And with these hands

We will spur the dawning of a new age, a novel way of life where happiness bathes the masses and peace is for sale (and lots of people are buying)...or...something. So the Tremendous Wife and I are passionate about living a simple lifestyle. We have a rain barrel to collect rain water so we can water robust vegetable garden and not drive up the water bill. We recycle everything that is recyclable and we have a compost bin that that is routinely fed all appropriate food scraps, lawn clippings and the such. This black gold then ends up in our garden to help our veggies thrive, and the scraps from them end up in the compost bin and, you get the picture. If we can use what's already available and around us to create the things we want in our lives, we're going to do it. We've started making our own beer and have made some fine brews and some forgettable ones too. Our next brew looks like it'll be an Imperial Blonde Ale, a well rounded crisp beer perfect for the summer. We've made our own mayo and our own bread, both of which were pretty tasty. We've laid off making our these for the time being. We consume a lot of each and producing both by hand would likely be more costly than to buy it from the store, hence defeating part of the purpose.

Our newest endeavor is one perfectly timed for summer, ice cream. We received a Kitchen Aid stand mixer for one of our wedding gifts and also received an ice cream maker attachment. This past weekend we kicked some of the space killing clutter out of our kitchen so we could give the KA our permanent home. Our first creation was a pumpkin ice cream that tasted like pumpkin pie sorbet, good but not great. The Amazing and Splendid Wife did a lot of researching and found a recipe for...wait for it...chocolate and peanut butter ice cream. We whipped it up and had to forcibly restrain ourselves from eating the entire batch all at once. It lasted 2 days. We're already planning on making another a batch today or tomorrow, hopefully a double batch. It has little dollops of chilled peanut butter mixed in at the end, ooooohhh my. With this stuff on hand it's not worth it to leave the house, for anything. Just be a shut in, unhinge your jaw and start shoveling. Then happiness and peace will befall the masses.