On Ice, Stirred
Jun. 23rd, 2004 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaThe migraine is almost over. I actually managed to go out today.
The 4th of July is coming up shortly, and it is a tradition in my family to make homemade ice cream for the 4th. So, armed with a BB&B 20%-off-one-item coupon, I set about looking for an ice-cream maker. The model I ended up with is a fairly substantial thing made by Cuisinart, a company that makes good food processors so I figured I'd trust them with a freezer-churner. It's a little small (it makes about a quart and a half at once), but it's cute and fairly compact.
Unlike the traditional ice-and-rock-salt models, which are difficult to use indoors, this one has a churner-bowl with some sort of semi-liquid gel in it. You stick the whole bowl in the freezer until it doesn't slosh when you shake it. The outside is plastic (so it doesn't stick to anything) and the inside is aluminum (to transfer the heat effectively away from the cream). The motor turns the bowl; the dasher is held in place inside it, with the ice-cream-to-be turning underneath the dasher. One feature (or, possibly, misfeature) is that the cover for the whole thing is open on top, so that you can add extra ingredients during churning (say, chocolate bits for a mint chocolate chip ice cream). In the summer in Houston, sweetened cream is an attractant for flies; I might get one of those net covers that are meant for barbecues for that.
So of course, I had to try it out:
--
1 cup milk
3/4 cup sugar (or less, to taste)
Whisk together until the sugar dissolves (about 3 minutes by hand, less with an electric beater). Add
2 cups heavy cream
1-2 teaspoons vanilla extract (to taste, and depends on strength)
Chill in refrigerator. Churn. Enjoy out of the churn as soft-serve, or ripen in freezer for 2 hours.
--
The one inconvenient thing about the freezer-bowl is that you can't store the leftover ice cream in the bowl. So I also invested in a couple of quart-and-a-half snap-top freezer containers.
My other recent purchase is a copy of the Voyager Tarot deck. It's . . . interesting. The card images are all collages of photographs of things like animals, plants, minerals, sculpture, random bits of technology, and (on the court cards and some of the Majors) human hands and faces.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
memeslayer, you might like it quite a bit - it's very stream-of-consciousness. quantumduck, you'll either love it or hate it (if you haven't seen it already). I'm ambivalent about its use of aquatic life in the Majors (I understand why all the echinoderms are on the Star, but why is the squid on the Hanged Man?). The Minors are just really hard to read. (There's an awful lot of fruit in the pentacles-equivalent cards. I understand why, but you'll be looking through the image, when WTF? Fruit!)
Then again, it's hard to dislike a deck with an Art Car in it.
The 4th of July is coming up shortly, and it is a tradition in my family to make homemade ice cream for the 4th. So, armed with a BB&B 20%-off-one-item coupon, I set about looking for an ice-cream maker. The model I ended up with is a fairly substantial thing made by Cuisinart, a company that makes good food processors so I figured I'd trust them with a freezer-churner. It's a little small (it makes about a quart and a half at once), but it's cute and fairly compact.
Unlike the traditional ice-and-rock-salt models, which are difficult to use indoors, this one has a churner-bowl with some sort of semi-liquid gel in it. You stick the whole bowl in the freezer until it doesn't slosh when you shake it. The outside is plastic (so it doesn't stick to anything) and the inside is aluminum (to transfer the heat effectively away from the cream). The motor turns the bowl; the dasher is held in place inside it, with the ice-cream-to-be turning underneath the dasher. One feature (or, possibly, misfeature) is that the cover for the whole thing is open on top, so that you can add extra ingredients during churning (say, chocolate bits for a mint chocolate chip ice cream). In the summer in Houston, sweetened cream is an attractant for flies; I might get one of those net covers that are meant for barbecues for that.
So of course, I had to try it out:
--
1 cup milk
3/4 cup sugar (or less, to taste)
Whisk together until the sugar dissolves (about 3 minutes by hand, less with an electric beater). Add
2 cups heavy cream
1-2 teaspoons vanilla extract (to taste, and depends on strength)
Chill in refrigerator. Churn. Enjoy out of the churn as soft-serve, or ripen in freezer for 2 hours.
--
The one inconvenient thing about the freezer-bowl is that you can't store the leftover ice cream in the bowl. So I also invested in a couple of quart-and-a-half snap-top freezer containers.
My other recent purchase is a copy of the Voyager Tarot deck. It's . . . interesting. The card images are all collages of photographs of things like animals, plants, minerals, sculpture, random bits of technology, and (on the court cards and some of the Majors) human hands and faces.
memeslayer, you might like it quite a bit - it's very stream-of-consciousness. quantumduck, you'll either love it or hate it (if you haven't seen it already). I'm ambivalent about its use of aquatic life in the Majors (I understand why all the echinoderms are on the Star, but why is the squid on the Hanged Man?). The Minors are just really hard to read. (There's an awful lot of fruit in the pentacles-equivalent cards. I understand why, but you'll be looking through the image, when WTF? Fruit!)Then again, it's hard to dislike a deck with an Art Car in it.
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-23 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-24 02:56 am (UTC)The issues with a top-motor churn are that the interior is completely inaccessible while churning, so things like chocolate chips have to be stirred in afterwards (while it's starting to melt on you), and that it's easy for the motor to burn out (or at least overheat) if the ice cream stiffens before the time's up.
I'm kitchen-geeking here; sorry. But I'm remarkably happy with it so far. (Coffee ice cream on demand, without having to leave the apartment . . . mmmm . . . .)
Hmm
Date: 2004-06-23 10:51 pm (UTC)Re: Hmm
Date: 2004-06-24 03:03 am (UTC)My take on the newage crap is that I can ignore it in favor of the cards themselves. I don't buy the separatist-feminist politics of the Motherpeace deck, either, but there are days when I really need it for a reading, or when the person I'm reading for needs it. I guess I'm not much of a New Critic when it comes to these things; I'm a Reader-Response Theorist (in every possible sense) when it comes to a tarot deck. (Even Historical Criticism only goes so far, like explaining why Waite jacked the Moon card.)
Re: Hmm
Date: 2004-06-24 09:09 am (UTC)Re: Hmm
Date: 2004-06-24 09:39 pm (UTC)Needless to say, I personally find this irksome.