No Surprise

Several years ago we purchased a Cuisinart Ice Cream maker at Costco. We put it into our storage unit, unopened, when we hit the road in 2009. We've known that we had it but didn't carry it with us because it would take up room that we needed to carry more necessary items. We grabbed it out of storage to use while we are here for the long period of time until April. I attempted to surprise Josie with some fresh, home made ice cream yesterday but the attempt was not successful.

I got out the ice cream maker and read all the instructions and decided to start with just a simple recipe - plain vanilla - in order to try out this new toy. The instructions indicated that the mixing bowl for the device be frozen solid (at least 2 hours) before making the recipe. I placed it in the freezer and went to the store to buy some ingredients that we didn't already have, like heavy cream and whole milk. No problem. Everything went according to plan except for one thing. Our freezer doesn't get cold enough to completely freeze the mixing bowl - not in 2 hours anyway. As a result of that problem, the ice cream never hardened during the process and I ended up placing the mix in the freezer while it was still liquid. Therefore, no surprise as the ice cream still hadn't gotten frozen by the time she came home at 4 PM. Maybe another day. We need to leave the bowl in the freezer much longer than I did in order to make it work properly.

Today we both work as I received a call last night to come in to help with deliveries. I will drive the truck to Josie's work, park it, and take the Jeep to make the deliveries. I start at 9:30 and will most likely be gone for most of the day. Josie said they still aren't getting the volume of orders that would be normal for this time of year, but maybe there is a new normal. I haven't done deliveries in a long time so I hope I remember the routine. It's really very basic but the secret is to route yourself so that there is no backtracking. As long as my deliveries are in Surprise, I should be fine.

We're counting down to Christmas - only 4 more days to go...