Experiments with food

The play kitchen project has stalled a little, because the weather has been so perfect we've been doing yard work instead.  The garden plots have been turned and additional compost has been added, but Ryan is thinking that we need to supplement our smelly homemade compost with the store bought stuff, so we can't actually plant until we get that.  I've been continuing to rearrange the gravel in the front yard.  Soon, the pink gravel will be moved and I'll be able to cover the bare spots in the green-grey gravel.  It's hard to work on that when Ryan isn't around, because I end up with a little toddler following me.  She thinks she's helping, but grabbing handfuls of pea gravel from the driveway and dumping it on whatever I'm working on is not actually helpful at all.  In fact, it's hinderful (which I know isn't a word, but it sounds like the opposite of helpful, so I'm using it).

Meanwhile, we've been trying out various food experiments.

One of our shared main goals is to reduce waste.  One of my personal goals is to eat as many mashed potatoes as possible.  Unfortunately, these goals are contradictory, because I like my potatoes peeled.  So when we made mashed potatoes on Friday night, I decided to try an experiment and use the peels for something other than compost.  After a little bit of digging around on the internet, I combined a couple of recipes and made potato peel chips.  First, I soaked the peels (which, due to the use of small golden potatoes and Ryan's peeling methods, were each about the size of a thumbnail) in salt water for about an hour.  I didn't bother measuring the ratio of salt to water, because I like salt.  Then I sprayed a baking sheet with olive oil and baked them at 350 for about twenty minutes, which was enough time to dry them a little.  Then I added garlic salt (as previously stated, I like salt) and baked them another thirty minutes.  My baking time was based on the un-scientific method, which was to pull them out when I needed the oven for the bagels that I was making simultaneously.  The peels turned out delicious, so I think we'll be doing that again.  I also used the potato water in the bagel recipe instead of plain water.  I didn't actually taste a difference, but that could be because the bagels were coated in garlic, which would overpower any potato-y flavor.

In further food experiments, tonight I am making vanilla ice cream, using some of those awesome vanilla beans I found on Amazon.  I haven't made this kind before - I usually stick to dark chocolate ice cream or fruit sorbets.  The ice cream isn't the experimental part though, since I just followed a recipe (from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter).  The experimental part comes in from the vanilla sugar that I'm attempting from the pods that I pulled out of the cream.  I don't know how well it will work, because I don't know much about vanilla and for all I know, the flavor could have cooked away.  The seeds are all gone, of course, but I've read that the pods can be used, though nothing I've read says anything about pulling them out of a cooked  ice cream base and rinsing them off.  If it works, I'll have some delicious sugar to use in my baking. If it doesn't work, then I'll have a jar of plain sugar with some seed pods in it.  No big deal.