Better than chocolate

When I was growing up, summertime gatherings at my grandparent's house always meant homemade ice cream. It was almost always vanilla, but occasionally chocolate chip, with Hershey's chocolate syrup and fresh seasonal fruit to top it. We made it in a Blue Mountain brand hand-crank freezer similar to this. The rule was if you didn't help crank it, you didn't get any ice cream. So the kids would go first, of course, and it would end with an adult sitting on top of it to keep it balanced, while one of my uncles cranked the crap out of it, trying to make the other person fall off.

Because of these great memories, I eschewed electric ice cream freezers for a long time. The old-fashioned method was surely the best, alternating ice and rock salt to get the right temperature, the pleasure of working a little to get a treat, the...uh...hmm...right.

Screw old-fashioned (not the cocktail, of course. Those are quite delicious.) I don't want to have to mess with the mess. I mentioned to my best friend before my wedding that I thought an ice cream maker would be nice. And that's what she and her husband gave us.
We don't use it often enough, and I don't have much of a repertoire. I don't like to make recipes that call for eggs (it's not a contamination issue, I just don't like eggs.) and I don't go in for super-fancy complex things. Or chocolate, really. The one I make with some regularity is lemon-buttermilk ice cream. It's delicious and low fat and perfect for putting garden fresh strawberries and raspberries on top.

"One of the earth’s monstrosities"

What was Pliny the Elder so crabby about? Okay, so they aren't soft, pretty plants. But they look pretty great in our garden.

I was thinking of making my own Cynar. (nah, it's probably much easier to buy it.)

Maybe that's what the gazillion ants that live on our artichokes are doing. Maybe that's what Pliny the Elder should have done.

(All of these 'chokes are on 2 plants!)

...unless Briscoe eats them all.

Oh, and he does love the raspberries.

We're thinking about opening our own Raspberry Mart

There's going to be a bumper crop of raspberries this year. And I can only make so much jam. Raspberry recipes, anyone*? Sure, I mean besides raspberry liqueur.




*And by "anyone", of course I'm referring to all 3 of you.

Global Warming? I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about...

Except that my Dahlias are starting to bloom. It's June, by the way.

Stomach v. Heart

This happens every year. I either plant way too many everything in the garden (I never thought there could be too many tomatoes) or I fall in love with everything at the farmer's market, so naturally I have to buy it, and then I get it home, and now what? I have a quart and a half of local strawberries (one of the best reasons to live in Oregon, by the way), 3 pounds of rhubarb, and a bunch of beets plus an extra helping of beet greens the woman in front of me didn't want. I have no specific plans for these things, and the berries aren't going to last for long. Yes, I will eat about a pint of them right off the bat, but really what I meant was that they are fragile specimens that go bad quickly, even under refrigeration.
Thinking quickly, or at least within 24 hours, I decided to make proper freezer jam. Not the kind where I make up a recipe and proportions, and use bottled lemon juice and no pectin whatever (ahem. not that I've ever done that...) and ended up with something like a sweet and sour fruit soup. No, this time I researched recipes online, went to the store (the Fred Meyer that turns me into a stressed out, evil bitch) to buy pectin and nice GladWare containers for the freezer, and ended up making a delicious batch of strawberry-rhubarb freezer jam and a mediocre batch of simple strawberry freezer jam. It was mediocre because it's a touch sweeter than I like it and it tastes almost like artificial strawberry flavor.

:::sidenote: as I was researching recipes for freezer jam, I had a very difficult time finding recipes that didn't use strawberry-flavored Jell-o as the strawberry component. It freaked me out a little, but The Husband reminded me these were probably Midwesterners who also often use condensed soups as a principle ingredient in their recipes:::

As for the beets, I cubed and cooked them, then tossed them with one batch of the greens I had chopped, and tossed it all with a French Vinaigrette. The other batch of greens is waiting to be steamed for a side dish. The Husband mentioned he's glad I like beets as much as he does.

See how lazy I am?...

I haven't really even blogged much at all about gardening. But blogging about my neighbors is almost in the same vein, right?

In my previous post about how precious some of my neighbors are, I mentioned a neighbor (he lives behind us) who smokes and hacks (dubbed "Lung Butter", and I can't take credit for that name. But it fits.) and is only one of the neighbors who leaves his dogs out all the time to bark. Lung Butter is the main reason we built a taller fence, because we found we couldnt go out into our backyard without him talking to us. And in the pre-taller-fence days, The Husband inadvertantly saw a swingers-style party in their house, which involved cocaine (or another insufflated drug) and mustache rides (no word on what he was charging for those.) The guy, I feel a little sorry for him, has been unemployed and spends his days drinking and smoking pot. We recently found out, too, that his family moved out. So now his days are spent also playing his electric guitar in his back yard.

Over the course of the past month or so, as we have been out working in the yard more, we get the pleasure of hearing Lung Butter play his electric guitar. He actually isn't half bad, but his playing consists only of the main guitar riffs of classic rock songs: Stairway to Heaven, Smoke on the Water, Iron Man are the ones I recognise. Yesterday morning as The Husband and I were getting ready to go to the farmer's market, Lung Butter came walking by our house and asked if we had a CD player in our car, because he had a copy of his band's CD he wanted to give us to listen to. Husband lied and said we didn't, but then later regretted it, as it may have been good for a few laughs.

This morning, Sunday at 8:00, I took the dogs into the back yard, and LB was already up and playing his riffs. I imagined it to be almost like Jimi Hendrix playing the "Star Spangled Banner" that morning at Woodstock. It could be historical, and here I am mocking it. Shame on me.