When Life Gives You Limes

 
This post was supposed to be a showcase of my finished knitting projects, such as that shawl I still haven't blocked yet and the DNA beanie that literally just came off the needles. But...I'm wearing a towel turban and can't be bothered. Instead, this is the story of a bag of limes.


We all know winter makes me crave citrus just like autumn makes me crave apples. Spiced lemon meringue pie, key lime pie, all pie all the time until I get bored or until my coworkers start acting all disappointed when I bring them cookies instead. (You will eat what I cook you and you will like it, damn you!) Still, at least I'm keeping the scurvy at bay. Do people still get scurvy?

In any case, it's no wonder that on a particularly frosty Friday night on an impulse shopping trip to Trader Joe's with friends I happened upon a bag of limes with my name written on it. Cute tiny little limes. Green and juicy looking. Bought the bag, took it home ("Reading Time with Pickle" by Regina Spektor--one of the formative songs of my medical school days, check it out if you dare).

The problem is by then I'd gotten tired of bringing pie to work all the time. Cookies, anyone? I tried making mousse, but you really need a binder like gelatin or starch to keep the fruit ones together, and so mine ended up separating into a fluffy eggy cloud over a puddle of (whiskey-infused) limeade. Actually...kind of tasty, but not exactly pretty. And then we hit a warm spell and I started wandering the ice cream aisle.

With five limes quickly reaching their prime in the fridge, eureka! Key lime ice cream, of course!

The recipe comes courtesy of the guys at Sorted Food, so the original measurements are in British/international units (sorry, but I promise you won't need a food scale, just a liquid measuring cup). It's one of those miraculous no-churn concoctions and a cream not a custard (i.e. no eggs), so you won't die of salmonella poisoning, though you may die of acute coronary syndrome. Hey, priorities, am I right?

No-Churn Key Lime Ice Cream (adapted from Whiskey Ice Cream recipe from Sorted Food):
200 ml heavy cream
200 gm sweetened condensed milk (1/2 of a 14-oz can)
1 tsp vanilla extract
50 ml lime juice (juice of approximately 5 small limes)
1 tbsp lime zest (from about 2 limes)
30 gm graham cracker crumbs (2 cracker sheets, crushed)

1. In a large bowl, whisk cream until peaks form. (This doesn't really mean it stands up, or maybe it stands up in the same sense that Jabba the Hutt stands up. #touchingjabba?)
2. Whisk in sweetened condensed milk, vanilla extract, lime juice, and lime zest until completely blended.
3. Transfer to a freezer-safe container and gently fold in graham cracker crumbs.
4. Freeze for at least 2-4 hours, stirring approximately every half hour for the first 2 until the ice cream just about sets.
5. Serve with a graham cracker or ice cream/beverage pairing of your choice.

Now, you may skip the graham cracker crumbs entirely, or serve as a topping, depending on how mushy (or nonexistent) you want your crackers to be, but I like the sort of oatmealy way it holds together. I'm a little weird with texture. By which I mean I appreciate some weird ones.

OK, so I know it's not knitting projects, craftivist or not. But sometimes life gives you lemons and you hurl a few right back at it with some choice words. And other times life gives you limes and you make ice cream. That and I'm nursing a few poems until they inevitably get rejected by various lit mags. I could use the comfort food therapy.

Of Avocados and Death Stars

Someone very wise once said something along the lines of how you can't pick a flower "without troubling a star." Madeleine L'Engle made that into a book title, to a novel that sank deep into my consciousness when I was a teenager. That may explain a lot about me.

I don't consider myself a craftivist. Not alternative fact. My pussy is a fluffy white domestic longhair cat, I've never driven a hybrid vehicle, I prescribed OCPs to teenagers in my practice for menstrual problems although I wasn't exactly encouraged to talk about sex, and my idea of a pipeline is that statistical program we plug our raw data into on my research project.

I am also a woman, a minority, an immigrant, and a scientist.

Rebellions are built on nope.

These dishcloths were the natural product. I didn't mean to make them, but it was that or tattooing the Rebel Alliance emblem on my arse. The knitting pattern was probably simpler and slightly less painful (also not subject to stretch marks), and I suppose you could always convert the letters into a "poster" blanket a la Shepherd Fairey, though I'm not so talented as to figure out shading and faces so you're on your own there.

And then there was the avocado poem. Still don't know where that one came from. Don't ask, don't tell?

Ode to an Avocado

At night the ghosts of Smoot

and Hawley walk the halls:

I wonder if they carry their heads

and by what contrivance, and if

they ride to a migrant chorus

chiming the hours in wicker baskets.

The flesh of the avocado

is smooth like sin, green as money

crossing the border on flatbeds

for love of the game: no floozy

is more lecherized, squeezed when ripe,

silky between lips like a fresh girl.

“My kingdom for a fruit,” said no

leader ever, but since the people

won't about-face, perhaps the produce

will turn its pebbly other cheek,

oblivious to history, while in guacamole

we read the course of empires.