefully now that the cake is mixed in it will counteract that.

The ice cream does differ in texture from custard-based ice cream and some of the sour cream flavor sneaks through, though favorably so. The real problem with this ice cream is that it is so easy to make. I now have a lot of it in my fridge, and it's going to end up on somebody's waistline, most likely me. Thank goodness half of this is reserved for the cake's baker.

Where Did That Come From?

This week I was exercising in the morning and happened to look out the window. The window in our gym looks out onto the roof above our back room, which has skylights. Sitting next to one of the skylights, was a small pile of poop. At least, it looks like poop. I haven't gone out there yet to investigate. But it raises the question, how the heck would it get there?

The turds look big enough to have come from a small to medium-sized dog, so having it come from a squirrel is unlikely. Conceivably it could be a raccoon, but we've never seen raccoons here, nor could we explain why it would get up on our roof. We briefly entertained the idea that someone could have thrown it up there, but either they'd have to have gotten into our backyard or have a small catapult (caca-pult?) to hurl it up there, and then they'd have to get three small turds to cluster together and not fall of the roof. Again, not likely.

We do have a hawk who likes to munch pigeons in our backyard. He's my prime suspect. Possibly he needed to land on the roof, though he normally is hidden in our cottonwoods or our neighbor's pine tree. It'd be unusual for him to land on the roof. However, further evidence was found yesterday. We are slowly stirring to get our yard and garden ready for summer, and yesterday we were turning compost and putting mulch around our little spruce trees. While wandering through the lower yard, I noticed several piles of poop under one of our cottonwoods. They're about the same size as the ones on our roof, but looked a bit different.

Regardless of where it came from, I need to get rid of it, which involves climbing out on the roof with a broom. Should be fun times!

UFOs and Europe

It's two exciting posts for the cost of one!

First off, UFOs! A couple of days ago, Lafayette was the location of a sighting of UFOs in the more literal sense of the word. Three unidentified flying objects hovered over Lafayette, and multiple people reported seeing the three red dots flying in a loose, varying formation. The lights were silent and slow-moving and of course, utterly mysterious. For video and the story, see this article from the Boulder Camera.

The second exciting news is that Jen and I have booked our flights for our trip to Europe! This is a bit more exciting to me than UFOs. We'll be flying into London, and then taking a regional flight to Basel, Switzerland to visit my friend from college Angie. Then we'll fly to Berlin to meet Jen's family before going on a tour of Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria together with them. Then we'll fly from Vienna back to London and back to Denver.

I'm so excited that finally my dream of going to Europe will be fulfilled. I've wanted to go for such a very long time, but never had all the factors of money, travel companions, and time coincide. But now, this is it. Jen and I are planning on starting to try for kids here in the near future, so we figured we'd get in one last travel hurrah before embarking down Baby Boulevard. I'm quite excited for the trip this summer. We'll get to celebrate our anniversary while we're over there and we're also making the trip a celebration of Jen's parents' 40th wedding anniversary. It'll be quite the adventure. I'll post more as the days get closer, but for now I just had to share the excitement. We're going to Europe! Thank you, God!

I Saw a Limb

Cottonwood wood smells like sulfur. That's just weird. I found this out while sawing a limb off of the cottonwood in front of our house. We have a spruce tree in the same area that is ailing, and the arborists we've had look at it say that one thing we can do to help is to cut this limb off so the spruce can get more sunlight. So this morning we set up a ladder and took turns with the small hand saw. The limb was about 5-6 inches in diameter, so there was a lot of sawing going on.

When the limb broke, it did not fall the way I expected it to. This is probably a common element to many injury stories. Fortunately for me, Jen was holding the ladder, so when the limb fell and somehow vaulted backwards behind the tree and hit the base of the ladder, I was saved from an injury story. It did knock over our planter, but other than some spilled potting soil, no damage was done. Still, it gets the adrenaline going a bit, if you know what I mean.

After also knocking down a bird nest behind our basketball hope that was causing some noisy mornings outside our bedroom window, we headed to the store and then to Robby and Vanessa's for their son Luke's first birthday party. Then it was back here for some improvised chicken pastry packets and more mustard potatoes. It already feels like Sunday evening. I'm glad that is not true.

Friday, I did go over to the Plastic Chapel and picked up some of the Series 2 Android figures. I had seen earlier that week that they were on sale. Since I missed out on the first series, I vowed to get over and pick some up. It's a good thing I did it this week, as I scored the last four in the store. I got two I wanted and two I don't care for. I'll have to see how far I'll go to get the one I really, really want.

Girl Scouts and Corpses

Not at the same time/place mind you. But I did buy Girl Scout cookies; Samoas and Thin Mints, naturally. I imagine some day I might try something else, but I doubt it. The Samoas did not last through the day, but the Thin Mints, being greater in number have lasted longer. The Samoas mainly were consumed on our trip to Nederland. We've been itching to get out of the house more. Jen suggested getting coffee in Nederland, and I recalled that the town was having their Frozen Dead Guy Days festival. What else could we do but go?

I'll let you click on the link for the story behind Frozen Dead Guy Days. Our encounter involved some lucky parking, lots of wind, and wandering around Ned in search of events. We saw a pastor in a three piece suit and a man in a full on chicken suit jump into the water of a frozen pond. Not together, mind you. We watched a bit of the documentary about the frozen dead guy, called Grandpa's in the Tuff Shed. We gawked at the hearses and characters scattered around the town, and finally saw some of the coffin races, which were pretty impressive. One coffin was decorated with a giant head of Justin Bieber. Well. What more could you ask for?

I should note that today, the traffic on the drizzly way in to work was pretty bad; slow, but moving. The freezing temperatures in the office weren't great. But the drive home was heaven, due to incredibly fluid traffic. I dunno what causes that, but it felt like some cosmic balance was in effect. Just had to point out that not all my commutes are awful.

Condimental

I may have gotten carried away. I just wanted to cook. I had some rapidly expiring lemons and some small dense limes. What to do? What to do? Then I remembered lemon curd. That'd be worth a try. So I cooked up a double batch of lemon curd and made another batch that was half lime and half lemon. That gave us an inordinate amount of the stuff. The lemon curd was good and the lime curd was outstanding, and we largely just ate the stuff out of the jar.

You would think I would have learned my lesson. However, the current issue of Sunset has all these mustard recipes, so I felt compelled to try some of them. I made three different types from the magazine and one batch of the amazing sweet and sour mustard I've made in the past. We now have more mustard than we will eat in a year. I made some soft pretzels yesterday, and that will use about 1/800th of the mustard we have. At least we won't be eating spoonfuls of this straight from the containers.