Banana ice cream

It appears that PNW is going to have a real summer this year so I’m trying to put my ice cream maker to some good use. I saw this recipe at the Chiquita website and loved the fact that there were so few ingredients involved. I apologize for the blurry picture – I too it with my phone just before the traces of the ice cream were about to disappear. Needless to say DH and I loved the ice cream!

Ingredients:

1. 2 bananas
2. 1 cup Heavy cream
3. 1/2 cup sugar
4. 1/2-1 tsp lemon juice
5. 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (forgot to add this)

Method:

1. Blend all the ingredients in a blender to a smooth consistency.
2. Make ice cream using your ice cream maker – per the manufacturer’s instructions.
3. I then froze it. When freezing cover your container with plastic wrap before putting the lid on. This will prevent the ice crystals from forming on the ice cream.

Can you keep a secret?

That’s a novel by Sophie Kinsella . I read it recently and thoroughly enjoyed myself!

It revolves around what Emma does when she loses her engagement ring –which is supposed to be a family heirloom and her discoveries and adventures on the way.

Yes that’s all I can tell you about it without revealing too much . When I was reading the book I thought to myself – if I were to summarize this book I would do so in just one sentence and yet I was reading this book which had hundreds of pages. It’s not just the theme of the book, it’s the way Sophie Kinsella writes. You almost feel as if you’re having a dialog with her. Her style is so easy going. Oh and then I simply loved Emma’s character! There’s something about her which makes her adorable. She’s friendly, unassuming and insouciant. Her attitude to take life a day at a time appealed to me a lot! All of this makes the book very engaging. Left to myself I would’ve read this book in one sitting!

If you’re looking for some light reading then this is the book for you! I highly recommend it!

Bay View State Park

We recently rented a cabin at the Bay View State Park and liked it so much that I thought I would post a review and some photos. There are 6 cabins totally and Cabin #5 and #6 have attached shower/restroom. Most of the state parks we’ve been to, the nearest house was a few miles away but here we’d houses next to the park. Surprisingly that didn’t affect the serenity of the park in anyway. Our cabin had an ocean/bay view – we were in cabin #4. I believe all cabins have ocean view and the park has a beach access. The cabin closest to the beach access is cabin #5 but others aren’t far either. The park was quite populated with cabin-ers, RV-ers and campers – in a good way; even though it was a rainy weekend.

The restrooms are close to the cabins and there’s a shower too. If you want to have a shower don’t forget your quarters! The cabins have designated parking. Each cabin has a picnic table, a porch swing (yes!) and a fire pit.

I would highly recommend a stay here if you’re looking for an idyllic vacation! Here are a few more photos:

A peek at our edible garden

After our tryst with vegetable gardening last year (you can read about it here, here and here) we decided to go full blown this year. I don’t know how but I came across a new method of gardening called the Square foot gardening. My DH always asks me where do I come to know about all these things…honestly even I don’t know! Serendipity I guess! We went and bought Mel’s new book, All New Square Foot gardening. If you’re lucky enough to be in WA you can get it at the Half price book stores. Buying the book was just the start of the journey. Then we’d to collect the ingredients for the special mix – five different kinds of manure/compost, vermiculite and peat moss. Once we’d the ingredients it was quite a project to setup the raised bed. Mixing of the soil requires quite some muscle power. Of course and then there was the most pleasant part of it all – getting the required veggie starts. Picking veggie starts is like asking a child to pick a candy. However many you take, you’re never satisfied! There’s always that one veggie that you wanted and couldn’t get!

I do remember taking photos of when we planted the bed but don’t remember where they’re. So unfortunately I can’t show how much the veggies have progressed but I can vouch for it that they’ve come a long way! Here we go with the photos…

The Square Foot garden bed – the first 4 squares are zucchini and summer squash

Monrovia blueberry bush – if you look closely you’ll see a lot of berries on it

Back of the bed – the larger plants are tomatoes, front left and right is onion and the lots of small plants are spinach (we’ve harvested it a couple of times now!); the lone plant is pepper.

Strawberry plant in a container of it’s own – look at all those little berries!

Mint – we harvested a lot of this and probably not too frequently which kind of stunted the growth of this plant. Lesson learned – harvest mint frequently!

Both the plants above are blueberries – can you see the little berries?

Only the raised bed is done using SFG. All the others are using regular soil.

So what do I think of SFG? It’s hard to say right now since we' haven’t had much fruit except spinach but I can say that all plants look quite healthy. It is a lot of hard work to put up a SFG bed so I hope the harvest is equally good. We did put a weed fabric and a chicken wire to prevent gophers and other rodents – so that was good. I’ll update as and when we get fruits on our plants.

Handmade Shea Body Butter

Do you find photos of handmade soaps yummy? I do. They’re like eye candy to me. I almost drool over them and handmade body butters; and have been wanting to try my hand at them for a very long time. My visits to Body Shop convinced me that it was time I give body butters a try. Not only are they expensive but full of chemicals!

(Doesn’t that look yummy?!?!?)

The best part is it’s so simple and needs so few ingredients! I followed this recipe. It calls for 60% Shea butter and 40% natural oils.

I took:

• 6 oz Shea Butter (I got my fair trade shea butter from Agbanga Karite)
• 4 oz Sweet Almond Oil
• .05 Sweet Orange essential oil (you can use any EO you like or even fragrance oil)

Then what I did:

1. Setup a double boiler. What that means is take a big pot and fill some water in it and then put a smaller pot on top of the water. Put this apparatus on heat. The heat of the water will heat what is inside the smaller pot. I initially put it on high heat and when the water was sufficiently heated up, reduced it to medium heat.
2. Put the shea butter in the smaller pot and melt it.
3. When the butter is melted, take the smaller pot out of the boiler and turn off the heat.
4. Add almond oil to the melted butter.
5. I then added the essential oil. I later read that it’s better to add the EO after the mixture has cooled down a little.
6. Next we need to cool the mixture. One way is to put it in the freezer for sometime but if you’re as impatient as me then in a big pot prepare an ice bath (lots of ice in water). Put the small pot on the water. Let the mixture cool a lilttle bit.
7. When the mixture is of a soft consistency beat it with a hand mixer. If it has reached your desired consistency then you can stop otherwise let it cool a little bit more and beat again. Repeat till satisfied.

Notes:

• I’d read that shea butter if heated at a high temperature turns grainy so I was quite conservative about the heat; and I found that shea butter melts pretty easily. So you don’t need  high heat for the double boiler.
• I started beating even when it was liquid. No harm done – there’s not much that can happen if you beat a liquid! Duh!
• When you beat the mixture let it still sit in top of the ice bath.
• Unrefined shea butter has a nutty smell of it’s own which may not be very pleasing to you. However after applying it on the body it disappears.
• 0.5% (or 0.05 fl oz) EO didn’t seem enough to suppress the smell of shea butter so next time I would up it to 1.5% (or 0.15 fl oz)
• The body butter solidifies some more after you keep it in a cool place.
• I didn’t use the corn starch as specified in the original recipe, so the butter is a little greasy but it gets absorbed by the body in a few minutes.

Sources for ingredients:

• I got my fair trade shea butter from Agbanga Karite. I think they’re quite reasonably priced.
• Essential oils can be found in natural food stores like Whole Foods Market. They’re in the Aromatherapy section mostly.
• Natural oils can be found at amazon or your local supplements store like Super Supplements.

My one step towards a more natural me! Oh and just for fun here’s a cost analysis: $2.50 for almond oil, $8 for shea butter and $0.50 for EO. So that’s $11 for 10 oz (as compared to the $18 for 6.5oz or $25 for 13.5 oz at Body Shop!) and not to forget you’re getting an all natural product!

Gujiya (sweet fried dumpling): new and improved!

A long time ago, when I’d just started this blog, I posted one of my first recipes and that was of Gujiya – an Indian dumpling. With every year since then I’ve been refining my recipe, sometimes posting notes under that post and sometimes just posting them to my long-time memory. This time when we made the gujiyas we thought everything was just perfect! So I decided it was time to post the new and improved recipe! I apologize for the photo – I figured I should rather take the photo with my phone than wait for myself to get the camera; in which case I risk the existence of these gujiyas. As you can see of the 28 that we made only 5 are left!

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup khoya
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp sooji
• 5 tbsp coconut powder
• 3 tbsp Raisins
• 3 tbsp chironji
• 1.5 cups maida (or all-purpose flour) – this is a little more than you would need for the filling but it also depends on how much you fill each gujiya; and I would rather have some extra than knead it again for the leftover filling.
• 3 tbsp oil
• Water
• Oil for deep frying

Method:

1. Roast the suji till golden brown.
2. Roast the khoya till it turns slightly pinkish brown. I use frozen khoya which has a slight raw taste and it helps to cook it a little. Let it cool.
3. Add coconut powder, sooji, raisins, chironji and sugar. If you don't have chironji, you can substitute it with any nutty dry fruit like roasted almond or cashew. Mix them well.
4. Knead the maida with the oil and water. The dough should be soft and try to use as little water as required.
5. Take a small portion of the dough, knead it in your palm and roll it into a ball. Flatten it into a disc and using a rolling-pin, roll into a circle like a mini roti/tortilla. The size of the circle? Depends on the size of gujiya that you want. The gujiya's size will be half of that circle. The final roti should be sufficiently thin.
6. Take the mini-roti in your palm, dip your index finger into water and slightly dampen the rim of one half of the roti (to help in sealing it later).
7. Put a spoonful of the mixture in the center of the roti. We used a dumpling maker to seal them. Make sure the ends are sealed well. When you fry them, air fills inside the gujiyas which expands them. If they’re not sealed well, the filling will ooze out and will mess up your oil. Don’t overstuff them for the same reason.
8. While you’re making gujiyas keep your other gujiyas covered with a damp cloth till you’re ready to fry them
9. Heat oil for deep frying after you've made all the gujiyas.
10. Fry the gujiyas at a medium-high flame to a light brown color.

Birds, squirrels and the birdfeeder

That’s a new bird feeder we put in our backyard and before we knew it the birds were flocking at it! After I put up the feeder I was reading somewhere that it takes 2-3 weeks for the birds to figure out there’s one and start visiting it. So it was a pleasant surprise to see that ours had visitors within a week!

Let me tell you it’s very interesting to watch the dynamics between the backyard critters and birds! If you look at the picture closely there are three birds – one at the feeder, another on the ground and the third in between the two. They’re all trying to get the benefit of the different locations!

Presently our feeder is not in the most suitable location because of lack of equipment to put it in one. As bird feeding experts would say the current location would be under attack by the squirrels and that is absolutely correct. We’ve watched them in action! I was quite amazed to see how much feed the birds were consuming per day till I saw the culprit; it was also the moment of revelation to me. While reading about bird feeding, people had warned about squirrels and I thought to myself – when we can feed birds why can’t we feed the squirrels too? The answer came to me when I saw the squirrels feeding. They not only scare the birds – to whom the “bird” feeder rightfully belongs – and hence they’re trespassing on other’s property; and then the amount of feed they eat is almost 10x what the birds eat. Despite all this, I must say it was amusing to watch the squirrel eat. The feeder was empty and this squirrel was trying to get to every last grain in and around the feeder. It came to feeder from the top, from the side and from the bottom to get whatever last bits it could. The grasp it’s tiny feet had was incredulous!

If you’ve a place to put up a bird feeder, you don’t need a yard you can even put it up in your balcony, then run to your local home store and get one; and enjoy watching these lovely creatures.