Blue Berry Ice Cream

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With the time of year (berry season) and Ellen’s birthday happening, it made sense to do a quick write-up of the blueberry ice cream recipe we use.  It is egg free (Ellen has an allergy), and simplified.  Living in the village means we don’t always have access to all of the ingredients at the same time… in our case, the original recipe calls for lemon juice and lemon zest, and lemons can be hit or miss at the store (we actually started making this recipe while living in Koyuk, and lemons were truly rare then).

Recipe:

2 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen work fine)

2 tablespoons water

2/3 Cup Sugar

1 ½ Cups of milk

1 Cup of heavy whipping cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

            All of the ingredients are relatively easy for us to get.  Unalakleet normally has milk, but we have also used the product Real Milk (while living in Koyuk where it was hard to get “regular” milk).  Real Milk is a boxed milk that can be stored at room temperature and therefore ships and stores easier.

Directions:

            Clean your berries.  As with any recipe that calls for fruit, your end product will only be as good as the fruit you use.  Now, that being said, I am not one of those berry pickers who goes through and takes each individual stem out of each berry.  Feel free, but I am just too lazy.

            Place the berries in a small sauce pan with the two table spoons of water.  Heat until the berries are tender and then allow to cool to a manageable temperature.  While the berries are cooking, heat the milk in a medium sized sauce pan and add the sugar.  Stir and heat this until the sugar dissolves. 

(Heating the Berries and dissolving the sugar in the milk)

    Make the berries into a puree.  We use an immersion blender, but a regular blender will work, or possibly a potato masher in a pinch

(Berry puree)

             Let it cool until room temperature and then stir in the puree, heavy whipping cream, and vanilla extract, cover the pot and place it in the fridge to chill for at least two hours (I usually just stick it in the fridge overnight and continue the next morning).

(All ingredients added before placing in the fridge)

            The solution is frozen in an ice cream maker.  We have a Cuisinart with a freezer bowl and this process generally takes about 10-15 minutes until the ice cream is nice and thick.  Transfer the ice cream to a sealable freezer container and place in the freezer to harden and to hide from your kids… oh, which by the way, don’t allow them to lick the freezer bowl afterward… a friend told me this was a bad idea.

(Add the chilled mixture to your ice cream maker, following the maker's directions)

Picking Berries with a Two-Year-Old

            In all honesty, as of the writing of this, Ellen will only be two for four more days.  So much change happens in the first years of life, and there is a great difference in the maturity of a two-year-old the last week before she turns three and the first week after she turned two.  None the less, going anywhere with a toddler adds something to the whole experience, and so it was with berry picking.

            Unalakleet is a cornucopia of tundra fruit.  In the first weeks of July this year, there were salmon berries everywhere.  It was nothing, even with a two-year-old not-so-stealthily sneaking her hand into the berry bucket, to pick a couple of quarts in forty-five minutes.  Salmon berries grow amongst the tussocks of the tundra which makes picking them feel a lot like a step aerobics class the day after.  It is no wonder that reindeer fly because a life lived walking in that kind of environment would lead an individual to look for easier ways of getting around.

            Our two-year-old figured out another way that was for her just as convenient as flying.

            “Dad, my ankles are getting really tired.”     

            “That happens when you walk on the tundra,” came my sympathetic reply. 

            Okay, maybe sympathy is not my strong suit.

            “I want to hoooold you, Dad,” the accent placed on the o and held for dramatic effect.

            So, it became step aerobics with weights. 

            Thankfully, blue berries, another of the abundant varieties in Unalakleet,  grow up out of the tussocks with one of our favorite places being on a hill with a pleasant bug deterring breeze.  Blueberry picking with a two-year-old looks a lot like getting her out of the car, explaining what she can and cannot eat, and then keeping track of her while she grazes.  If done correctly, she eats enough where she doesn’t need to eat dinner, but not to the point where she has eaten herself into digestive discomfort.  There is a fine line there.

            That was my goal this morning at least.  If done right, I wouldn’t have to feed her lunch.  However, the only way I could get her into the car was with the allure of going up to the bridge where she would be able to play with her sand castle toys on the sandbar.

            “Hey, since we are already near the berry patch, how about a little snack?” was my next con. 

            “Sure.”

            Out came the berry bucket, I lifted Ellen out of the car and directly into a patch of grape sized berries.  She should be busy for a while.

            Which she was, but being business minded (have to say I’m kind of proud) she figured she would cut out the middle man.  Wouldn’t it be so much better to avoid removing the berry from the plant and just follow dad around eating out of his bucket?  And so started my version of the shell game in which the berry bucket never stopped moving, always just out of reach of my scrambling kid while I continued to fill it.

            I lifted Ellen up and away from my bucket and plopped her down into another patch, giving up some of my prime big berry picking in order to continue picking some other smaller berries a couple steps away.  I have discovered that I have to be careful to assure that her patch looks more attractive than mine or she will come walk through my patch, smashing berries like a toddler Godzilla, as she attempts to pick and eat as many of the berries I was picking before I can get them into the bucket.  This is generally accompanied by her giggling in such a way as that I can’t get mad at her.

            She ate her way through my prime picking spot while I continued working on filling my bucket.

            “Dad, I want to go play with my sandcastle toys,” came her request.

            Shoot, she had remembered, and why wouldn’t she? I had tried to use the same trick my dad used on me when I was a kid.  He always promised to take me swimming after my bucket was full.  That was Michigan, in the middle of the woods, hot humid July berry picking, and his bribe was an incentive to get me to pick and fill my bucket faster.  The result was always the same though: a sweaty, whining kid who wanted to jump in the lake and made no connection between the blueberry desserts and pancakes at the end of the long arduous process.

            “Dad, I want to go play with my sandcastle toys,” was repeated.

            “Well, I guess now is a good time to switch gears.  Go ahead and start heading to the car,” and I bought myself another couple of minutes with my next step taking me back to prime grape-sized berries.

            Berries continued to plunk into the bucket as Ellen climbed into the car.  I was dreaming of blueberry delight, blueberry pancakes, blueberry muffins, blueberry ice cream…

            “Daaad,” again with an emphasis on the vowel, “I’m ready to switch gears and go play with my sandbox toys.”

            She’s two.

These were some of the biggest blueberries I had seen.  This was the kind of picking that filled a bucket effortlessly and would be enjoyed during the cold months of winter.

“Daaaaaad,” was repeated and reminded me of my sister’s voice.

My sisters is 45-years-old and still traumatized by the mere mention of a berry bucket or even the idea of stepping foot in the woods any time of year.

We changed gears and headed toward the bridge where she could play with her sandbox toys.  I mean, who really was I to complain?  My fishing rod was in the car and silvers are in the river.

After a couple of hours of her building castles and dipping her feet in the river, and me catching a thousand humpies and losing three silvers she was ready to switch gears again.  We washed sand from feet and hands and I deposited her in the car while I went back for the rest of the gear.  My rod was still there, a silver was ten feet from the bank and just hanging in the current, Ellen wasn’t complaining and so I cast a few more times…  Ellen wasn’t complaining.  I packed up my Rod and headed for the car where I found her in the very back with the berry bucket just putting the lid back on.

“I only ate four,” she smiled as she held up four fingers. 

And so, that is what it is like berry picking with a two-year-old.

Selling a 1955 Tripacer

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            This may seem like a really strange place to start a strand of blogs on aviation… selling a plane seems like it should be the last post rather than the first.  However, we have had our beloved little Tripacer for 6 years, I earned my license in it, it helped us move a bunch of our stuff from Galena to Unalakleet (300 pounds at a time), moved our oldest girl to college (that sure looked like more than 300 pounds of stuff heading to the dorm room) and it is about time for something different.

(Romay on her way to college)

            I have to admit, I love the little plane.  Though they are often teased, flying milk stool, glides like a brick, etc., there is a bond that I seem to develop with even the humblest of machines.  And really, how humble is a machine that can take my rear from sitting on the ground to cruising at 100 knots a couple thousand feet above it?

            Tripacers are solid.  Piper built them very much the same way they built their family of cubs.  It is a welded steel tube skeleton encased in a cloth skin.  That frame can take some abuse and is very forgiving at the hands of a rookie pilot.

            Though the first Pacers and Tripacers were somewhat underpowered, with a Lycoming O-320 150 horse engine, ours performs pretty well.  It gets off of Unalakleet’s short (1900’) crosswind runway fully loaded without breaking a sweat or causing the pilot’s blood pressure to go up.  Packing light is not something my mother-in-law has ever been good at and it was comical to see her bags packed to the ceiling in the seat next to her little 80-some-year-old frame.

            Maybe it is for those reasons that so many pilots have earned their wings flying Tripacers.  While working on my license, I had the cool experience of sharing a runway with multiple Firebosses and Superscoopers who were in the area fighting Alaskan wildfires.  Many of their pilots had learned to fly in Tripacers and they would come to admire my family’s little plane while sharing memories and stories of their old planes.  The little “milk stool” definitely was not the prettiest plane there, but pilots would walk past the silver, polished 170 gleaming in the sun parked next to her to come take a look at the yellow and brown interior of the little Piper.

            When we bought the plane, my wife and I were both working on furthering our education, had a daughter who would soon be heading to college, and money was tight.  A Tripacer seemed to be the perfectly priced plane to get us into aviation.  And, it treated us well and served that mission.

(Out on a date)

            Our degrees have helped us move up, our older girl is not in college anymore, and though I would never say we are flush, our airplane purchasing budget (after the hopeful future sale of the Tripacer) is a little healthier than the first time around.

            The task at hand is to find a good home for our first plane.  It is our hope that it helps many more generations of aspiring aviators earn their wings.