Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

I made some ice cream tonight, well, yesterday night, it’s 1:20 am as I write this . I got some strawberries yesterday, they came with a free pot of single cream. While hanging around Tesco I thought, ‘actually, I feel like getting some strawberries. Maybe I can make something out of them’ I’m not too keen on plain strawberries you see, I like them but I couldn’t eat a box of them and the free cream was the clincher. If I didn't use it on the strawberries I could put it in a milkshake or something. Tonight I decided to make ice cream. Our freezer’s broken so we have to use the little freezer compartment in the old fridge that is still, just about working, despite the door sometimes falling off. A few weeks ago the door to the freezer compartment broke. Now I wasn’t having that. I spent most of the evening trying to fix it. A piece of it had snapped off and I lost it while trying to stick it back on. Eventually I had the idea of using a little piece of wood from an old desk thing (long story but simply it’s from the remains of some flat-pack furniture we dismantled ages ago) I sawed a piece off of the little piece I took from the remains of the desk, and super glued it in place. Then we had this mad struggle with the door involving two tricky little screws. Eventually, in the early hours of the morning the door of the freezer compartment was back on and working. I have to say I was exceptionally proud of that.
So this compartment is pretty small so we can’t really store much in it but I got mum to pick me up a few things on her way home (I hadn’t thought of making ice cream yesterday so I didn’t get them) Strawberry extract, large food bags, rock salt and most importantly ice. We don’t have any fancy gadgets like ice cream machines or blenders and food processors so what and how I can make things is quite restricted. I found some cool ice cream recipes a while ago but it wasn’t hot enough to make them. (I must add. Phew this heat. What the hell happened? Last week I suddenly stopped bringing my duvet downstairs with me (I’ve been using it to snuggle up in over winter, it’s really cosy) and changing from my winter to summer pyjamas and stuff like that, little things but sudden). She was able to get everything for me except the strawberry extract. I didn’t mind, I just cut up two more strawberries and mashed them with a spoon instead and added a drop of vanilla extract that we had lying around. This particular recipe uses the bag method. I finished making it at about 10 pm-ish. What came out was a little serving of nice but not completely frozen ice cream. I split it in two in little bowls and gave one to mum. It was pretty nice but melted too quickly, I don’t think I froze it properly. But, to be fair the bag sprung a leak. Anyway, the result was pretty nice, despite me being able to drink half of it. The solid part had a nice texture and you could taste the strawberry and it was really nice and refreshing.
Another recent achievement is my creation of two large fans. I need to find a way of powering these paper and card fans but I have all summer to work on it now don’t I. One of them is ready for hand held use, though it’s a little big. I used a toilet roll for the purpose and painted it silver to make it pretty. It works pretty well. I’m making a smaller one for easier hand held use. I think an ice lolly stick or two might work for a handle on this one
Ah, little things make me happy .

Here is the recipe I used
http://www.ehow.com/how_5249623_make...ice-cream.html
I had to look up ½ & ½ a little explanation of that would’ve been nice at the time. As you can imagine I don’t think we have such a thing so after looking it up I used half a cup of milk and half a cup of the free cream that came with the strawberries, that offer of cheap strawberries and free cream worked out pretty well huh? That also makes me happy.