Homemade Ice Cream Party!

I LOVE ice cream. Let's just get that out of the way right up front. I will eat ice cream year-round, even when we have snow here in Utah, and I don't like being cold. But buying ice cream year-round can get pretty expensive, especially if you like the fun flavors like I do. (Darren is easy to buy ice cream for -- he likes plain ol' vanilla.) Because of all of this, making homemade ice cream sounded like a brilliant idea for me. There's just one problem -- we don't have an ice cream machine, the extra cash to buy one, or (perhaps most important) the space to put one!

So imagine my delight when I came across this recipe for homemade, super-easy, amazingly creamy ice cream without an ice cream machine! And only a few ingredients required to make the basic vanilla ice cream! YAY!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! (And a holiday-themed treat recipe)

We spent the weekend with Darren's family, celebrating his dad's birthday. Since the celebration fell on St. Patty's day, I decided to make some sort of holiday-themed treat and bring it with us.

I found a recipe for Mint Chocolate Chip cookies on Betty Crocker's website. I laughed at their instructions to begin with a sugar cookie mix-from-a-box and instead turned to my go-to source for delicious recipes: Our Best Bites. These cookies were simple, quick, fun, and absolutely yummy! My mother-in-law said, and I quote, "I think these might just rival Thin Mints!" To me, they tasted a lot like the Christmas cookies my dad's side of the family bakes each year -- the peppermint-topped ones, to any family members that are reading this. Delicious, soft, and with just enough mint and chocolate to be simply fantastic.

Alfredo sauce

Whenever Darren and I go out to eat at an Italian restaurant, the one item on the menu that always, without fail, catches my eye is the seafood Alfredo. Doesn't matter if it has shrimp, scallops, or any other seafood combination. But as nearly the most expensive item on the menu, seafood Alfredo simply seemed out of our price range; it was an indulgence.

Then, one day, our local Smith's grocery store had scallops on sale. I figured I could get just enough to make a few servings of seafood Alfredo for about $2-3, add some bottled sauce, and put it over some pasta. The next day, though, as I was watching Rachael Ray's talk show (a recent "study break" habit of mine on campus), I watched her make Alfredo sauce from scratch. It was so simple! Butter, garlic, milk (and chicken stock, if you want), and flour--that's it!

And so I decided to make scallops in Alfredo sauce totally from scratch. Here's the process, my second time around making it.

Written while sleep-deprived and watching TopGear

Let the title serve as a warning, if past posts haven't -- this might be slightly incoherent, poorly edited, and maybe even pointless, but that's ok! Because at least we're posting something , right? Right.

First things first -- the update on our lives.

Darren:

They (doctors) still aren't quite sure what's been plaguing him for the past 6 months, but they think it might be migraine-related. The anti-migraine meds he's been taking have been helping, so that's a good sign. He's doing PT and what he calls "dizzy therapy" (I think it's called balance rehab, officially) and both seem to help, as well. Yay for progress!

He'll be starting back to school during the Spring term - end of April to mid-June -- taking an accounting class. Then it's back to school full-time in the fall to get back into the swing of things with his Information Systems major!

Michelle:

I received my graduation announcements in the mail last week, and I'm sending them out this week! You know what that means? I'm almost done with school!