Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

JP Licks now has both peach and cucumber ice cream. Last week, they only had the peach, and I'd given up on cucumber for this year, but I looked at the list of flavors at the Coolidge Corner store, and cucumber was on the board, right above peach.

So, I bought two pints of ice cream, and hurried home with them, since I'd forgotten to bring an insulated bag with me. That meant I just bought the pints, and hurried to catch a trolley, rather than also getting a dish of ice cream and eating it on the trolley platform, letting trains go by until I finished my ice cream. (I don't think there's a rule against eating ice cream on the green line, but I can't mask while eating ice cream, or anything else.)

I just looked at both the JP Licks website and the phone app, and neither of them mentions the cucumber ice cream; both do show the peach.

I stayed indoors all day yesterday, for no particular reason, and then at about 8:00 I checked the forecast for Friday-Sunday. Friday (today) in particular was forecast to be hot, so I got cattitude and adrian_turtle to go for a short walk with me after dinner.

I woke up a bit early this morning, and instead of trying to get back to sleep, I got up and had tea, and sat for a little bit until I was awake enough to be hungry for breakfast. I had yogurt, pulled on clothes, and walked over to the nearby Whole Foods. (The Star Market opens earlier, but is a bit further away.) I got a few useful things, including more non-dairy ice cream sandwiches, because I (mistakenly) thought we had none left.

Those ice cream sandwiches are for Adrian and Cattitude. I'm happily eating (dairy) ice cream, and currently have peach, ginger, black raspberry, chocolate, and chocolate orgy. That is a lot of flavors, but I'm buying pints of ice cream if I'm near Lizzy's, or sometimes Tosci's or JP Licks, and expect to be able to get the ice cream home before it melts. Insulated shopping bags definitely help.

I have been to a farmers market for the first time this year. I decided that the risk of taking the bus down to Harvard on a Sunday morning, and a market set up for social distancing, was low enough to be worth it. The Sunday market starts at 10 a.m., so I could avoid the heat of the day. The buses both ways were uncrowded, and other shoppers as well as the vendors were being good about distancing.

I have:

• cucumbers, one large and two pounds of the little Diva cucumbers


• lamb and sweet potato ravioli


• a red-leaf lettuce, having asked the vendor to give me either a red- or a green-leaf lettuce, whichever she thought was better


• blueberries


• raspberries, and


• cherry tomatoes.

Strawberry season appears to be over, and I didn't feel like paying $6 for a box of local cherries.

I bought a lot of cucumbers, because I don't expect more from the garden for at least three days. We have three boxes of the ravioli, and I have offered one to Adrian.

cattitude came back from the Belmont farmers market with two containers of strawberries, which are good even though with the current rules he couldn't choose which containers to get. We have eaten about a third of the berries so far, not counting a few that were already overripe, and will probably finish the rest while they (or most of them) are still good.

I transplanted another tomato seedling today, in the process confirming that the tomato cages I bought really aren't suited for container gardening. This involved putting the plant in one container, failing to get the tomato cage around it, and then dumping it out (gently) and putting the plant in a smaller container. Which also barely works for the tomato cage.

It started raining before I finished, and I lost track of which of the other plants I gave plant food to, but any I missed should be okay. This was the second or third rain of the afternoon, this time without thunder, so the plants all got plenty of water.

It is strawberry season. cattitude went to the farmers market on the Harvard campus this afternoon, and came home with two quarts of local strawberries.

They are good enough that we had eaten all but three berries from the first quart before sitting down to (the rest of) supper tonight; I don't know how many will be left in another twelve hours, but there's a farmers market in Davis Square on Wednesday afternoons. The strawberries on sale there last week clearly weren't ripe, but I am taking that evidence that one of the vendors who comes there grows strawberries, and am hopeful for tomorrow.

Yesterday morning, I was gathering mulberries in the local park, near a sidewalk. Someone saw me and asked whether they were sweet. I said yes and explained that she should look for the black or very dark purple ones, because those are ripe. She thanked me and headed toward the subway; I picked and ate a few more berries and then went home.

And for dinner last night, we had raisin French toast with fresh local strawberries. Raisin French toast because I stopped at a bakery on my way home Tuesday evening, and they were out of plain challah, but had a raisin challah left. I got home and cattitude said that it would make good French toast. He was right. (It would have made good French toast with maple syrup, too, but while I brought the syrup to the table, neither of us used it.)

This morning in the park, we saw a turtle on the lawn, with her head up, looking around or maybe sniffing the air. She was holding still when we first saw her, then started moving, slightly away from the water, and then away from us and parallel to the bank (we may have startled her). She then walked back to the edge of the salt marsh, started to walk down the concrete slope, and then slid the rest of the way to the water. I'm guessing that she had finished laying eggs before we got there; if she was looking for a good place she will probably try again tonight. I'm not expecting baby turtles: even if she found a male to mate with, the buried eggs are likely to be dug up by dogs, raccoons, or skunks. (These turtles, while I'm happy to see them, are neither native to the area nor threatened, so I'm not going to find a park ranger and see if they can do anything to protect the nest.)

And this afternoon I met drcpunk and our friend L. at the Grand Central Oyster Bar for a late lunch of matjes herring filets. (I had one piece of herring and some crab soup; drcpunk had two pieces of herring; and L had one piece of herring and some herring salad. Then drcpunk and I had ridiculously rich desserts, a chocolate cake with golden raspberries, served with curry creme anglaise [sic, a very mild curry, and it actually does work] and whipped cream alongside. Then I bought a cup of tea (must maintain caffeine levels), and we walked over to Bryant Park and talked until it was time for me to go to the gym.

I had a pretty good workout with Emilie (though she showed up significantly late, because of baby stuff, and since she had to teach a class after our session she owes me ten minutes which I hope I will get next week, assuming the baby doesn't insist on being fed at exactly the wrong time again). ( numbers, as usual, mostly from memory )

cattitude and I spent a little while watching swallows in the park after lunch; the first I've seen this year, and swooping low, back and forth. I saw the red on the underside of the wings once, and the yellow a few times. We went on when the insects that were attracting the swallows found us.

On my way home Friday, I saw the season's first fireflies (one at a time, a total of four in a few blocks' walk in the park), and called Cattitude to come downstairs and see them.

Strawberries, of course. The privet is in bloom, as is lots of clover.

And it's annoyingly hot and humid.

Few young birds: the plants are running early, but the ducks and geese don't seem to be. I have seen two goslings and one duckling so far. And some of the starlings today might have been fledglings.

Because of centuryplant's post, yesterday we went looking for dragonflies. I saw a few, but not close up.

[I have OS install stuff to do, oh frabjous day!]

This morning, cattitude and I bought cream and sugar. After lunch, I made raspberry ice cream (with a bit of blackberry because I thought I didn't have quite enough raspberries). Raspberries, sugar, and lemon juice, mixed together so juice comes out of the berries. That sits for two hours. Then, beat eggs, then beat in sugar, cream, and milk. Then the raspberry juice and mashed pulp go in, and it gets poured into the ice cream maker.

At that point, I discovered that the recipe I was using makes more than my ice cream maker can hold at once; next time, I will divide everything by two. (That's simple, and making 2/3 of a recipe would mean discarding a fractional beaten egg.)

I put the latest replacement knob on my ice cream make, turned it on, and everything went swimmingly. I put the extra ice cream mix back in the refrigerator while the machine did its thing. Once the first batch was done, and the machine had had a little while to rest, I made a smaller batch and mixed in chocolate chips while packing it into a freezer container. The second batch was closer to frozen when it came out of the ice cream machine, probably because it was a much smaller batch.

After dinner, we had raspberry ice cream (without chips). I liked it. Cattitude liked it. julian_tiger liked it. And the ice cream maker is in good shape, which is a relief. (It had seemed overstressed by an attempt at pear sorbet a while back, and with the previous replacement knob it was tricky to get the timing right.)

This recipe seems to be a nice compromise between the richness of making a custard first, and the simplicity of just using milk, cream, sugar, and whatever the flavor is (lemon juice, ginger, vanilla, cinnamon,…). That compromise does mean that I'm using raw eggs; I'm prepared to take that risk (these were Greenmarket rather than supermarket eggs, but I suspect that doesn't much matter), but not everyone may be.

The day began, up here in Inwood, with mulberries fresh off a tree, and ended with lightning bugs in the rain (I spotted the first of this summer maybe ten yards from the mulberries). In between, work featured a morning fire drill (which actually had us leave the building, at least), and intermittent power problems in the afternoon. I gather this is common in lightning storms. Nonetheless, I decided I didn't really trust the Long Island Railroad to be running on schedule in such conditions, so I asked my fellow proofreaders if someone could give me a ride to "any Queens subway station." Cristina kindly obliged, dropping me at Willets Point/Shea Stadium on the 7.

I boarded the 7 in pouring rain; by the time I got to midtown, it was overcast and damp but not raining. I went to the gym, despite having earlier written in my journal "I have a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side."

( gym notes )

It was raining again before I got to the subway after working out, lightly but with lightning visible over New Jersey; the light rain I emerged into at Isham Street was a heavy rain by the time I was in Inwood Hill Park, but I didn't mind: the park needs the water, and I had an umbrella and lightning bugs (I often say "firefly", but in weather like this they're lightning bugs).