I made homemade ice cream yesterday for our big Three Birthday's & a Graduation Bash. Actually, there weren't tons of people - just the right amount - but the puppies made up for it... When you start adding fur to our three pups (Lambert almost qualifies as five just by himself), what you get is a pack.

Man, oh and loving the puppies... if anyone finds a Newfie-Mix puppy that doesn't cost too much, well, I want him/her. I can't yet afford him/her, but I can start daydreaming about him/her. Just figure: if I manage to get a job that pays back my school loans so I don't have to go live in South Korea and live even more nunnish for two years in order to be financially viable, then maybe I can get a dog! In the meantime, I very much enjoyed the dog pack that accumulated last night.

And it was so friggin' hot (it went from hovering in the 50s to slinking in the low-90s in one day, causing my mother's artichoke plant to have a heat stroke & my sweat glands to sprout overnight) that one Margarita turned me into a blithering idiot in ten minutes, and so I figured I might as well continue in that vein, and so did... ah, the beauty of summer!

Anyhow, back to the ice cream, which was made to accompany db's chocolate-strawberry cake, which she was going to title the "Sweet Maria Cake," until I vetoed it (with bias) in favor of "Jackass Maria Cake." So, the Jackass Maria Cake was wonderful and very pretty as well, and so was the ice cream I made, which I have decided to call: "Harmony of Bitter & Sweet Chocolate Ice Cream."

In case you like making ice cream (like me), I used this basic recipe, but to make it uniquely my own Harmony of Bitter & Sweet, I added the following three steps:

(1) Zest the rinds off two oranges plus a touch of thumb knuckle. Add the results to the custard base simultaneous to the chocolate bits.

(2) Wear a bikini and sweat as you are making the first part, but don't, and I repeat don't, sweat into the custard base.

(3) Add, um, well, a bit (a bit? no, maybe more, maybe a fair amount? like a shot, or possibly two or three shots, but it depends on whether you have just had a bit of margarita with 90-degree weather how much you add, but yeah, a 'bit') of Cointreau Orange Liquor to the whipping cream. Hell, it's just like vanilla (!) so add as much as you like, as long as you know it makes it slushier and harder to freeze.

Yep, so that's that, but I would like to add that ice cream is best made when you have at least three grunt laborers to help you churn the hand-churner, and for this, we all had to thank kt, la, and my sis. Good job, ya'll.

Yeaaaaaaaaah, I love love love summer. Oh, and I finished Lolita, and it was indeed a twisted tale:

The Squirl and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits
Have certain obscure and peculiar habits.
Male hummingbirds make the most exquisite rockets.
The snake when he walks holds his hand in his pockets...

She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, any old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.