Ice Cream!

Many of my family members are allergic to milk. My dad is so allergic that he doesn't even eat milk chocolate, but most of the rest of us get at least a slight stomach ache from drinking milk or eating it on cereal or wev. For a long while, we used soy milk, but only my dad was willing to drink the stuff; it was horrible. And soy ice cream is just not worth eating. However, because of the recent mainstream interest in organic food and anything that can reasonably claim to be "all- natural," goat's milk is available even in the local mainstream grocery store. Goat's milk isn't exactly as tasty as cow's milk, but I like it much better than soy milk, and, most importantly, its creamy enough to make decent ice cream.

I made some vanilla-cherry ice cream first, but I don't have pictures from that batch. This is the peppermint ice cream that I made on Sunday. Once enough ice has been frozen to make another batch, I'm going to make some more, either mango or plain vanilla. The thought of making just plain vanilla ice cream is a bit sad, but my dad likes it so I'm considering it. He likes mango too, though, so we'll see how inclined I am to stand up and chop up mangoes into little pieces when it comes time to make the next batch.

I smashed up pieces of peppermint candy to toss into the ice cream.

My mum's ice cream machine is about 30 years old. It still works great, though.

I made a half batch so it wouldn't overflow the top before it was churned enough to be creamy. Even using whole goat's milk isn't quite as creamy as using heavy whipping cream (go figure), so the longer it churns, the better.

Sweet Potato Soup

I made this soup yesterday. It's kind of like chowder and super tasty, so I thought I'd write the recipe down to prevent my forgetting it. It's easiest if the potatoes are left over from something else, but there's nothing wrong with cooking a potato for the soup, they don't need to be cold or anything.

1 already cooked sweet potato, skinned and mashed
1 stalk of celery, chopped
1/3-1/2 medium red onion, chopped (sweet onions would probably also work but I like red ones)
some butter to fry the onions in
1/2 cup frozen or canned corn
1 cup (or so) milk
some water
salt to taste
black pepper to taste (I use maybe 1/2 a teaspoon)

You can add more vegetables as you have them. This soup began as a kind of leftover mashup, and this is what I had. I can verify that it's good this way, though.

First, fry the onion for a minute or two in a pot, then add the celery and fry for another minute or so, so the onion is more than halfway translucent and the celery is still crunchy. Remove from heat, and add the potatoes and corn. I never manage to mash the potatoes properly, so at this point I make sure there aren't any large chunks left in the potatoes by poking them around with a spoon. Add milk and enough water to make the soup the consistency you want it, which will depend on the size of the potato. Last time I made this I had a rather small potato and it took maybe a cup of water, although I can't be sure because I just stuck the pan under the faucet and filled it until it looked right. If you don't use enough water, the potato will suck it all up and instead of soup you'll have mash.

Return the pot to heat and warm it until just before boiling. Add spices to the point where it's a little salty and slightly peppery. Before you add the salt this soup will be pretty sweet, but it takes a surprisingly small amount to make it taste like chowder so don't get too enthusiastic. When it comes to the pepper, though, enthusiasm isn't a bad thing; I always end up adding more in the end. Garlic powder is optional.

This recipe makes approximately two servings, but of course you could make a huge pot of it if you happen to have several left over sweet potatoes.

If only I could program

Someone needs to put up an online recipe database you can search based on the ingredients in the recipes. Every recipe database I've seen is just your basic search tool where you type in a word or phrase and get every result with that word or phrase in it. What would be 100 times better would be a search system like Wowhead, where you can set up a filter based on characteristics of the item, only this would be just a basic search page with with several inputs, and instead of searching for, say, "Chicken Parmesan" you would search for "chicken breast" "onion" "apple" "garlic" and "green pepper." And instead of getting every recipe with "Chicken Parmesan" in the title, you would get recipes with your ingredients in them.


I know I can't be the only one who looks at the items in my refrigerator and just can't think what to make with them. This website would make millions.