Sometimes it's so Simple - Rootbeer Floats

It may be February, cold and rainy, but we can still dream about summer.  The other night, we had root-beer floats for dessert and they were perfect.  Our favorite babysitter had the inspiration to get ice-cream (french vanilla) and cream soda.  There were a couple of root-beers in the fridge, holding down a back corner of one of the shelves, and voila: dessert was made.  We were divided on cream-soda versus root-beer.  I'm a purist on that one.

It's hard to beat this dessert.  We used to go to the drive-up A&W for chili dogs and floats when I was a kid and something about that creamy, fizzy concoction always says summer and fun to me.

When I was lucky enough to be relatively penniless in Greece for a week one summer, a long time ago, I convinced the woman at the cafe in the village I was staying in to mix me a float.  She didn't have root-beer, and she didn't have vanilla (or maybe our language difficulties got in the way on that one) and she really didn't *want* to mix soda and ice-cream.  I finally convinced her to sell me a glass of sprite and a dish of pistachio ice-cream.  I plopped the ice-cream into the soda glass and handed her back the dish.  Talk about the right kind of summer lunch!  For the next few days, she sold me the ice-cream and soda, always in separate dishes, and looked disgusted when I handed her back the ice-cream dish.

I'm sure I didn't do the american tourist any favors, and I haven't heard about a new ice-cream-float craze in Greece since then.  But sitting on the sidewalk, watching a couple of kids play, feeling the heavy heat and sunshine pour down after a morning of visiting ruins - well, it doesn't get much better than that.

The Real Thing

We're finally getting some cooler weather around here, but this weekend was sunny and beautiful.  Perfect for celebrating the end of summer with a final ice-cream blow-out. 

After the goat-milk ice-cream, we went to the other extreme and visited a local soda shop that specializes in floats, sodas, egg creams and sundaes. 

We had a couple of scoops and listened to the clamour of people talking, metal dishes clanging and the fizz of the whipped cream dispenser.

Wouldn't you rather treat yourself to scoop of this stuff every now and again than have frozen-light-yogurt-ice-cream-substitutes every night of the week?

Here's to the arrival of Fall.

A Different Kind of Kid

This weekend, the kid-chefs and I got to know goats.  Five of them, to be exact.  And they were cute!  A friend knew my son is enamored with goats and a local woman who raises dairy goats had an urban husbandry workshop nearby, so we checked it out.

She'd brought two does (females) and three doelings (baby girls, about 4 months old) in from her farm and demonstrated how to milk them, trim hooves and described what it's like to have a small herd.  They were hilarious. 

Munching on poison ivy and every branch in site, butting each other out of the way, bleating when the moms were led off for the demonstrations - they were very entertaining.

Then it was time for the food!

We tried some milk, fresh from the goat, some cheese and some icecream.

The milk tasted like the milk we're used to (cow's milk, that is!) and the cheese was a farmer's cheese, similar to chevre, but less creamy.  The icecream?  It was delish.

It was a fun couple of hours and I love that the kids (mine, not the goats') get to see where their food comes from, and hear about the effort it takes to raise it yourself.  Thankfully, there are so many local farms and people around our area making these kinds of events easy to find and experience. 

I left convinced that having a few dwarf goats on an in-town lot could be fantastic, but as of now, that's not an option in our town.

I'm not sure we'll be milking goats ourselves twice a day any time soon, but angora goats might be another story....once we move out of town!

Pony Party Cupcakes

The rule around here is if it's your party, you get to choose the cake.  For her party, my daughter chose pony cupcakes from Hello, Cupcake!  One thing I have learned about this cookbook is that I cannot expect our final product to look like the photos in the cookbook, although I have a friend with an amazing-baker daughter who turns out cupcakes that look exactly like the photos!  That girl has a future in some kind of fine craftsmanship! 

We started with a basic vanilla cupcake recipe, to make 24 cupcakes.  I was trying to get these done myself, between various Saturday activities and when I dished the batter up into the paper cups, I only had enough for 12 cupcakes.  See that measuring cup with all the liquids?  Yup, it needed to go in the mix....cooking as therapy for perfectionist leanings!   Lucky for the weekend schedule, the cupcakes turned out fine once the batter was complete.

The kids had a great time assembling the necks, spots, and heads, and we managed to turn out a reasonable looking herd of ponies.  The mini-cupcake tufts of grass were an inspired aunt's contribution to the party pasture. 

We also gave the ice-cream maker another whirl - this time with cream - and it worked much better.  I'm not sure we've found the right combination yet though.  Ah well, we'll have to keep on trying!

Time for Ice Cream

It's suddenly gotten to be 100 degrees here and hot!  That can make for some pretty miserable end-of-the-school year events, but it's perfect for at least one of our favorite foods: ice cream!

I have always wanted an ice-cream maker at home, and lingered over the recipes for home made sorbets, frozen yogurts and the perfect vanilla ice cream.  Well, this year, my mother sent the kid-chefs a summer-celebration gift.  Yup, you guessed it - they have their own ice cream maker!

Since they share the experiments with me, I can't be too terribly jealous....

Our first trial was a learning experience.  We learned that 2% milk is no substitute for cream when making ice cream.  Ice cream.

After a series of well-timed turns of the crank, we dished up some frozen 2% milk with blueberries.

It was delicious - sweet milk, defrosting rapidly in our dishes, with perfectly ripe blueberries.  It didn't last long!  Our next experiment turned out better - stayed tuned!