Ice Cream?

Part One: Not So Ice Cream

One of our wonderful wedding gifts was a homemade ice cream maker! (Actually, we have two; my mom is currently using one since hers is broken at the moment).  Anyway, in a spur of the moment last night, we decided to try to make ice cream.  We have the family recipe (homemade ice cream is HUGE in my family) [especially peach-pineapple], so we decided to give it a try.  There were a couple of things, though.  We didn't have any evaporated milk, and our recipe was for 1 gallon, and since my directions for the milk were "fill to fill line" we had to adapt for 6 quarts.  So, we went and got four cans of evaporated milk and came back.  We put in two cans and the adapted amount of sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla, and grabbed my 39-cent plus tax milk.  Here's where the new problem was.  I had been drinking it, so we didn't have enough.  So, what did we do?  One can of evaporated milk + one can of water.

We put it in our machine, turned it on, and let it run, and waaaaaay more than 40 minutes later it looked like some kind of weird milkshake.  So we put the motor back on and let it turn some more.

So just a little bit before bed we decided to take what we could get.  It was like a mixture of a really good vanilla drink and generously flavorless ice cream.  The water was what made it turn out this way.  My husband said he had something very similar in Mexico as a missionary. "Heladito" he called it.

See how it has like a little island of ice cream floating in a sea of vanilla drink?

Part Two: [Snow] Cream in August

What is snow cream?  People from snowy regions may never have heard of it, from what I gather talking to people.  Here in the South where we hardly see snow, my family would make ice cream out of snow when we could get enough.  Anyhow, what is snow?  In reality, tiny bits of frozen water.

We divided up our little ice cream (failure?) into cups last night and stuck them in the freezer.  It now has the consistency of snow cream! (except maybe slightly harder before it melts a little)  So, the water content wasn't such a disaster after all, especially since I haven't had snow cream in what seems like years.  I'm not exactly sure when the last time was.

So voila!  Genuinely fake snow cream from a little ice cream mishap!  Why have we never thought of it before?

Leftover Brown Sugar Chicken and a Milk Story!

Basic Chicken Fried Rice, Anyone?

Sorry, folks. No picture this time, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway.

We had one piece left of the fabulous chicken and about three storage containers of leftover rice on Sunday.  (Late post; both of us started school this week)  So, we decided to chop it up and throw it in with the rice.  Easy recipe time!  Cooked chicken + cooked rice + soy sauce.  A wise lady once told me that it's not necessarily the complicated recipes that are the best, but the easy ones.  (I'm loving the whole easy thing).

The Milk Story

So, if you follow CVS, you know that they have their milk on sale this week for $3.39 for a gallon. Any discount on good milk is great, especially when you love to drink milk like me (especially when I wake up in the middle of the night).  Anyhow, we were planning on going shopping yesterday and I decided that I'd check my e-mail before we left...and whaddya know!  There was a wonderful little email from CVS with a $3 ExtraBucks Coupon!!  Bwahahaha! 

So, after a run to Home Depot and Walmart, we hit the CVS and I literally bought milk with TWO QUARTERS and got change back. (Now, I understand that I could have rolled the ExtraBucks by making use of another ExtraBucks deal, however we were out of milk, and not much this week interests me...plus the coupon expired in two days).

Life is good!

Maybe I'm Not a Hopeless Chef After All!

Brown Sugar Baked Chicken

I love Pinterest! Pinterest is my friend, especially since I'm new at the whole homemaker thing.  Anyway, I was browsing through the Food and Drink section the other day and ran across this recipe from spoonful.com for Brown Sugar Spiced Baked Chicken.  My husband and I agreed it should be on our must-try short list.  Sure enough, when it came down to Saturday, we still had three pieces of chicken left from our meal planning shopping trip this week (by the way, the meal planning seems to be going well as for getting ingredients, but we seem to end up altering our meals from the original recipes, but, then again, what are recipes for?)

I substituted paprika for chili powder (we didn't have any paprika), and whaddya know, the chicken turned out fantastic! (We think the sugar melted off) And it was so easy!  Just mix up the seasoning, slap the chicken into it, toss it in a baking dish and put it in the oven for twenty minutes! Easy is good for a newbie like unto myself.  One piece each filled us up, too, so we have one lovely spiced leftover to combine with something (probably leftover rice) for dinner tonight.  We make our rice in a rice cooker that we received as a wedding gift, and that thing is awesome.  Haven't really tried much with it, but it can apparently do quite a few things.

Watch Your Bananas!!

Not-So-Despicable Minion Amigurumi!

One of our new favorite movies now-a-days is Despicable Me and its lovely counterpart that we saw in the theater.  Since then, we haven't exactly gone "minion mad," but we do love the little guys, and playing Minion Rush on our iPads is pretty fun.  They're adorable, hilarious, and the Banana language is quite fascinating to one such as myself.  I've been plotting to make a Minion for a couple weeks now, and I finally just broke down and did it.  He came together really quickly, actually.

I found this pattern from Snacksies Handicraft Corner on Pinterest.  I actually just now discovered that there's now an updated pattern that should have been just a little easier to follow, but I didn't have too many problems.  Maybe I'm just used to making mistakes... 

Isn't he adorable!  He's not despicable at all!  He's completely made out of yarn from other projects (except for his brown eyes), and my darling husband actually spent hours untangling the yellow yarn for me (he's really good at untangling)!!  I'm glad he likes him so much (but we haven't named him yet)!

I'm really getting into the amigurumi side of crochet.  It's so much fun, and then you can play with your work...good for the inner-child.

Bread!

The Seemingly Normal Bread of Life

Hello, again!  It has been a while, has it not?  Summer is basically over, and we're now living in our own place.  Of course, there's still boxes all over the place, but if there weren't, it wouldn't be realistic. (I seem to use a lot of contractions! My English teachers would cringe!) I've crocheted some things between my last post and the present, but I've been a little busy to explain.  Perhaps if I can catch my breath again, I could explain a little.  Using cotton yarn is great!

The feature of the day, however, was my climbing over the boxes in the kitchen floor and using my long awaited... wait for it... BREAD MACHINE! Hooray! It's one of the wedding presents that I didn't get to see until after we left the in-laws'. Working at the grocery store, fresh bread would come down the belt for me to bag, and I would almost always think to myself, 'I'm so excited to use my bread machine when we go back South!' Well, after being up for a bit this morning, I decided today was going to be the day!  So I grabbed my favorite scissors and cut my box open.  Ah, power.  (I don't particularly like knives).  I read my instructions, (I was so excited that I didn't even look through the French and Spanish sections like I normally would) and started cleaning the equipment to get it ready to roll [dough].  I went to the Walmart (in my lovely car that I've missed all summer) and grabbed some bread flower and bread machine yeast.  In fact, I even went over and looked at the yarn and did not even get any!  I did gather some ideas, though.  Christmas, anyone?

So I got back home with my lovelies, and I baked an empty bread maker for ten minutes...twice.  I would bet at the moment that you are thinking like my darling husband and ask "why didn't you do that before you went and got the ingredients?"  Well....I guess I was just that excited.  It would have made lots of sense though.  So, after everything was cooled down and cleaned, I meticulously made a small mess in the kitchen (and cleaned it right up, I might add) and threw together the white bread recipe that came with my machine.  Ta dah! Three hours and two job applications later, I had a lovely loaf of home made bread and I didn't even really get my hands dirty!  It went really well with some chilli and cheese, and a gulp or three of some Mexican-style rice pudding!

So, here it is: my little one and a half pound loaf of seemingly normal white bread.  It was quite delicious!  One of these days, we'll have things put away where I can take nice pictures of things, but that day is not today.  If you haven't made bread, I challenge you to.  Yes, you can do it without a machine, but I get to keep my wedding rings on this way...and do other things like fill out job applications.  Have a great day!  (And no, I didn't make that potholder...my aunt did...)

First Impression On Our Apartment

DIY Yarn Wreath

What says welcome like a wreath on the front door??  Okay, it may not be a welcome mat, but it sure is fun and inviting!  Such a quick little project, too.  I simply bought a 10" styrofoam extruded wreath at Hobby Lobby, and dug into my yarn stash and created this little beauty!  It's all Red Heart Super Saver yarn.  I wrapped the wreath in just plain Blue, and crocheted roses out of Hot Red, White, and Spring Green with a Size K hook and a tapestry needle.  I found the pattern for the roses at Attic24. Just remember, if you'd like to try it, her pattern is in UK terms.  I finished off with a little bit of hot glue to attach the roses.  Ta dah!