Remember when boys were a shadow
to the allure of girls ?
The highlight of every week was
a trip to the grocery store
sweaty and sunny
smiles and silliness
and sex ?

Remember when we drank Pom iced tea
to quench our thirst ?
And Powerade
to pretend
to belong ?

Remember when poetry
came easily
with every heart ache ?
And heartache
came easily
with every
boy ?

Remember when boys were shadows ?

So if you decided to make vanilla ice cream the way I did, then you were probably left with three egg whites that you didn't know what to do with. The good news is that egg whites can be frozen and then thawed to use later. I just poured mine in a ziplock bag and wedged in between some other things so it would stay upright. Remember to label the bag with how many egg whites are in there so you don't forget.

There are quite a few things you can make with egg whites. I wanted to make some sort of sweet or dessert, which doesn't narrow it down terribly. And then I was restricted by the ingredients I had on hand, which did narrow it down quite a bit.

In the end, I decided to just make a white cake.
I referenced this recipe page, which also has a nice recipe for buttercream, which I haven't tried but sounds legit after a brief conversation with Diana Link (Inadomi?) the other day.
The best part about the recipe on that page is that it calls for 6 egg whites and makes two 9" rounds so. If you're not doing a fancy layered cake, then you can halve the recipe perfectly and make one 9" round instead.

The cake did turn out quite egg-y in the end. Not like EGG but it did call to mind the fact that cake in Chinese is 蛋糕.

Ingredients:
3/8 c butter (if you have those convenient baking rectangles, it's 3/4 of one of the sticks)
1/2 c milk
3 egg whites
1 tsp vanilla (yeah, I didn't have almond extract)
>1 c flour (I'm lazy...)
<1 c sugar (...and not very precise)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Preheat your oven to 350F. Take the butter out of the fridge, put it in a bowl and cut it into smaller chunks.
Flour your round cake pan.

In a medium bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
In a different bowl, mix milk, egg whites, and vanilla.
If your butter is softened, add it to your dry mixture and incorporate as best you can. (If it's not, feel free to microwave.)
In the recipe, it said to add all but 1/2 c of the liquid mixture to the dry+butter mixture, so I tried to add half in first? But it ended up being just odd. So, I recommend just adding all the liquid mixture into your medium bowl slowly while stirring.

Bake for 30 minutes, and you're done.
Frosting would probably be a good idea.

Edit: I don't know if it's the all-purpose flour instead of cake flour, but the cake is on the dense side. Reminds me a little of pound cake.
&& It literally looks like a cake you would make from a mix which is why I didn't bother taking a picture.

I meant to write about this awhile back and just realized today that I hadn't yet.

So basically it all started when Candace gave us some homemade vanilla extract. Yeah, I looked it up - apparently it's not difficult to make, literally vanilla beans in vodka. So I thought, what can I make that will use vanilla? How about, vanilla ice cream!

I basically combined this method of making ice cream without an ice cream maker with this recipe for vanilla ice cream, with a few modifications.

Ingredients:
1 c heavy cream
1/2 c half-and-half
pinch of salt
3/8 c sugar
4 tsp vanilla extract
3 egg yolks

Pour the heavy cream into a a large metal bowl (with a lid), add 1 tsp of vanilla extract, mix, and put that back in the refrigerator.

In a saucepan, heat the half-and-half, salt, sugar, and the rest of the vanilla extract. Stir until everything's dissolved, then turn off the heat.

In a small bowl, stir together egg yolks.
Make your custard by adding spoonfuls of the warm half-and-half mixture into the bowl of yolks and stirring continuously. When the bowl of yolks is warmed somewhat, pour it all back into the saucepan while stirring.
Turn the heat back on to low and stir constantly, being sure to scrap the bottom of the pot once in awihle, until the custard thickens. It doesn't really get as thick as pudding, but slightly more than a thick gravy?

Take your cream out of the fridge, pour the custard into it. Stir until everything is smooth.

Loosely cap the bowl and put it in your freezer. Check on it after an hour, give it a stir if you feel so inclined. Mine didn't really do anything until ~1.5 hours in. Then it got a bit of a crust around the side of the bowl:

Really stir that in well so that the entire mixture becomes consistent again. You're going to do this every half hour or so.
About 3.5 hours in I got something that looked like the whole top froze over (like a lake), and then the surface cracked and more cream bubbled out.

About 4.5 hours in I got something that had more of an ice cream like texture, but really wet:

An hour later it really started to look like ice cream, if a bit soft:

I gave it another stir for good measure, and then I went to bed. Checked it the next morning and it had pretty much kept its texture.

A few things of note:
- I used half and half instead of whole milk because half and half came in a smaller carton at the store, and we normally don't drink whole milk. It made the ice cream SUPER rich and creamy though (like, after you ate it you got a slight feeling of your mouth being coated in cream), so if I did it again I would just go for the whole milk.
- The metal bowl is nice for when you're making it, but then it's really cold, so I ended up transferring the whole thing into a plastic bowl later so that you didn't get frostbite when trying to scoop out ice cream to eat.
- The ice cream is HARD. It actually worked out that I transferred it into a plastic bowl because then it was sort of cut out in scoop-sized chunks and made it easier to serve later on. Some people commented that it was sort of like Haagen Dazs in being quite hard when you first take it out of the freezer, but softening up to a nice ice cream consistency after a few minutes.
- My sister said it tasted like frozen cream, but then realized that's what ice cream is, literally. A bit on the icy side apparently?

Two of our ghost shrimp died. =( I'm not really sure why. They were both opaque, but they weren't yesterday? I thought I read that becoming opaque was a sign that they were going to die. So it was either really quick or I just wasn't paying that close attention yesterday. The internet also said sometimes that means they are having trouble molting. But there were at least two moltings in our tank so I didn't think that would be an issue. It was also the largest two (Oohaha and Guts) that died. =(

First of all, I learned from May that they are called "baby" back ribs because they come from the relatively smaller 300-lb hog rather than the normal 500-lb ones?

Anyway. It seems like every time someone comes to San Diego, they want to have Phil's BBQ, which is fine because I understand that when you visit a city you want to visit the restaurants that are known to be good there or unique to the location. But I feel like all I've been having lately are these over-sauced ribs from Phil's which, let's be honest, aren't /that/ good, are they?

Once, at Amy's house-warming, we got one unsauced half rack for me, but they were still sauced. I think they sauce them while cooking and then "unsauced" just means they don't add even more over the top before they serve it to you.

I used to avoid ordering baby-back ribs at restaurants because they couldn't live up to my standard. Why did I say "used to" - I still do. But you know, we have visitors, they want to go out for something good in San Diego. We can't really avoid Phil's. And I'm not living at home anymore, so who knows when the next time I'll have Dad's BBQ will be?

So every time someone wants to go to Phil's I trudge along reluctantly and get a mini craving for Dad's ribs. And then Mike's parents were here and we went to Phil's and within a week or so May came down for a day trip and we had Phil's and my mini craving became more gnawing. So I went to Costco and bought a ginormous 9lb bag of ribs. I regretted it immediately.

I cut four 6-rib sections (only used two in the first trial run), seasoned with salt, pepper, and garlic powder in preparation for a bbq experiment. (Half of the rest went to hongshao paigu - not as good as Mom's, I think I need ginger - and the other half to meat soup with seaweed.)

Preheat the oven to 300F.

Line a 9"x13" Pyrex pan with foil. Place the ribs meat side up in the pan. I was lucky that they happened to fit perfectly I guess, since I originally planned to make it in a different pan.

Stick it in the oven and let it cook for an hour. Then spread BBQ sauce on it. I only put BBQ sauce on one of them, since Mike likes sauce and I don't. Cook for another hour. More sauce. One more hour. (That's three hours total.)

Close-up of my yummy non-sauced one:

Cut one to make sure it was cooked:

Tasty! Mike said the sauced one was good too. I think it did need a bit of honey or lemon or something for a glaze. But not bad for a first try. Will definitely do this again. =) That feeling of regret went away as I was munching that first rib. =9

Day 5 (Feb. 28): Nothing to report except that all of our charges were alive, yay!

Day 6 (Mar. 1): One of the shrimp molted! At first when I saw this odd shrimp-shaped thing curled up in the tank I thought one of them had died, but I counted and all three were still in the tank. Fished out the mysterious thing (no pun intended) and realized one of them must have molted, but I don't know which one. None of them looked that much bigger, although Oohaha is huge as usual.

The rest of the shell sort of broke/disintegrated when I was trying to get it out of the tank, but the head was relatively intact:

Day 7 (Mar. 2): Went out to dinner with Da-ayi, Da-yizhang, Sara, Phanat, and Amara. Afterwards they came over to check out our tank. I think Phanat and Sara were more interested than Amara, but it was still fun to show someone else our fish and shrimp.

Day 8 (Mar. 3): Did the first official 10% water change. Although I did do that emergency 50% change and earlier in the week we had done another 10% water change when Sharkbait was making me nervous lurking with his fin practically breaking the surface of the water.

Day 9 (Mar. 4): All of our animals have officially lived for 9 days in our care. Challenge complete.