Lemon ice cream. I could taste it already. Last time I made it we were fighting over it. Truth is, anytime I make homemade ice cream we are fighting over it. It’s kind of hard to hide because it has to be kept in a freezer and we only have so many freezers in our home. So it is right there. (I wonder if they make under the bed freezers? Or maybe a freezer that looks like one of your dresser drawers?)
I whipped up a lovely, light lemon cake with lemon icing out of one of my many cookbooks in the collection. Name of the book? Butter. What else do you need to know? I guess I didn’t really whip it up. The recipe involved many steps. I have long sworn off cake mixes for various reasons. I make every cake from scratch. Creaming the butter. Lemonizing the whole milk. Zesting the lemons and subsequently squeezing the juice out of them. Intoxicated by the aroma of fresh lemons. I guess that’s why they put lemon in household cleaning products. Who doesn’t want their home to smell like lemons? I was enjoying every finicky step. Anyway… I wanted some smooth, refreshing, lemon ice cream to go with it.
I had cooked and mixed and re-cooked the rich milk and egg mixture that makes up the ice cream and set it in the fridge to cool for eight hours. I guess thats when I should have started to look for my ice cream paddle. But I didn’t know it was lost at that point.
Finally when I needed it, I went directly to the last spot I saw it and it was not there. I tore apart the pantry and as result cleaned it. Tore apart the linen closet. The cupboards and many other nooks and crannys where it may have wandered off to. Nothing. That ice cream paddle had vanished off the face of the earth. I told myself-be calm. Don’t lose your cool over this. Which would be my default reaction. It’s ok… just go to the store and buy ice cream. No, it won’t be the same but it’s not the end of the world. Me being me, I kept searching, but this time with a calm demeanour. Finally, I had to force myself to move on. My OCD tendencies insist I search until I find it but I had twelve people coming for dinner so I had to work on the rest of the meal.
I did move on to other tasks but as I did I asked myself ‘what’s the magic of the ice cream maker paddle anyway?’ I had the frozen ice cream bowl. So I tried my regular KitchenAid attachments. They did not work. I reasoned, all that plastic paddle does is move slowly around the freeze bowl for twenty minutes and you end up with ice cream. Why couldn’t I just stir the ice cream in the freeze bowl myself for twenty minutes? I guess the real beauty of having the attachments was I could turn it on and go do something else for twenty minutes. But this could work.
So I settled in for twenty minutes of slow stirring. I could not get anything else done during this time. As I watched the cooked milk and egg mixture start to freeze and thicken by the motion of my stirring (well actually the nature of the freeze bowl) it occurred to me that many things in life require our undivided attention and there is no easy quick way to achieve the desired results. We have to do the work. We can do the work. Once we set our face as flint about a thing…. we get it done. We can’t always have easy. Sometimes we need to slow down and focus and just do the hard work.
As I watched the cream thicken, I could feel my stirring becoming more laboured. Ice cream was happening and it was going to be so worth it. Many things in life are totally worth the hard work but we seem to run from hard. Who doesn’t want easy? I want the best results by doing nothing. But this small incident reminded me that I set out to do the hard and holy things in 2020. I want to do the things that require resolve and discipine and intention. I am getting weak and lazy. Always succumbing to the path of least resistance. I need to build up my stamina. In every way.
But because I set my mind to stirring that cream for twenty minutes (which seems like eternity, by the way) I ended up with a rich, refreshing, creamy frozen product which would compliment my lemon cake perfectly. I was tempted to order new parts off Amazon right away but our Internet was down so that wasn’t happening.
Those parts have to be here somewhere but until I find them I guess I will make ice cream the old fashioned way. Churning it. And remind myself that the result is worth the work. Hopefully I will be able to apply this reasoning to the many things I want to achieve this year. I can’t just let something or someone else do the hard work while I fritter off doing something less onerous.
I do love the tactile side of cooking and baking. It brings such a sense of accomplishment and I hate to be defeated by a piece of plastic. And I wasn’t. I can do this thing. Life…. I can do it. I can stir the defeat out of it because I want to. I want to do the hard and holy things*.
*Ann Voscamp
The Red Plaid Apron 