homemade ice cream

we recently purchased an ice cream maker attachment for our kitchen aid mixer and have started making homemade ice cream.  we also purchased the ben and jerry’s ice cream recipe book, and i highly recommend both purchases to those without.  the ice cream bases that we’ve made have been creamy and delicious.  the base is made up of a combination of heavy cream, milk and sugar.  we have made oreo mint and reese’s/chocolate swirl, and this week we made a lactose free option.  it consisted of almond milk, coconut milk and sugar.  it was a little icier, but still great and with a hint of coconut.  featured below is the reese’s/chocolate combo.

house for sale

our house is for sale and you can check out final pictures here.  pass this along to all of your friends that want a house in knoxville.  fyi, it takes a long time to load.

DownTown Livin’ Baby

Kelly and I have made the transition back to Durham but I our new lives as Durhamites are not as similar to our old lives as Durhamites as one might guess.  While we both have return to our old jobs, our old small group, and in large measure our old routine, there have been changes.

We are livin’ downtown!! and we are trying to make the most of it.  We joined the YMCA which is across the street (we walk), on our anniversary we went next door for a french breakfast (we walked) and then dinner at a new downtown restaurant (we walked), last Saturday we went to the farmers market and bought produce (we walked) and then breakfast at Blue Coffee (not as good as Long’s in Knoxville but we walked), last night we ate mexican at Brightleaf (we walked), and it if it weren’t for my job in Raleigh we might not need the cars.

Downtown activity that did not involve walking – planting tomatoes on the roof top deck.

But downtown living is not all fun times…..

there is the garbage truck that comes at 6 am, the homeless man who went in the dumpster and tossed out aluminum cans one by one for about an hour and a half at 4 am, and the other homeless man that followed us down the street while telling the other (imaginary people) not to mess with us.

gypsies?

so in light of the recent circumstances, evan and i have decided to move back to durham for the summer.  our week goes like this… wednesday, meet with a realtor to put our house on the market, thursday, move to durham, friday, start work at our old jobs.  ha ha.  i just laughed out loud at us.  i am going back to work at almac and evan will work in durham over the summer and then come back to knoxville for his last semester in the fall.  we have been working our butts off for the last week to get our house ready to sell and it is close.  life is crazy and hard, but i am finding lots of things to appreciate as well.  so to end on a positive note and give a few well-deserved shout-outs, here is my list of things i am loving during this time in life.

1)  parents.  both of or parents have come out for a weekend and worked their butts off on the house for us.  it not only helped us get stuff done, we feel so supported and loved.  thanks!!

2) blue bell chocolate cookie dough ice cream.  they do not sell this in NC.  i have eaten it every night now for a week straight.

3) frazier’s carpet one and james.  james is our nice little carpet guy who hooked us up on a very short timeline when home depot overpriced our quote.

4) starbucks caramel frap.  let’s not lie.  we know this is always on the list.  but it is a delicious work break currrently.

5) cliff.  evan’s old boss.  he is giving evan some work in the meantime, and he is hopefully going to hook us up with a summer lease in an apt in the building that evan built for him last summer.  very cool!

6) almac.  i felt obligated bc i put evan’s old boss on their, but i am thankful for my job too.  they are so excited to have me back, although i am not sure why!

7) chuck, the tv show.  does anyone else watch this?  it’s my favorite show.  i declared this especially last night after kung fu.

unemployment.

so “the economy” has hit home lately and i received word about two weeks ago that my last day with Wood Properties would be April 17th.  they were really apologetic and said i have done well but they just don’t have enough work for me or money to pay me.  i’m not surprised, because i am very expensive.  just kidding.  i wasn’t too surprised though, because they had not closed a sale the entire time i was there (9 months), and while the leasing side of things remained active that’s just not enough to sustain a whole, albeit, small company.  getting laid off is pretty awkward.  people are not quite sure how to react, and so i think they kind of avoided me for the last week.  i am learning in hard situations that saying something, anything is better than nothing.  i tend to get nervous about saying the wrong thing in bad situations, as i know we all do, but a simple i’m sorry at least acknowledges that you realize the situation has happened.  anyways, the very last day was particularly funny, the boss took us all out to pf changs, delicious, where everyone chatted like normal and then when we all walked off they kind of waved at me and said “see ya.”  i did not know what to expect, and it’s not like we were bff, since i had been there a short time anyway, but a casual wave and “see ya” just struck me as funny.  odd.  so now i am unemployed, just hanging out at the house and painting.

Chick Fil A

So this week has been free Chick Fil A breakfast week in Knoxville and we have taken advantage every day. Wednesday they gave away chicken minis and I love those things. The chicken mini, I decided, is like a Sister Shuberts dinner roll with a chicken nugget stuffed inside. So delicious!! Tomorrow is the Chick Fil A biscuit.

Bathroom Remodel

Our readership has probably long forgotten that teal bathroom that we started to remodel in December.  Or maybe you can’t get that bright blue 6 gallon per flush toilet out of your head and you’ve been pining for remodel pics for the last 4 months.  Well here it is, the new blue bathroom.  We love it especially because it’s 3x the size of our other upstairs bathroom, the curved “hotel” shower rod gives up extra space to soap up, the 1.2 gallon per flush toilet keeps our water bill happy and two towel bars means I’m not trying to bunch both of them on one small bar!

These great pictures keep a little of the retro charm alive, and I love the funky lifeguard stands!  Thanks, Dad!

Chilly Chile

So I am back from my trip to Chile with the MBA class.  All considered it was a good trip.  I thought I would quickly highlight some of my favorite parts of the trip.  We were studying the wine industry in Chile so we visited several wineries.

 The areas that we visited were beautiful.  I attached a few photos so you can get a sense of what it was like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Curtis, Teddy and I after dinner at a winery one night.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Some ladies picking out the bad grapes.  Chile is heading into the fall so it was harvest time down there.  They said only women get this job because they do a better job of distinguishing the colors of the grapes and which ones are no good.

 

 

 

 

 

 So this might have been my favorite part and is the inspiration of the title of this post.  We did lots of wine tastings while we were down there so when we went to tour the Nestle factory they set up an ice cream tasting.  Everyone got their own tray of ice cream like the one pictured. Delicious!!  From left to right: two cups of ice cream (one was the cheap standard Chilean Savory brand and the other was a premium blend), then the Danky cone (black and White) which was really good, a popsicle  thing, and finally a mega bar.  The highlight was definitely the Danky cone.  It was kind of like a Nutty Buddy only no nuts. It had white chocolate all around the cone on the inside and around the ice cream above the cone, then it also had dark chocolate in the bottom of the cone and chocolate and vanilla cream swirl in the cone with some chocolate swirl things on the top.  Sadly they don’t make them in the US yet but hopefully they will catch on and they will introduce them into the US market.  The popsicle thing was kind of cool too because once you finished you could use the stick as a miny water gun.  Anyway it was delicious.  

 

  So the trip was fun but it is always good to be back in the ole US of A.

Santiago, Chile

The new header is a picture of Chile’s capital, Santiago, in honor of the fact that Evan is headed down there tomorrow.  His whole MBA class is required to participate in the week-long international trip, where they’ll be studying the wine industry.  BUMMER, right!?  I’m so jealous… I know he’ll have an amazing time, that is if we can dig up his passport in time!  Who knows where that went in the move???

More Cake

Per request, here’s a picture of the inside of the cake!  It tasted delicious!  Also, the pink frosting is buttercream, not fondant, which you are supposed to ice the cake with first.  It’s pink because it’s leftover from valentine’s.  it wasn’t visible in the pictures, but the pink did show through the white fondant a little, so you might want to use white as the underlayer should you ever attempt your own fondant covered cake.