My coffeemaker. only five years of age, expired of a very short illness three days ago, so after a brief mourning, i went out shopping to Costco and found the same model for 59 bucks. And then i’m thinking, hmm, why am i considering buying the same model when the last one wore out so soon? And then my eye alit on this ice cream maker which i’d been wanting for ages, so i bought that instead, figuring i could just keep heating water on the stove and making drip coffee until i saw the perfect coffee machine.
Alas, when i got the ice cream maker home i looked more closely and saw that it was made in China, so i’d already violated my vow to try to buy stuff made closer to San Francisco. But it was here, now, and after i read a little further and got to the part about making chocolate ice cream, realized i needed to test the thing.
And the test revealed that i’d jumped the gun and not let the bowl chill long enough in the freezer, so the end product was more like a delicious, extra-rich chocolate milk shake. Naturally, i had to test it again although i put this off until the next day…and managed to stretch the second batch out over two days since it was hard as a rock and physically impossible to eat fast.
Which made the whole adventure not quite so bad although the totals for the two batches amounted to a quart of heavy whipping cream, a pint of whole milk, and a pound of bittersweet chocolate. Gasp. To paraphrase Adolf Eichmann, “I was just following the recipe.” And besides, to reduce the glycemic load, i went ahead and used a cup of Splenda instead of cane sugar although i sense that that did not fully compensate for the pound of chocolate.
For this trial run i used half Guittard chocolate and half Dandelion, which meant that the chocolate bill alone was thirty-something bucks. Didn’t want to kill myself cheaply.
Meanwhile, here’s a shot that Mark pointed out for me. It’s the view in my office in the morning before i pass the severely wounded Segway off to Cooper, who’s 15 and very bright and can probably take the whole damn thing apart and fix it and reassemble it and have himself a working Segway. How come my friends all have brilliant children? I mean, i didn’t select ’em for their genes. The friends.