Success in the lab.
Project Ice Cream has its first unqualified success: Mango. Mmmmango, I should say. It’s a real Homer Simpson flavor. Marge, more mmmmmmango. And it’s the easiest one so far, if you don’t mind peeling ripe mangos, which are slippery buggers. And oh my, it was the perfect ending to dinner, which was a rather fiery Thai curry thing.
So, make a note: Mango ice cream will send your guests home happy. (And Maureen, thanks for the Tolstini recipe! We’ll be making a date for that one, surely.)
Eeeek! Stop the presses. The 10 o’clock news just brought word of a homicide in Grosse Pointe. The city of just-plain Grosse Pointe, aka “the city,” one of the five municipalities that make up our little Eden. It looks like some sort of domestic, but the standout detail for me was this: This is the first homicide in GP city in, ahem, over 30 years.
Because homicide is so rude. It’s also tacky, and shows a lack of breeding. And it makes a mess. So we don’t do that here.
So with that, let’s start with the bloggage, which is rather D-centric today:
Meet the young mayor of a dynamic city overlooking the Detroit River — Windsor, Ont. Does this story sound familiar? When he was born in May 1974, his family had just arrived from Lebanon, and his father, a jeweler in the old country, started a business selling pita bread, primarily to the city�s Arab immigrants. (The mayor speaks fluent English, French and Arabic.) Later, when his father retired, Eddie and his brothers took the business over and expanded it across Ontario and into a dozen states. Meanwhile, he earned an honors degree in chemistry and biochemistry, and started law school. When he was 24, he was chosen young entrepreneur of the year. I think I buy this family’s pita bread, but I’m not sure; I’ll have to check the label.
When baby wolverines were born at the Detroit Zoo, and were given the names Sparty and Bucky, I wondered what was going on. So did lots of UM alumni, who called up and waved their wallets around. Never fear, though; the names have been changed. And yes, the story contains the phrase “deeply offended.”
Moving out of Michigan, the NYT looks at the embryonic Al Franken for Senator campaign. A Marge Gunderson moment within: “I jumped ya twice in Thief River Falls,” said a middle-age woman in greeting at the pre-speech party in a tent next to the Ted Mann Concert Hall at the University of Minnesota here. The seeming inference of long-ago sexual congress would cause deep blushing elsewhere, but it actually meant that Faith Rud and Mr. Franken had bonded in a far more profoundly Minnesotan way: she had used jumper cables to revive his Volkswagen bus on a cold night long ago after a college gig.
If I ran the world, or at least its newspapers, I’d do this more often — use a well-written essay on the features front, rather than yet another story reminding readers to apply sunscreen liberally. Here’s a nice one, on celebrity, photography’s pitiless gaze and the picture of Dorian MJ.
The heat has broken! Humidity, outta here! Think I’ll go celebrate.
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Joan said on June 15th, 2005 at 10:15 am
Would you mind sharing that mango ice cream recipe? My mouth is watering!
Carmella said on June 15th, 2005 at 11:21 am
There was a pic of MJ on the front page of the FW Journal, and I was shocked at how icky his fingernails were. Eww…gnarly. ANYWAY, get that tought out of your mind and back to ice cream. The best I’ve had lately is this Ben & Jerry’s: OATMEAL COOKIE CHUNK;
Sweet Cream Cinnamon Ice Cream with Chunks of Oatmeal Cookies & Fudge. Oh, yeah babe.
Nance said on June 15th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Gladly.
Mango Ice Cream
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 cups mango puree
2 cups heavy cream
Beat the eggs and sugar together until light — about three minutes. Fold in the mango, fold in the cream. Freeze. Enjoy.
Very simple, no? I didn’t measure the two cups of puree — just peeled two ripe mangos and mushed them up in the food processor. I had some wariness about eating the eggs uncooked, which I suppose is unsafe. You could heat the egg/sugar mixture over a double boiler until it’s 170 degrees, which is the “instant kill” temp for salmonella. (I didn’t; no projectile vomiting yet.) Also, I think this could be made even better with a little lime juice and powdered ginger. But it’s plenty good as it is.
mary said on June 15th, 2005 at 1:11 pm
As a dessert Thai or Szechuan food, coconut ice cream is pretty amazing. Something about the chili/ginger/garlic preceding coconut just hits the right note. Mango sound equally wonderful. The divey Thai restaurant I go to serves cold mango slices on slightly warm, sweet, sticky rice for dessert. Heaven.
Linda said on June 15th, 2005 at 3:03 pm
I have a question for all of you who now live, or have lived, in The Fort that is totally off topic, but I am hoping it will be okay and I have been waiting for a lull in the conversation.
Years ago when I worked at the Lutheran Home in the Alzheimer Unit, I found that more than one of our residents would babble about “going up to The Avenue” or “so and so went up on The Avenue”. Now, the problem was that I could not ask them where this “Avenue” was because of the obvious nature of Alzheimer’s Disease, but I have always been really curious as to what street or what part of Fort Wayne would have been referred to as “The Avenue” by several different people of diverse ethnic and monetary backgrounds.
No one I asked at the time ever knew, and I was just wondering if anyone on this message board would know?
Dorothy said on June 15th, 2005 at 3:41 pm
I haven’t a clue, but it sounds like a LOVELY place! Maybe it’s just a local expression, like going downtown? Where I grew up (Wilkinsburg PA) we said “upstreet” to indicate the shopping district.