Restoring the Old Girl

Ice Cream 101
Tools were downed today as the rain drenched us yet again. Lucky the Earth is round and we can't see what's around the corner. How alarming it would have been back in September when it started raining if we had known it wouldn't stop for five months - and counting!
Apart from the torrential downpour, we also awoke this morning to a sorry looking cat who had a sore paw. Long story short. The vet had to amputate half a toe on Teddy's back foot. I know. Something had squashed it. He certainly is an accident prone puss. We have to keep him inside for the next few days or more. Easier said than done in a house with 400 doors and a thousand windows.
I took a photo of him wth his bandaged foot, but I don't want to be that person who posts cat photos and talks about them like they're a person. I'll leave it there.
The latest bee in my bonnet is about all the weird stuff in our food. We don't eat a lot of processed food in this house, but I'm trying to whittle that down even further, hence making my own ice cream.
I have an ice cream maker and making ice cream is not foreign to me. The best I've made is milk, honey and cinnamon ice cream. Recently I found a very quick and easy vanilla recipe in Tessa Kiros' book Falling Cloudberries. You don't need an ice cream maker. I made it in one the first time, but now I just use a whisk and it works just as well.
I made it Christmas day and it was a hit and so easy, so I made it again yesterday.
It honestly takes five minutes. I've tweaked the recipe a bit, you need:
600ml pure cream (that's the runny one, not thickened cream)
4 egg yolks
a teaspoon of vanilla extract (or paste but not vanille essence)
a tin of condensed milk
Firstly, you beat the egg yolks and vanilla until they're mixed, then you add the condensed milk and mix that in. In a separate bowl whisk the cream until it has soft peaks, then add it to the condensed milk mixture and whisk together.
Pour it into a container that you can put into the freezer. After an hour or two get it out and whisk it a bit more (just in the freezer container will do). Put it back in the freezer and whisk again in another hour or two.
That's it.
It's a great base to add other things like; smashed up bikkies, pureed fruit, chocolate, etc.  We added frozen mixed berries. Below are the bowls of berries, cream and the condensed milk/egg yolk/vanilla mixture.

Whisk, whisk.

This is the finished product!

I cannot tell you how easy it is. My small children aren't far off being able to make it.

On a healthier note, to counteract the shenanigans going on in our freezer, we made a very sensible and healthy chicken stir fry for dinner.
I can make a Flourless Middle Eastern Orange Cake with Orange Syrup, but I can't boil rice....??? I'm not kidding. This is why I'm such a fan of that brown rice you buy in the foil bag and stick in the microwave for a couple of minutes. That's what I put in my stirfry with a splash of tamari. Delish!

Tomorrow we need to do some serious re-organising downstairs. Our neighbours are moving back to Melbourne and we have had to take back a lot of Motherwell's bits and pieces we had stored under their house; bentwood chairs, a miner's couch and matching chair, an iron bed, rocking chair, etc.
I shall leave you with a stunning (although always tacky) photo of the sunset we had this afternoon. It cast a weird golden light. You really have to be there to appreciate a good sunset, but you might get the idea.