On the 12th Day of Christmas my husband and I breathed a collective *sigh* of relief as we blew out the candles of our Christmas wreath candles, took down our string of Christmas cards off of the wall and sat down to enjoy some homemade ice cream.
If there is one thing about -45F to -50F overnight lows, it definitely speeds up the creation of homemade ice cream. What normally takes a trip to the grocery store to procure or 4-5 hours to freeze when made from scratch and placed in the freezer can be made simply by sticking milk, sugar and vanilla in a pitcher on the back porch for an hour. It has been so cold this week with temperature peaking at -30F, but mostly staying around the -40F to -45 range. So cold your eye-balls hurt just walking to your car. So cold that we haven't gone grocery shopping in 3 weeks because we just want to race home and climb under our down comforter and watch Netflix on my laptop rather than running around grocery shopping or doing other important things like buying socks and sweaters. As the days drag on and the cold front switches to coming from Canada instead of Siberia the most intelligent thing I have thought/realized is that -40F equals -40C so I don't have to do math to tell my friends in Croatia how cold it is, I can universally complain! My poor brain is frozen.
We have long since run out of groceries that we bought with a specific purpose aka a recipe in mind. We are getting increasingly creative/desperate. Last night we made ice cream from scratch out of sheer desperation from our lack of dessert options. (We were soooo spoiled by Christmas choices.) Tonight we made a well balanced dish consisting of rice (starch) with parsley flakes (that's a veg right) and bacon bits (our protein). Mmmmm... Mmmmmm... Tomorrow we may have to actually go shopping because *gasp* we're out of Bisquick and life without waffles just isn't worth living.
