Brain Use

I asked for and received an ice cream maker for my birthday this month. It's a pretty easy contraption to use as it's just a bowl which you freeze overnight and then a paddle which easily attaches to our Kitchen Aid mixer.

As it is August, I had to debut the ice cream maker with a Blueberry Sorbet made with just a simple syrup, lemon juice and lots and lots of blueberries. I strained some but not all the skins out and it was pure summer in a bowl to enjoy.

Next we tried a Stone Fruit Ice cream. Stone fruit? Well it was a mix of peaches and I threw in a nectarine to get enough ripe fruit plus it had apricot nectar in it. It had a delicious peachy flavor but a rather odd coating left in your mouth. It was a scalded cream recipe and I wondered if it had something to do with that.

Next, I tried a banana ice cream. It was a very simple recipe which required no heating so pretty quick to put together as I had refrigerated the bananas. I added mini chocolate chips and tried swirling in peanut butter. yeah.....that worked! No weird coating in the mouth but I need to work on the peanut butter swirl as that got rather hard in the freezer.

Since K is not a banana fan, he tried his favorite coffee ice cream. He was using a recipe which called for light cream and we had only heavy cream so he winged it by mixing whole milk and the heavy cream. Personally the point of ice cream for me is to have a bit of rich decadence so even though the flavor of this ice cream was really good, it was a little too ice milky for me. Not rich enough.

What does this have to do with brain use? Cooking and baking and ice cream making is such a creative process to me. It's so much fun to try new combinations and see what happens. At 40 years now, I gotta keep the brain nimble you know!