Current mood:	pleased
Entry tags:	food, food:ice cream experiments, food:recipes, life:diet

Today the super-deluxe fantastic ice-cream machine that I ordered was delivered to my workplace. In TWO separate boxes. I will not relate the saga of how I got both boxes home tonight, because I am weary and it is late. Suffice to say, it was a saga, with very weary arms and fear of tripping. But I made it home, with both boxes.
Though it turned out that the second, lighter box was the "bonus free blender" that came with the ice-cream machine if one ordered it before some date or other. I don't need a blender, really. Oh well, I'll worry about that later.

The ice-cream machine was duly unpacked (and I was glad to see that it wasn't red, even though the one I ordered was supposed to be red). The instructions were read, the pieces were put together, and I prepared for Experiment #1.

Experiment #1: gelato from low-cal jelly. Used the removable bowl.
Result: semi-fail. The jelly set before it froze, and the poor machine couldn't make much headway. I let it keep going, and the result wasn't too bad, but it was more like jelly with ice-crystals in it.
Lessons: (a) Do not use jelly, and if you add gelatin (which recipes say helps in ensuring small crystals) don't add much. (b) It is a bit of a pain making up the salt+water mixture required for using the removable bowl. The alternative is alcohol (they suggest brandy); I think I will invest in a small bottle used solely for this purpose.

Experiment #2: use the loathed vanilla Optifast milkshake as a base for ice-cream
Recipe: 2 serves of Optifast vanilla milkshake, 400ml water, 4 teaspoons of Cassia Cinnamon(*), 4 teaspoons Splenda
Result: Delicious! Creamy, spicy cinnamon icecream! Yum! I had half fresh, and put the other half in a container in the freezer, for one of my meals tomorrow.
Lessons: (a) Skim-milk based icecream is still nice, so long as you eat it before it melts. (b) Cleaning the fixed bowl of the icecream maker is a pain.
(c) And no matter whether one uses the fixed or removable bowl, there's going to be some of the icecream that freezes solid on the side of the bowl. Oh well.

But I'm very glad that I invested in an icecream machine that does its own freezing; it's so much quicker and more convenient that way. The ones you have to pre-freeze are so much hassle that one ends up not using them. But I think this one is going to get some good use.

Proposed Experiment #3: A sorbet made from herbal tea (and no gelatine this time).
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(*) Cassia Cinnamon ("Dutch cinnamon" Cinnamomum aromaticum, as distinct from Ceylon cinnamon "true cinnamon" Cinnamomum zeylanicum) is supposed to be good for Insulin Resistance; I had ordered some from an online gourmet herbs place, and it also arrived today (along with a bunch of other herbs I'd ordered at the same time).