Blanching

There are things I've heard about over the years that I've never tried.   Typically it's because I'm lazy and don't want to bother to take the time—even if the thing is supposedly a time saver.   With our neighbors moving and cleaning out their house, we've acquired some additional "stuff."   One thing they brought over were two single-serve ice cream makers by the brand Zoku.

Zoku is sort of the Ikea of the frozen treats market.   Their products work well, are stylishly made and people who have them like to talk about them.   I've never had any Zoku products before but when these two little bowls arrived in our kitchen with a, "would you want these?" my answer was a definite "yes."

They work in the same way the larger ice cream makers do in that there is a central area you freeze beforehand.   You then add the ice cream ingredients and churn for some time until the ice cream is made.   The little bowls were similar in shape inside to that of a wok or wide cone.   You keep the bowl in the freezer and when you're ready to make some ice cream you mix up 5.5 ounces from the recipe of your choice, add it in and then scrape the sides of the bowl with the included spoon/scraper tool for five to ten minutes until your ice cream is ready to eat.

That is if you can wait that long before eating it.   When I make it there is constant attrition as I stir, sample, scrape, sample, etc.   The suggestion is to make a larger batch of vanilla base up ahead of time and then each time you can choose to add other ingredients such as chocolate, strawberries, peaches, etc.

I'd been craving peach ice cream for a while now so I got some peaches at the store.   The very minimal instruction and recipe manual made the point of explaining how to prepare the peaches as opposed to saying to add mashed up peaches to the mixture.   For some reason, it clicked with me if the manual writer thought it was that important enough to explain how I could blanch the peaches by putting them in a boiling pot of water for thirty seconds and then drop them into an ice bath so the peels would slide right off, then it was good advice.

This morning I got up and wanted peach ice cream—at seven o'clock—so I started boiling some water.   I put the peaches in the ice bath and was amazed that yes, the skins not only slid right off but that it left the peach so perfect looking you couldn't even tell the skin had been removed.   I carried a slimy peach into the bedroom and woke my husband up to show him.  He feigned interest.   Then, while I was peeling the remaining peaches, I heard my daughter up in the room above the kitchen.   I called up to her via Alexa Drop In and told her to come down and we'd do something special for breakfast.

She hadn't made ice cream in the Zoku bowl yet but was interested.  I had her chop up a few slices of peach while I prepared the remainder that I'd cut up for general snacks.   Then, we started to make a bowl of vanilla ice cream from the vanilla base I'd made the day before.   She, like her mother, wanted to sample as we went along, but we had enough to add the peaches when we were five minutes in and the mixture had reached the soft serve state.

We finished off our bowl of breakfast ice cream as our secret, planning what flavors we'd make next time (albeit not for breakfast, I told her.)

The Big Boy Update: My son and I don't typically play the same games but recently there have been two we've overlapped on.   It's been nice to have a common ground of something we're both interested in.   He suggested one of the games to me and I suggested one to him.  The second game we can play together as a team, which we're planning on doing this weekend.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter worked on a letter for her grandparents today using some nen tactile stickers I got at the dollar store.   They have a lot of good choices that rival much of what I've seen as far as being able to tell what the item is.   Puffy stickers are easy to find, but they're just outlines to my daughter if it's not an easily discernable shape like an ice cream con.  These stickers had depth within them.   I also found some other fun things she could put on her picture letter.   She likes doing this kind of thing.  Initially, she wasn't going to write an accompanying letter but when she got into some of the stickers, she wanted to write a note explaining what some of the things meant.