French Vanilla Ice Cream 4 egg yolks 1/3 c sugar 1.5 c cream vanilla to taste pinch of salt Mix egg yolks and sugar at a high speed until they’ve thickened to a lovely light yellow and make ribbons when you draw the beaters out and across the surface of the mixture. Scald the cream. Remove from heat when a perfect scald is reached. Add salt and vanilla. (I judged the vanilla by the mixture’s smell, and would guess I used 2-3 tablespoons. But that’s a guess.) Drizzle the scalded…
When I was a kid, we used to go down to Homer for the 4th of July. Loads of us, extended theatre family types. Lots of kids, lots of adults, lots of mosquitoes. Fireworks you couldn’t see, because the sun doesn’t go down in Alaska in July. Wading in the slough and getting clay up to your knees and convincing each other that the mothers wouldn’t notice. Picking Alaska cotton and tickling each other with the fluff. Running up the solid mud road to the cousins who had running water,…
There’s been a bad plane crash in Soldotna, the next town over from my home town of Kenai. Ten people were killed. They haven’t released names yet, except somebody I went to high school with just said the pilot was a family member. When I was fourteen there was a terrible, terrible small plane crash in Homer that killed about twenty people and injured several more. Among the dead were a junior high history teacher, which meant literally everyone at my high school had had him as a teacher, and…
Picoreview: Now You See Me: I loved it, actually. Really enjoyed it. And this is an enormously non-specific review, because it’s got too many great twists to risk spoiling. Jesse Eisenberg meant Mark Ruffalo wasn’t my least favorite performer on the screen, which I think has never happened before in a movie with Ruffalo in it. I thought the romantic storyline was forced, but the only person I’ve ever thought Ruffalo had on-screen chemistry with is RDJ, and it is clear other people don’t think his charm is limited to…
I am given to understand that Paul Bettany won Wimbledon yesterday, and that the British are very excited about this. :) It was an insanely busy weekend. Saturday was pretty nearly perfect; we went forth and shopped, getting exciting things like lawn mowers and ice cream makers, and went to the farmers’ market, and had lunch out. We also got new shoes for Young Indiana which exploded three hours later. The entire bottom front half of the left shoe just went splooey and fell off, and all he’d done was…