AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

an exercise in cooking

Cherry Cheesecake Ice Cream.  I used the recipe in the Perfect Scoop for Cheesecake ice cream as the base for this tasty treat.  After I finished the ice cream I pureed my cherry mixture and layered it in a tupperware with graham crumbs (I used the teddy grahams, because they were super easy to crush and on sale).

The cherry mixture was:
1-2 pounds of cherries, pitted and cut into 8ths
1/4 cup brandy
1/4 sugar (ish)

The cherries I didn't bother weighing and I didn't use all of them that I had.  I just chopped and pitted for about 30 minutes or until I got bored.  I let them macerate overnight in the fridge.  In the morning when I made my ice cream, I pureed approximately a half cup to a cup of the mixture so I wouldn't have any really big cold chunks.

It worked really well, with the only flaw being a bit of iciness in the cherry swirl.  Still tasty, and better yet for the summer, cold and did not require either the stovetop or the oven.  Yum!

One of my friends earlier this week posted an article from the NYT about cooking and the lack thereof in the U.S.  Here is my favorite quote from "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch."

It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates of our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing: up to six hours a day. (That’s nearly as much time as Guy Fieri devotes to the activity.)

I don't really do that much cooking in the average week, so this article really hit home.  In the last week, I've made black beans and rice (with a pan fried tofu), homemade spicy french fries, and ice cream.  If I did any other real cooking this week, I have forgotten it all.  This weekend I want to make the plum kuchen from Smitten Kitchen.  I even got plums from the farmer's market for it.  We'll see how it goes.  I usually have bigger plans than I can get done in my 27 minutes of kitchen time a day.

chopping cherries

The last couple of weeks have been a real bear for me.  Work and life in general are pretty good, but I cannot sleep.  I have no good idea why, but I am assuming it is the heat and humidity, a little bit of stress, and a bit of twitchy, twitchy legs.

Of course, this makes me tired and grumpy during the day, but potentially super productive in the mornings.

What I've done this morning:

• finished rereading Elvenbane;
• threw away some produce that had gone bad;
• cleaned counters, etc. in the kitchen;
• swept the floors of the kitchen and the living room;
• made cherry cheesecake ice cream (I chopped cherries last night before bed);
• made myself coffee (it's steeping right now);
• washed all of the dishes / loaded the dishwasher; and
• played Bejeweled on my really slow computer.

I've been up since 1 a.m.  I already know I'm not going to the gym, because by the time I get to Boston I will be hard pressed to put one foot in front of the other much less downward dog and pigeon. 

Oh, and completely unrelated: I apparently have magic stupid powers and one of the veins near the surface of my leg burst last week.  It looks pretty much the same as it did last Tuesday, so I will probably call the doctor and make sure there isn't anything more wrong than just my body taking its old sweet time to clear the apparent bruising from the site.  Fun, fun, fun.

 
Beautiful, isn't it?