Anna's blog - now with 50% more ice-cream!

Oh no, regular updates! What shall we do? Quick, let's hide over there!

Well, I'm persevering with the Shalom cardigan - as it progresses, I think that I'm gradually shifting to the 'I like it' camp as far as the weird-arse colours are concerned. Though now that's resolved, I bet the bloody thing turns out the wrong size just to spite me (and also perhaps because I am a foul and degenerate creature who didn't swatch... that might also have something to do with it). I guess we'll see. Here is the knitwear in question, at any rate:




Something amusing - during the first few hours I spent working on this one, a certain thought kept nagging at me. As weird as the burnt orange/tealy green combination was, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was somehow familiar. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out. Then I looked up at the painting hanging on my Dad's wall - the painting that I'd been sitting next to while I knitted:


Hmmm, perhaps that explains it...

And because there is not enough ice-cream in this blog (and also because I am a lazy bum who keeps toying with the idea of keeping a separate food/recipe blog but is too lazy to actually follow through and start one), here is the recipe for the Best Icecream Ever. Well, perhaps not the best ever, but it's pretty bloody good, I must say. And it's ridiculously easy, because you don't actually make the ice-cream part. Don't look at me that way - I can make ice-cream from creamy/eggy/sugary scratch, and sometimes do, but this recipe originated in my exam period, where I don't really have the time, let alone the concentration span, for standing at a stove dutifully stirring custard...

The three magic ingredients:

• 2 litres of vanilla ice-cream (I used HomeBrand, for I am a tight-arse)


• Dark chocolate (once again, I used dippy supermarket brand stuff, because that was what I had in the house at the time) - I think I used about 100-150g - I wasn't paying attention.


• Peanut brittle (once again, bought stuff) - about 100g-ish, I think.

Leave the icecream out to soften for a bit - just enough so it'll be easy to mix stuff through it. Chop the peanut brittle as finely as you have the patience for - it works best when you've got pieces of differing size though. Chop the chocolate too - I like to almost shave it, so that you don't get too many big chunks (but once again, differing size is good).

Then mix it all together, and refreeze the icecream. Doesn't sound like much, but this is most transendently good ice-cream ever. The smaller shards of brittle sort of melt into the icecream, and the bigger, more peanuttybits stay crunchy. The fact that you don't need to work hard for it just makes it taste even better.

Yum. That is all.