The Cream Rises to the Top

Oh how I love skimming fresh cream off the top of the jar of milk! Unless we're on our last jar, cream is always ready to hand when we need it. Most of it goes into the cream whipper to top our mochas and hot cocoas. Sometimes a little goes into mashed potatoes, or a desert recipe. Occasionally I make sour cream or butter with it.

Did our parents' and grandparents' generation really give up this little luxury just to avoid having to shake the jug a couple of times before pouring the milk? Surely not. Probably homogenization* was was an industry convenience. Whatever the reason, it's a loss. A small one, sure, but a loss none the less.



*Homogenization is the process of pulverizing the milk fat so that it stays suspended in the more watery portion of the milk, rather than rising to the top as it does naturally. It is not related to pasteurization, which is the process of heating the milk to kill any potentially harmful pathogens. Most milk at the grocery store is both pasteurized and homogenized.

The Fruit Bowl

Do people still have fruit bowls? Thanks to my husband, we do! A few weeks ago, he pulled most of the fruit from the fridge, stuck it in my big stainless steel mixing bowl and set the bowl on the dining table. Then he proceeded to leave little notes for us some mornings when he observed specimens going soft: "Time to eat the mango!" or "Time to eat the pears!" Lo and behold, we are eating more fruit! Above is our bowl after yesterday's trip to Horrocks. There are several varieties of apples, pears, avocados, mangos and kiwi fruit. Bananas are elsewhere so that they don't get bruised, and grapes stay in the fridge so Ethan doesn't help himself to a choking hazzard. Here he is hefting a blurry mango. :o)

The only downside? Having to dump all the fruit on the table when I need the mixing bowl for, ya know, mixing stuff. Otherwise, I highly recommend reviving the fruit bowl, at least for the winter months.

Making Ice Cream

My new Kitchen Aid mixer came with a free ice cream maker attachment, which arrived in the mail last week. I've been promising the kids ice cream, and today was the day. I adapted a recipe from this book:
The recipe was nice and simple -- milk, cream, sugar, eggs, flavoring. (They suggested a historically typical lemon, we went with mint chocolate chip.)

I was able to make it using local ingredients, except for the chocolate and perhaps the mint oil. The cream and milk came from the cow herd we own a share in. The eggs from a family in our Quaker meeting who raise a few chickens in their back yard, the sugar was Michigan beet sugar. Even the mint flavoring *could* be local -- there are big mint farms in this area.

The recipe begins with a milk/sugar/egg yolk custard. The book states, "Don't expect your custard to be yellow like Eliza Jane [Wilder]'s unless your cream comes from grass-fed Guernseys and your eggs from scratch-fed chickens."

Check. Check. The cows are Jerseys rather than Guernesys, but that's a minor detail. ;o) I don't know why the fact that my custard was bright yellow made me so happy, but it did. (What I said in this post may have something to do with it.) Can all that beta-carotine and omega-3's make up for the huge hit of saturated fat? No? Oh well...

As much as I enjoyed getting in touch with the past, there is a time and place for modern conveniences. Like whipping egg whites to a stiff peak and turning an ice cream dasher for 30 minutes.

I don't have any pictures of the finished product. We were too busy eating!