7/7/12 - Lucky day!...unless you're looking for plums

I went to yoga, then to the Silverlake farmer's market, where I was frustrated in my search for beautifully ripe plums. They had plums, but they weren't very ripe or very sweet. I may just have to get up early and brave the Hollywood market. I'll do it! I'm desperate for a do-over on that plum butter, and I'm just jonesin' for a plum so ripe, I can suck it right out of the skin.


I went home for a bit, and made the custard for my blackberry ice cream. Very promising!

I went to my voice lesson, which was fun. I had a sub this week, and it was kind of refreshing to learn some new exercises and perspectives.

I went home and did some laundry. I was having some pretty serious motivation issues. You know how sometimes you have a lot you could do, but you don't know where to start, and you don't want to do any of it anyway? I did some half-hearted cleaning, ate some leftovers, did the dishes, and moped around. Around 7, I decided maybe a cacao smoothie might get me going. It kinda did, I guess. I played some guitar, some bass, and did a little singing. Sunday, we're recording "Are You Really Gonna Be Mine?" so I practiced that for a while. Then I watched "Project Runway" while I waited for Alex to show up. I was expecting him to appear with a hard drive containing my application video, but alas, it was still rendering, so I had to wait.

I made sort of a little riff on Hoppin John for dinner; kale, quinoa, and canellini beans with liquid smoke and molasses, served with some sliced heirloom tomato on top. I wasn't entirely satisfied with the greens, but Alex liked the whole thing so much, he ate 3 helpings.

When Alex showed up, I had been preparing to make some flax crackers, which I sort of forgot about until the middle of dinner. So after we ate, I got back to it. It's absurdly easy. You soak the flax seeds in water for a couple hours, then spread the gooey mess out on a baking sheet (I put mine on parchment),

 and put it in a 200 degree oven for a couple hours. I turned off the oven when I went to bed, and left them in until morning.

I also put the custard in the ice cream maker at this point.

Oh man, it turned out so good! There are a couple things I would do differently in the future, but they're nitpicky. In a perfect world, the blackberries would be cut into smaller pieces, and be less icy. I wonder folding them in after churning would help with that, or if they'd just get all icy in the freezer anyway. I used the blackberry ice cream recipe from http://whiteonricecouple.com as a consultation for the custard step, but I used agave instead of sugar, and I didn't puree the blackberries. I also didn't add lemon juice, and I'm ever so glad I didn't. I had perfect, sweet, ripe berries, and I wanted the ice cream to taste like that.

 And it did.