Avocado Ice Cream

I’m participating in an online Iron Chef competition with friends.  Our mystery ingredient this week was avocado.  Having just received an ice cream maker attachment for my beloved Kitchenaid, I decided it was destiny that I’d seen an Alton Brown recipe for Avocado Ice Cream a couple of weeks ago.

What you need:

12 ounces avocado meat, approximately 3 small to medium

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 1/2 cups whole milk

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup heavy cream

Start by peeling and pitting your avocados.  Mix with lemon juice, milk and sugar.  Alton calls for a blender, but I don’t own one (nor does my mom, who’s kitchen I’ve taken over).

Her trusty immersion blender did just fine for us.

As with everything, Monkey was all too eager to help. 

Whisk in the heavy cream, cover and chill 4-6 hours (until it reaches a temperature of 40F or lower).

Process in your ice cream maker, according to manufacturer’s instructions. 

It sets up fairly quickly (it took mine about 10 minutes). 

You can serve immediately if you prefer soft serve.  We put ours in the freezer over night for a Sunday afternoon snack.

Mmmmm.  It didn’t taste as I expected.  While it’s not my favorite (chocolate!), I enjoyed the creamy nutty flavor.

Enjoy!

Happy 2011

“Every ending leads to a new beginning”

We brought in 2011 with a bang this year.  We received (and accepted) an offer on our old house last week.  T happened to be off this weekend, so we decided it was now or never in going to empty the place out. 

There wasn’t all that much left.  The kitchen hadn’t been packed yet.  We expected to be spending a week there later this month to finish packing it up in anticipation of moving everything to the new house.

Instead, all of our furnishings and the last of our belongings had to be trucked 200 miles and placed into storage. 

With the help of a handful of family members (and a friend of my father-in-law), we had everything loaded onto a U-Haul in a matter of hours (even our massive swingset/clubhouse!).

I thought that was pretty good, considering we still had quite a few boxes to pack. 

  

I was never in love with our house, but it was our house.  We worked hard to buy it and we put a lot of sweat and tears into that place.

We got married while living there.  We brought our babies home to it.  We have nearly 7 years of living and memories inside those walls.

I never did get to finish all of my projects.  I figure that’s normal for someone who always has a never-ending list of projects, though..  right?

And the only thing left are bare walls

years of memories

echoes of  little voices

echoes of babies crying, laughing, playing

and echoes of the pitter patter of little feet

ready for someone else to come in and make it home.

We are [im]patiently waiting for the closing on our new house.  We found a great old place in town.  Maybe we’re crazy to get into the upkeep of an extremely old house, but we both loved the place when we finally saw it in person (after nearly a year of driving by – and looking at the listing online -  saying “God, that place is perfect for us.” ). 

So, here we are in limbo.  We’ve been living with my parents for the past 2 weeks now with 4-5 weeks left to go in this portion of our adventure.  The kids have adjusted so much easier than I anticipated, though it was probably easy to adjust living here with Grammy and Pa.  The new house with just our little family might be more of an adjustment.  Luckily, children are resilient little creatures – and I’m trying to keep them busy enough they (specifically Monkey) don’t have time to dwell on it. 

So welcome, 2011 – welcome.  Here is to the start of our new adventure.

For the record - I am NEVER MOVING AGAIN!