Ice Cream

I bought an ice cream maker.  A Cuisinart ICE-21 to be exact.
I've always been intrigued by homemade ice cream, it was an occasional treat growing up, but it's nearly impossible to make enough ice in my freezer to make the old family machine work correctly.  The new machine has a freezer bowl.  I just put the whole bowl in the freezer the day before I want to make ice cream, and I put it into the machine cold.  No mussing with ice and salt.  I'll keep the old family machine, it could be fun to buy ice for a party and make more than one batch at a time.

Discovery 1:  I've totally gotten used to a low sugar diet.  I'll really dig into a bowl of unsweetened cream and strawberries, but ice cream made to the standard recipe is really too sweet.

Discovery 2:  I've totally gotten used to straight heavy whipping cream, the 2/3 cream and 1/3 milk mixture in the recipe seems thin to me.  I'm going to try experimenting with heavy and light cream.

Two more pounds

I've been cheating on my diet entirely too much lately.  Between all the convenience foods consumed while moving, tempting free food at my new job, a couple big parties (although the second one I managed to keep most guests from bringing food I shouldn't eat, and avoided eating the crackers they did bring), it's been hard to stay strictly on my diet.  My throat has been slightly swollen for a month now, I really need to be strict for a few weeks for that to go back down and I keep slipping up...

So, I knew I'd been cheating and decided it was time for a weigh-in.  It has been four months since my last weigh in, and I've lost two pounds.  Well below my pound per month average, but still not bad for eating as much as I want, indulging in rich fatty foods, enjoying all the food I do eat and not being hungry.

Hopefully as the weather improves and we finally finish emptying the city house I'll be able to get a bit more sunshine and exercise and pick that weight loss rate back up.  Gardening season is coming soon.  My indoor seedlings are pushing up out of their little trays, getting themselves all ready to go outside...

Improved but not cured...

Saturday was my 35th birthday.  I of course used the excuse to cook, a lot, and run up and down my hill between the bonfire and the house, a good number of times.  Needless to say, at the end of the day I was very happy, but rather worn out, and I had a blister from wearing barn boots without socks.  Sunday morning I awoke rather stiff, and proceeded to climb downstairs backwards on my hands and knees.  (We have very steep old stairs, a bit better than a captain ladder.)  Things loosened up as the day went on.

Monday I got downstairs the normal way, but my knee went out a few hours later, putting me pretty squarely back in fibromyalgia territory for the day.  It was rather disheartening.  Then I got the reminder to update my blog, and I commented to my husband about it, that I'd improved but not been cured.  My dear man put it back in perspective, "but you've improved a lot".  Yes.  Yes I have.  It's Tuesday, and I'm fine again.  Only three days after the stress, one day after the worst of the effects.  I should probably take it easy for a bit longer, but I have indeed improved.

Thinning

Most of my seedlings are up, some are getting too tall for humidity domes already.  It's time for one of the slightly sad duties of gardening: thinning.  Uncertain of how good my older seeds were, and confident seed was much cheaper than space under plant lights, I planted more than one seed per cell in my pots.  In some very poorly germinating seed this turned out to be very prudent, as even with the extra seed only a few cells are showing any sprouts, but then others have 2-3 plants in every cell, and one of my sources of broccoli seed was incredibly fertile and the pot is overflowing with sprouts.  Right now both sprouts in the cell are cute little promises of future mature plants, but if I let them continue they will crowd each other out and not do so well in the garden, so out come the scissors, and I have to choose one to keep, and one to be thinned.

*clip*  A sprout falls to the floor.  It's promise gone.  But yet I've given more promise to it's brother that is left behind to thrive.

Sometimes I have to do thinning in my life too.  Just this week I unsubscribed from one of my gardening e-mail lists. It was educational, but it took too much time to filter for useful info, and that took time away from more targeted reading and actually getting away from the computer and using what I'd learned.