Richard and Margaret gave us an ice cream set for our wedding last autumn, and this was the first time I’ve used it. The recipe came from the The New Best Recipe cookbook that I have talked about before. For 1 quart of strawberry ice cream –

1 lb strawberries
Salt (a pinch)
1 1/4 c sugar
1 1/4 c whole milk
1 1/3 c heavy cream (I used whipping cream)
6 large egg yolks
1 t lemon juice (I omitted b/c of the next ingredient)
3 T vodka (I used Grand Marnier)
1 t vanilla extract

Hull and slice strawberries.

Mix with a pinch of kosher salt and 1/2 c of sugar.

Mash berries with a potato masher (I don’t own one – I used the bottom of a small bowl), let it sit for 40 minutes until the juices have come out and the sugar is dissolved.

Separate eggs, whisk 1/4 c sugar into the yolks.

Heat milk, cream, 1/2 c sugar until steam appears (175 degrees).

While whisking madly, slowly pour ~1 c of the hot milk into the yolks. Then whisk the remaining milk like mad and pour the yolk-milk mix back into it. Cook on medium heat (stirring constantly) until the steam appears and foam subsides (180-185 deg). Don’t let it boil because the eggs will curdle. Strain the custard.

Simmer berries over medium heat for a few minutes.

Strain berries and reserve juices. Stir Grand Marnier into berries. Soaking berries in booze lowers the freezing point and prevents them from morphing into solid ice blocks. Refrigerate everything overnight. (Freeze the ice cream bowl overnight with the freezer on the coldest setting, in the coldest part of the freezer.)

Stir vanilla and strawberry juice into the custard. Start up the ice cream mixer, then pour the custard into bowl.

Churn for 20-30 minutes, until the ice cream looks like soft serve. Add strawberries and churn until incorporated.

Spoon back into a container and freeze for 2+ hours until solid. It’s a little melty in the picture above because I mistakenly thought the coldest part of the freezer would be the bottom. Also, I think the booze prevented the ice cream from getting hard over all, even after it froze overnight in the icemaker area.

There you have it! It wasn’t too complicated (maybe total of 1 hr in the kitchen, not incl. machine churning time), but the 2-day process means there’s no instant gratification, either. Still, it was fun doing it, and I think I’ll be checking out the other (lower fat) sherbet and sorbet recipes later in the season.

I bought some Coopworth striped roving off of ebay last week and spun it up as a thin single. It was all spun up in 2 days – 8 ounces go by quickly when you’re not plying.

It’s a little twistier than I like for singles yarn, I’m going to knit up a swatch to see if it will bias.

We finally got our water softener and RO water unit installed on Friday. Goodbye Brita! Hello yummy “refrigerator water”! Now I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, or if the softer water is beginning to dissolve all of the built-up minerals from the last 4 months, but our hot water supply is suddenly not feeding to the upstairs shower. Plus, faucet aerators all over the house are clogging with alarming frequency. I’m wondering if we’ve disloged a mineral clot large enough to stop water from exiting the heater.

Update on the automatic litter box – I think we’re going to keep it. Taking the advice I found online, I used packaging tape to build up a little “dam” on the lower half of the entrance. James still doesn’t turn around in the box, but he doesn’t like having tape on his rear end, either. The tape does get peed on has to be replaced every time I empty the poop drawer, but there hasn’t been another out-0f-box accident since I started putting it up. I’m willing to deal with tape. That’s still much better than sifting.

One of Matt’s coworkers Mark came over for dinner tonight with his wife Laura and daughter Eleanor. Laura is the seller of wool I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It was nice to have people over. Very few people have visited since we moved here, and I haven’t thrown any kind of dinner event since October of 2003. We had sukiyaki for dinner – a Japanese simmered dish of beef tenderloin, various leafy greens (spinach, Chinese cabbage), onions, mushrooms, and bean threads cooked in a thin sauce containing fish stock, soy sauce, sugar, and sake. (We cooked on the table – I used the birthday cash from my parents to buy a tabletop electric hot pot! Thanks Mom and Dad!). Blanched crudites and dill dip were served as appetizers – a quick dip in boiling water followed by cooling in ice water really brings out the colors. (Red pepper is served raw – no blanching needed.)

We had homemade strawberry ice cream and cake (box yellow cake with can chocolate frosting – Matt’s favorite, sigh) for dessert. I was kind of tired by then and forgot to put out the dessert tray of fresh pineapple bits and Bing cherries. Oops! (Sorry Laura and Mark! I’ll remember more next time!) I documented the ice cream making process pretty well and will post details soon.

I had this idea of making an allover lace cardigan, maybe a twin set, using a shiny mercerized cotton that has been aging in the stash since 1998. I picked a pretty lace pattern from a stitch treasury and agonizingly made my way through a swatch.

It’s about 50 stitches wide and 3 repeats tall (probably ~40 rows in all?), and it took me, no kidding, about 4 hours to do it. Around then, I began to sense I wasn’t having fun. I don’t particularly like the process or appearance of knitted lace – when you don’t have a “resting” row in between “working” rows. I also don’t like patterns where the stitch count changes depending on the row. This swatch made me feel anxious, and I didn’t think I’d be smiling while I figured out things like shaping when I could hardly keep it together enough for a rectangle.

This one’s going back to the drawing board. I’m going to think about it a little more.

While we’re waiting for better ideas, hey, take a look at my new nephew. Baby Daniel, born in March.

With 2 Yale-educated parents and a life in the Big Apple, I bet this fellow will be smart and sophisticated. Of course, that makes him a perfect candidate for a Chicken Viking Hat.

I have been improving my photography skills little by little, and today, I am pleased to see that I am capturing colors with greater accuracy. I have to thank Felicia, the queen of awesome photos, for her great advice. I also invested in a mini tripod, I’m trying to play with longer exposures but no flash, and this will keep the camera much steadier than my hands ever could.

On my monitor, this is truly the color of the yarn. From left to right, we have the tricolor roving from eons ago, then there’s more of the tippy red roving, and on the right is a wool/alpaca/kid mohair mix from Chehalem Wools.

The Chehalem roving is very nice, but there’s enough VM that every single draft length has to have something picked out of it. It’s lovely fiber, though. I think they sell covered fleeces, maybe I’ll go that route the next time. The tippy red roving is still tippy and also requires frequent pauses to pull bits out. Only the tricolor roving is a smooth, easy spin.

After my first year of college, I got a part-time job in a research lab making microbiological media and autoclaving glassware. However, I wanted to do actual research, and I was quickly given a small project studying yeast genetics. I did a large-scale screen to identify yeast genes that, when overexpressed, could bypass a meiotic checkpoint that normally stopped cells from dividing when their DNA was completely broken into tiny pieces. Yeast bearing any of these overexpressing genes could sporulate even when there were massive problems repairing double strand breaks in DNA after recombination. (If you’re dying to know more, you can read the abstract here.)

Anyway, at that time, we shared lab space with another investigator. All of us had separate projects, but the investigators, students, and technicians all worked side by side, and we got to know each other pretty well. During my senior year, a new technician joined the staff of the other investigator. He was a recent Carleton College graduate, and this was his first job. He was a really friendly, unassuming sort of guy – and he was smart, worked hard, and had a funny sense of humor. I remember he told me a story once about working at a Taco Bell, being really sick one day and working at the drive thru window. He ended up vomiting on a customer when he leaned out to hand him his bag of food! He couldn’t stop laughing when he told me about it.

My friend left the technician job after his boss was denied tenure (the academic affairs committee essentially told the boss to wrap up his work and go get a new job). I don’t know what he did after that. We lost touch when I graduated in 1996, and I hadn’t talked to him probably since 1998. I’d been randomly googling for him on and off since then, wondering what happened to him, if he had gone on to grad school, what was he doing now, did he get married and have kids?

Btw – I have great faith in Google. I recently googled my way to an old friend from elementary school, someone I haven’t seen since 1994. She has a very popular Korean name, made her rather tricky to locate. I tend to have periodic fits of nostalgia, and I search for many of my old friends “gone missing.” Lots of them have accomplished great things already, and I’m proud to have known them once upon a time.

Where was I? Oh yes. I’d misplaced my friend from the lab. Well, once Matt and I knew for sure we were moving to Minnesota, I remembered that this fellow was a Carleton alum. I was excited thinking that I might finally see him again – I knew his parents lived somewhere not too far from Northfield, and I figured he’d be home for Christmas or something, it’d only be a matter of time until I tracked him down.

This past weekend was the Carleton College alumni meetup, and I realized on Sunday that it would be the 10th reunion for the class of ’95. Hey, I thought, maybe he’s here right now! Wouldn’t that be neat? Maybe I could find his email address or something and drop him a note. I asked Matt if he had admin privileges to the alumni database, if we could look my buddy up and see if he was registered to attend the reunion. Sure can, he says, and we type his name into the search engine.

We peer at the screen, there’s my friend’s name, the year he graduated, and his major – and right next to that, it says, “Deceased.”

Wait, what?

I had Matt verify it with the alumni office. It’s true, the office said they had his obituary from around 5 years ago. I guess he would have been about 27 years old when he died. I don’t know anything else, just the estimated date of death (July 2000). It sounds so trite, but damn, I was really looking forward to seeing him again. I can’t believe he’s gone.

Right after I moved to Minnesota, I bought some fiber. I got a bonus batt of lusciousness, and it recently turned into this:

The color was “meh” and definitely in the need of an overdye. Enter Kool Aid! I picked an apple green flavor.

It was a very milky green, I think they used the word “frosted” to describe it.

Vinegar, microwave, blah blah blah. It didn’t do squat for the yarn. (Note to self: avoid frosty colors from now on.)

I resorted to regular old food coloring, more vinegar, more microwave, blah blah blah.

Hey, nice results! Not even remotely Hulk-like.

It’s ~125 yards (~1 oz, I think?) of fingering weight, and oh so soft. Cashmere and silk, baby. That’s what it’s all about.

Can some of you do me a quickie favor?

Do a search within my blog (use the search function in the left column) for anything, and tell me if the links within the entries work and the punctation looks okay for entries ported from Livejournal (before March ’05)? If anything looks amiss (raw HTML code embedded instead of punctuation, especially where apostrophes should be), could you please let me know:

a) what you searched for
b) your operating system
c) browser and version

If everything looks normal, you don’t need to leave a comment.

Thanks!

UPDATED TO ADD: I see what the problem is now. It’s Internet Explorer. It just doesn’t support the &-a-p-o-s-; entity (hypens added so it doesn’t turn into an apostrophe). Because they suck. The post-move WordPress-originated blog entries use &-#-8-2-1-7-; to code apostrophes, which IE does recognize. I’m really not seeing myself going back to each entry and manually coding in different apostrophes. (Now some smarty is going to tell me about a speedy way to automatically do all of the replacements, but nyahh, I’d rather be spinning.) My low tech solution – tell ya’ll to try the latest version of Firefox.

The cats are not adjusting well to the automatic litterbox. They have always liked to pee in the front half of the box and poop in the back half. This globe has much less front-to-back depth than their previous box, and I witnessed James at 5:45 AM with his butt sticking out of the entrance, pissing merrily on the floor. This was the 2nd accident in about a week.

Darn.

The Litter Robot peoples gave me a hint or two on how we can get them to get farther into the box (dangle a little weight – like a quarter or something – in front of the box that will tap them on the rear when they go in, hopefully remind them to scoot in a little farther). They extended my money-back guarantee time from 30 days to 45 days, to give them some more time to adjust. I’m not optimistic about this one.

Another year gone by – today is my 31st birthday. Woot!

In my great love of all things gadgety, we bought a robotic litter box:

Luckily, the boys are not afraid of it (Matt and I were worried that they’d be too skittish and would just “hold it” until they exploded). I can hardly think of a better gift to myself than never having to scoop litter again.