Thai Tea Ice Cream

I love Thai tea. Let me rephrase that. I LOVE THAI TEA. It is one of my favorite taste combinations. It is my comfort food. Having some sends my heart racing and my taste buds to a joyful simple place.


So naturally, the first thing I did when I got an ice-cream maker for the holidays was... to make Thai tea ice cream. I'd been eyeing a recipe for a while from Use Real Butter. 


I've had some Thai tea that a friend got in Thailand laying around for ages, so I was happy to use it. It took a while (as did figuring out how to put the ice cream attachment on my stand mixer), but in the end it was worth it. So delicious and not something I can get in a store. 





The photo above is of the second recipe I tried, from Ivory Hut. This recipe is WAY easier than the previous one, and the flavor comes out just the same. I think I'll be going with the latter one from now on (since I ordered 3 bags of Thai tea off Amazon because this craving is not going away soon) because why not make it simple? =)


Photo lessons? Not much. I tried taking the photo with various backgrounds, and had trouble focusing on the wood background (though it looks the best on it). What is up with me and focusing? I should also be more mindful of imperfections before I take photos for cooking. It was bugging me when I was editing the photo that there are some smears from imperfect dropping of ice cream on the side of the dish. 


For now - so many ice creams to try. What next? Suggestions?

Simple Thai Tea Ice Cream

Recipe taken from Ivory Hut

1 1/2 cup half-and-half or whole milk (I used whole milk)
4 tablespoons loose leaf Thai tea
1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

Put the half-and-half or milk in a sauce pan and scald the milk. Add the Thai tea and sugar and stir to dissolve the sugar. Once it comes to a simmer, take it off the heat and continue to stir until sugar is completely dissolved. Let cool, allowing the tea to continue steeping, then add the heavy cream. Put the mixture in the refrigerator and let it get cold. You can also stick it in the freezer to speed up the process.

Strain, then pour into your ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s directions. Makes about 1.5 quarts.

Some notes:

-I do not strain my ice cream very well. As seen in my photo, some thai tea leaves are still left. Some folk may not like that. I don't mind. My main problem is that I only have one strainer which is not very good

-I left my mix in the fridge for a good 5 hours before putting it in the maker. I am sure you can leave it longer. Great for 'do ahead'.

Catching up for the weekend

Considering how beautiful the area around Seattle is, I usually try to get out of the city at least once per weekend. That being said, I work for a company that supports on-call for engineering support for each feature that at team owns. Basically - your team (4-8 people) is responsible for the code/machines/service/etc you own. If there are problems - you'll get paged. So we rotate on-calls for a week at a time. My team is great in that we have very low pager load, but being on-call still means that I need to stick around internet-ready areas in case something does happen.

So - I am in the city. What to do? More like... what to choose to do? So much fun to be had - but this weekend was mainly about relaxing and hanging out with friends.

1/8/11


Saturday, my gym had their belated holiday party. A great way to see everyone not in their smelly workout clothes (well at least most people...), eat some delicious food, and do a white elephant exchange with all the gifts that we got for Christmas that we didn't want.

I spent some time snapping shots. My main attempt was capturing the dogs that various people brought running around the place. It just didn't work! Dogs do not stay still at all. I just could not figure out how to focus on them - was learning about focusing on only a part of the screen rather than the whole thing. Nope. Nothing. Well only after I got home did I realize I never upped by ISO from 100. Duh. Lesson for later.

This is the ONLY photo I took of any of the dogs that was in focus. Now thats impressive and depressing. Let this be a lesson I shall not forget. Yet another one.

1/9/11


I have better photos for Sunday, but I cannot post them as they were part of the Daring Bakers challenge for the month, to be revealed at the end of the month.

Sadly I did not take many photos apart from that. I went out to lunch at Japonessa and was going to take photos of the sushi... but I forgot. At the end of the meal Ryan remembered about the camera and took a photo of the full glass of hot sake that I had. Full because that is one of the most disgusting things I have ever tasted. But I had never tried hot sake before (cold sake is good!) and for a couple of bucks and happy hour I was willing to try. Never again.

So then I just have one salvageable shot from wandering around Pike's market before it started snowing from Beecher's cheese. Not interesting shot, and too much extra light reflected in it. But it is all I got. Even with having more fun at Knee High Stocking Co. with friends later and a board game night... camera remained forgotten.

Doing today's photo (1/10/11) separately as it comes with a recipe!

Warming up by the fire

So the plan yesterday was to take the camera to a friend's surprise b-day party, but it was raining pretty hard and it was a 30 minute walk and I already had to drag my laptop with me, so camera stayed home. Regretting not bringing it because it was a charming venue at Liberty Pub. Will definitely be back there.

To make up for that - I played a little bit with taking pictures of fire and some of the toys I have. Was having trouble getting the effect I wanted from the fire - I wanted it more red. Had to stop abruptly when I realized I was going to be late to said b-day party. All of my photos were a little too saturated and I later realized I was using too high an ISO. For next time: lower ISO and maybe a bit of flash? Will try playing with fire again.

1/7/11

1/6/11 = Self portrait day

As the day started off rather poorly with getting back from Crossfit to find that there was not hot water in my apartment. Not a good thing when you're very sweaty and tired and want to get out the door to get to work. I only managed to wash my body - the hair went dirty. Note: must figure out where and how to use the showers at work. 

Project of the day - figuring out how to do self timer on camera. Yes - things I should have learned a long time ago, but alas I did not.

I've been reading a lot of fashion blogs (more like normal people blogging what they wear) lately. Some of my favorites are Already Pretty, Kendi Everyday and What would a Nerd Wear. Trying to dress nicer and buy things that last a while rather than are on sale and don't serve much of a purpose. So today, on a day which started off so poorly I attempt to dress classy to make myself feel better. Dark colors since I was fuming with anger this morning.

Also fun realization was finding the necklace I am wearing in my jewelry box. I got it from my high school boyfriend (hi John!) for a birthday because I was bugging him to get me a necklace. Well... not exactly what I wanted since it is too fancy to wear on a normal basis. But I dug it up today and I really like how it looks with a v-neck. I do believe this is the first time I've ever worn it (whoops), but I think it will get a lot more wear now that I found a use for it.



Boots - Durango
Shirt - H&M
Tights - Hue
Skirt - Boden
Earrings - Claire's
Necklace - gift

No Knead Bread

Since I got a bread machine for Christmas I have been making bread every couple of days. It is so amazing setting the thing up at night and waking up to warm bread and an apartment that smells delicious. That being said, I recognize that a bread machine does not make truly amazing bread.

So for this I have tried my second ever attempt at bread (the first was a horrible failure - the bread could only be used as a weapon considering how hard it was). This recipe is ridiculusly simple, and with a resting time of 20 hours I could easily do with my schedule (not like 2 hour resting time, and then I have to stay up until 2am to cook bread).

The result - yum! Not the best bread ever, but as Ryan put it 'I would be happy if they served me this in a restaurant'. That seems to bode well? I think my bread did not rise far enough - I am blaming this on my yeast which is bread machine yeast (thats what I usually use!). I will try this recipe again with different yeast later.

Another thing I discovered is that my oven is too hot! I got an oven thermometer for Christmas and stuffed it into my oven. 20 degrees too high! Makes sense why I keep burning things.

Photo lessons of the day? Manual focus is hard. I couldn't get auto focus to work so I tried focusing manually. Looked fine on the camera but it was completely off on the computer. The posted photo is the only auto focus one that I took. Whoops.



No Knead Bread
Adapted from Cooking for Geeks

Ingredients
3-3.5 cups All-purpose white flour (390g)
1.25 cups water (300g)
1 tsp salt (7g)
1 teaspoon instant yeast (5g)

The night before you want to make bread, mix up all the ingredients until the flour is moist. This shouldn't take very long since there is a lot of water used in the recipe. Cover with plastic wrap in a non-metal bowl and let rest at room temperature for about 20 hours (I did 23 hours).

Put a cast iron pot into your oven and preheat it to 450 degrees (I left the lid out, was that okay?). Put the dough on a floured surface and fold a couple of times. Let sit for 15 minutes (mine sat for 20....). Shape into a round loaf shape and place on a floured cloth towel. Let rise to double in size (mine only 1.5ed in a reasonable length of time). Plop the bread into the cast iron pot and bake with the lid on for 30 minutes. Take the lid off and bake for an additional 15 minutes (I did 10 because I realized that my oven is too hot). Viola! Bread!

Saying farewell to the tree

I love my Christmas tree, or what is more appropriately called 'New Years Tree'. I have had a tree around holiday time my whole life. As we do not celebrate Christmas in my family/Russia we always exchanged gifts at New Years. At you might realize, staying up to open presents at midnight gets a little old, and waiting until midday January 1st when everyone actually wakes up also doesn't work well, so we've in general switched to opening presents on Christmas, since that is when everyone else does it, though we have also opened on Orthadox Christmas or New Years or just a random day in December before. It is all about the presents and the beautiful tree anyways, not the specific day. =)

So now that I am living accross the country from the family, I have started putting up my own tree - Christmas or New Years or whatever you call it. It must be real, because it is just much more friendly that way (though clean up is indeed rather unfortunate). The only big problem is that I am not in a house and can thereby not just burn my tree when I am done with it in April (how long the tree at my parents house often stays up...). I have to take it out to the dump yard by January 9th, which isn't even to Russian New Years!

So today's photo is dedicated to saying farewell to my tree. It's been fun, but tomorrow you're going to be taken down!

January 4th


From a photo perspective, today made me realize that I need to use the right lens and settings for the right photo. This was not the right lens, and all of the photos I did with various settings were not that great. This is the best one I got and it was only a little salvagable in Lightroom. I got a much better one before with a different lens. Sure makes a different, right?

A New Year - Project photo a day

Happy New Year! I never really do resolutions since I tend to forget about them, but it occurred to me that this can be a good chance for me to force myself to take more photos. I've been trying to learn more about photography recently and the 'take one photo a day' seems like a great approach, as well as a good way to document life and encourage myself to do cool things. =)

I realize that I might not upload photos on the exact day (for example, it is January 3rd, and I am just now uploading photos), but as long as a photo is taken and later posted it counts.

So here is to 2011 and exploring photography!

January 1st

The weather was amazing so I dragged Ryan out early (well anything is early on January 1st after being up so late) to try out snowshoeing. I'd never tried it before, but was pretty sure I'd love it so I went ahead and bought snowshoes earlier the previous day. Went with a very easy trail to try them out. Went to Gold Creek Pond which has a huge winter recreation area - lots of people snowmobiling, snowshoeing and cross country skiing. A little hard to adjust to walking in these shoes - walking with feet further apart is odd. Overall, I am ready to face more adventurous trails next time! Also I forgot to charge my battery so it ran out halfway through the trip... whoops?



January 2nd

Continuation of the amazing weather led to a day ski-trip to Crystal Mountain. I had never been there before and it is definitely my favorite resort in Washington so far. Right next to Rainier, has much faster lifts (and padded!) and on-mountain dining. Lots of wins! It is also larger so people are a lot more spread out. The day was magnificently clear too. This photo is from when I went up to the very top 'expert' section and was trying to go along the rim of the trail to get to the less icy moguls section. The trail was thin and full of rocks - not pleasant. But the view was magnificent.

January 3rd

I subscribe to a CSA - New Roots Organics. They deliver a bin of produce once a week - I get to pick and choose what is in it and it comes from a variety of farms. It is great, but I haven't gotten a bin in a month between the holidays, being sick, etc. Finally! A bin! Excited for intense amounts of kiwi and oranges/mandarins. And have to figure out something to do with lots of onions and spinach.