... lettuce?

I arrived in Boston yesterday evening (YAY I HAVE A WIFE YAY) to discover that my housemates have gotten an ice cream maker from weirdquark's parents.

Clearly we had to make ice cream posthaste, because I have only been waiting forever to make various flavors of ice cream I've been hearing about, like pink peppercorn ice cream and sweet basil ice cream and plum and so on.

We could not find pink peppercorns at the nearby store, so we settled on Earl Grey-flavored. The custard is still chilling now and seems awesome.

Then we had six leftover egg whites and also a lemon from which we had cut only one strip of peel.

Now, I don't know whether other people also have the cooking-related syndrome I have. I think of it as the Throw Together syndrome, and the thought process behind it is 'and then while that is cooking I can just throw together [insert recipe involving something else I am using/fiddly detail for recipe I am already making/completely different recipe that has a matching cooking time]'. And the Throw Together syndrome? Iterates. This is the thought process that leads one inexorably from 'I will make a cake' to the moment when one finds oneself putting together a scale model of the Eiffel Tower made of shortcrust and agonizing over the number of candied cherries necessary to accurately replicate the blinking lights. In addition to the cake. Which somehow began to involve ganache and fondant and every pan in the house*.

At four in the morning when the entire process is over, it's a masterpiece, but you're too tired to do anything other than blink at it and pass out. And then the next day there are Dishes.

My housemates are as far as I can tell not afflicted by this syndrome to the same degree that I am, but they aid and abet.

Six egg whites? Make infinite quantities of meringue. And we threw in the juice of the lemon, because we could, and we couldn't find any resources that advised against it.

The texture came out very nicely, lovely light crisp slightly sticky meringue.

But I am here to tell you that if you throw the juice of one lemon into your meringue before baking, the finished product will have an aftertaste that I can only describe as almost precisely that of iceberg lettuce. It's quite strong, and not exactly unpleasant, but the entire experience changes from that of dessert to that of salad. If you really, really concentrate you can tell that it is lemon, but you have to be thinking about it.

Seriously. Lettuce.

They are totally edible, though. And the ice cream will I think be very good.

Readercon this evening! Yay!

* I have never literally had the thing with the Eiffel Tower happen, but I really think the cake I made for last Twelfth Night was a morally equivalent experience.

... lettuce?

I arrived in Boston yesterday evening (YAY I HAVE A WIFE YAY) to discover that my housemates have gotten an ice cream maker from weirdquark's parents.

Clearly we had to make ice cream posthaste, because I have only been waiting forever to make various flavors of ice cream I've been hearing about, like pink peppercorn ice cream and sweet basil ice cream and plum and so on.

We could not find pink peppercorns at the nearby store, so we settled on Earl Grey-flavored. The custard is still chilling now and seems awesome.

Then we had six leftover egg whites and also a lemon from which we had cut only one strip of peel.

Now, I don't know whether other people also have the cooking-related syndrome I have. I think of it as the Throw Together syndrome, and the thought process behind it is 'and then while that is cooking I can just throw together [insert recipe involving something else I am using/fiddly detail for recipe I am already making/completely different recipe that has a matching cooking time]'. And the Throw Together syndrome? Iterates. This is the thought process that leads one inexorably from 'I will make a cake' to the moment when one finds oneself putting together a scale model of the Eiffel Tower made of shortcrust and agonizing over the number of candied cherries necessary to accurately replicate the blinking lights. In addition to the cake. Which somehow began to involve ganache and fondant and every pan in the house*.

At four in the morning when the entire process is over, it's a masterpiece, but you're too tired to do anything other than blink at it and pass out. And then the next day there are Dishes.

My housemates are as far as I can tell not afflicted by this syndrome to the same degree that I am, but they aid and abet.

Six egg whites? Make infinite quantities of meringue. And we threw in the juice of the lemon, because we could, and we couldn't find any resources that advised against it.

The texture came out very nicely, lovely light crisp slightly sticky meringue.

But I am here to tell you that if you throw the juice of one lemon into your meringue before baking, the finished product will have an aftertaste that I can only describe as almost precisely that of iceberg lettuce. It's quite strong, and not exactly unpleasant, but the entire experience changes from that of dessert to that of salad. If you really, really concentrate you can tell that it is lemon, but you have to be thinking about it.

Seriously. Lettuce.

They are totally edible, though. And the ice cream will I think be very good.

Readercon this evening! Yay!

* I have never literally had the thing with the Eiffel Tower happen, but I really think the cake I made for last Twelfth Night was a morally equivalent experience.