Snow Ice Cream

It has been snowing for the last couple of days. Snowing a lot!

Yesterday I braved the elements and went into the office, but was smart enough to bring my work laptop home with me so I didn’t have to worry about it today…I’m up against a Friday deadline, so a non-working snowday was NOT an option.

It snowed almost all day long. The boys went out and pelted each other with snowballs for a while, and Paul got a hankering for some ice cream. Really – ice cream! It’s snowing big, fluffy white flakes. I think hot chocolate and Paul thinks ice cream. He apparently has always been fascinated with the idea of snow ice cream and today was the day!

We carefully filled a bowl with clean snow, made the base and folded in the snow.

Wanna know something funny? It tasted JUST LIKE REAL ICE CREAM!

Who knew? (Besides Laura Ingalls, of course)

Snow Ice Cream Recipe #1
source: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art38570.asp
Ingredients:

1/2 c. sugar
1 c. cream
2 eggs
2 tsps vanilla
Pinch of salt

Place the above ingredients in a large bowl.
Mix with an electric mixer. Add fresh snow..approx 5 – 6 cups and mix in to blended mixture.
Eat immediately.

NOTE: Always make sure you’ve had snow falling a while before you collect snow for ice cream so you know it will be clean and free from contaminates.

Sighs

This has been a strange week for me. It was my birthday, and it hit me kinda hard. I’m getting old. It put me into a bit of a funk most of the week, and I’m afraid that my family took the brunt of it. Because of timing, my birthday dinner is postponed until next weekend when Nick will prepare a gourmet feast of my favorite foods.

In preparation of one of the courses, I spent today making beef stock with bones that have resided in our freezer for a couple of months now. I thought of taking a photo of the stock, but there’s nothing photogenic about it. It’s just brown.

In an effort to get me out of my funk, Paul and I took a drive last Sunday. Not having a particular place we wanted to go, we just drove north along a couple of smaller highways.

We passed through many small towns, passed a lot of vehicles that had Christmas trees tied to the roofs, and thoroughly enjoyed the scenery. At one point, we pulled into a little parking lot and watched the North Cascade Elk Herd for a while. I wish they were closer, but the scenery was beautiful.

Here’s the same photo, zoomed in so the elk are visible:

We also saw probably 10 bald eagles, but none of them cooperated for a photo shoot. But the river where we spotted 5 of them at the same time was amazing with the fog hovering over the water.

When we got home, the boys had gotten the Christmas decorations out, put the lights on the house and set the tree up. So we spent the rest of the evening decorating the tree and my funk was gone.

Then a couple of days later I looked out my back window and sighed deeply with contentment. After all, THIS is my backyard.

I am blessed.

Cruise Ship-style Dining

This past Saturday was one of those that had Farmer Paul and I out running around town all day. We started out heading into town (Snohomish) to do a couple of things. For lunch, Paul wanted to get seafood at Chuck’s on 1st Street. Chuck’s is a character restaurant. Not in the “Mickey Mouse” kind of way, but in the “sitcom” kind of way. Sitting at the bar, dunking my fish & chips in tartar (delicious!), enjoying show. Andy cooked up a storm in front of us in the open kitchen…keeping everything perfectly synchronized, the waitress was running to keep up with the busy Saturday lunch crowd and Chuck greeted everyone coming through the door, alternating between the pleasant remarks for the average customer walking in, to the familiar “gruffer” greetings for the regulars (which includes Paul). Good, enjoyable small-town comfortableness.

After lunch we wandered through some of the shops as we made our way down to where we parked the car. In one of them, an Italian import shop, the owner offered us a taste of truffle oil (I’ve always wondered what it was like…and the answer is…very good! But $17 a bottle good? not until I’m rich!) and a taste of balsamic vinegar. Of course, I’ve tasted balsamic vinegar before…there’s almost always some in the cupboard. The one he was sampling was a 10-year-old vinegar and it was very nice. As we talked a bit more, he must have decided he liked us, cause he pulled out the good stuff. It was, he said, a 20-year-old bottle of balsamic. The difference in taste was surprising. The older vinegar was candy-sweet with the tangy bite of vinegar still there. It was also $60 for a bottle. Paul and I came up with the idea of drizzling it over our Christmas morning french toast. Don’t be surprised if it ends up wrapped under our Christmas tree this year!

Well, the day went on into the evening. After haircuts, dishwasher shopping and other random errands, we found ourselves thinking of eating dinner. We were near a bar & grill we’ve enjoyed several times, so we stopped and went in. At this point, it was almost 8 and the place was full with people waiting outside. We put our names on the list to get a table in the dining area, but then went and stood near the bar tables which were seat-yourself. All available tables in the area were taken, and there was another couple ahead of us waiting also. After 15 minutes or so, a table opened up and the couple started to head over, but then the man turned around, asked if it was just the 2 of us waiting, and suggested we join them at the 4-top table rather than waste the extra 2 seats.

So we cruise-shipped it. Sat down at a dinner table with another couple that were complete strangers and had a fantastic time introducing ourselves and being socialable. Kelly’s a truck driver who went to Spring Creek Barbeque in Fort Worth a while back while visiting his sister in Dallas (oh, for some of Spring Creek’s fresh hot rolls!!!), and Margie works for an insurance company and shared some proud-mom stories of her kids who are mostly grown up and out on their own. Over the hour or so we were there, we talked about chicken farming, construction going on in Seattle and the surrounding area, and lots about classic rock.

It certainly was not the dinner experience I thought we would have when we went into the building. It was better.

Maybe next time we’ll extend the invite.

Addiction

I just ordered a new camera. I was going to wait for a while, but really, I miss having one! I’ve never been the kind of person who has taken photos of every milestone in the kids’ lives. I’m the one that had rolls of undeveloped film in every drawer, just waiting for me to take them to the drugstore for developing.

Scrapbooking? Me? Never even considered it.

So why, why do I feel so lost without a camera now?

Because I can’t take pictures of my food!!!!

I can’t show you the contents of my pantry that is getting fuller and fuller of canned stuff every week. You don’t get to see the jewels that are my very first attempt (and very successful attempt) at making bread and butter pickles. Or Nick’s super-delicious cheesecake.

And I want to try my hand at making tamales, but I don’t want to until I get my camera!

Cooking seems so meaningless without it. I guess that means I’m addicted to my camera…or at least to taking pictures of my food!

It’ll be here in 5 days…
…and counting!

Lessons of Masa

I’m sad. My camera broke. Totally, completely and unfixable. That camera has been through a lot with me. We got it right before vacation one year. Some of its first pictures included killer whales at Seaworld and kids playing on the beach at Galveston. That was just about forever ago.

And recently its what I’ve used for all my food photos. Family reactions to this latest adventure have ranged from enthusiastic and helping me style the food to mildly amused and/or impatient depending on level of hunger.

But, alas, the time has come for me to part ways with my old trusty camera. Its been good to me. But it got dropped by people who will remain nameless (though they know who they are!). So I’ll have to find the money to get a new one. And then figure out which one to get. And then second-guess the one I do get. Sigh.

So now you know the reason that I didn’t begin this post with a photo of a stack of homemade tamales. Corn husks stuffed with masa and filling and cutely tied on the ends with thin strips of husks. Plump tamales, piping hot right out of the steamer, served with a delicious and unusual cabbage, chile and pineapple salad on the side.

I have wanted to learn to make tamales for a long time. When we owned our business in Fort Worth, we would occasionally need to bring in temp workers to help out with some of the work that had to be done by hand, and our favorite workers were a group of 4-6 Mexican women. They were the best! They were cheerful, quick and accurate. And Mama made incredible tamales that she would bring in for everyone to have for lunch. I miss Mama’s tamales.

I’ve floated the idea of making my own a couple of times to Farmer Paul, but he has always steered me away, convincing me there’s more to it than just a recipe. So a couple of weeks ago in the food section of the paper, there was a link to cooking classes and one of the options was a tamale class in Seattle. And I decided that the time had come, the time was now, it was time to go-go-go learn tamales now. (Sorry…Dr. Seuss snuck in for a moment)

Anna played the part of the loving sister and accompanied me so I wouldn’t be along, and after work yesterday, in the driving rain, we headed to Seattle and the cooking class to learn the secrets of tamales.

I’m not going to post the school’s recipe for tamales, but really…there are recipes for it all over the internet. The secrets of tamales as they were revealed to us, however, are as follows:

• Use real butter or (preferrably) lard and beat it in the mixer until it is very light and fluffy.
• Let the corn husk do the work. Put the masa dough in the husk and, using the husk, roll it back and forth, letting the dough work itself into the proper shape.
• Don’t put too much filling in. Just a tablespoon will do it.

And that’s about it! I’m going to try to make them myself very soon, and I’ll find a way to take pictures when I do. In class we made two versions. One had corn and pablanos mixed in with the masa but no filling; the other had a chicken and chorizo filling. I thought they were both good, but not great.

MINE will be great. Just you wait and see!