summery things

We had a brief respite from the heat this weekend, windows flung wide-open, the fans still working overtime. I slept with the sheet, the blanket, and the duvet because the nighttime temperature fell to the low 60s. It was glorious.

The temperature swing is brutal, though. I woke up bathed in sweat and threw off a few layers, rolled back over and tried to sink back down into sleep.

We're looking at an absolutely brutal stretch, now, for the next as-long-as-my-weather-app-can-predict. The nighttime temperatures look good, but I have this fear that as we get closer, they will creep up to the mid-70s nightmare where you just can't gain enough traction to cool down the inside of the apartment.

I dunno, man. It might be enough to make me give in and buy an AC window unit.

Last night, Kate and Ben went out for dinner together, and I stayed back, slapping a flank steak into a fajita marinade for dinner tonight - it will have to do with pico de gallo and maybe some smashed avocado, if mine are ripe, rather than classic fajitas - and then eventually hardboiling a couple of eggs. I had a lot of water, a peach, and two hardboiled eggs for dinner last night.

Although I ran the eggs under cool tap water for a minute or so prior to eating them, they still practically blistered my fingers as I peeled them, impatiently. Sprinkled with salt and riding the too-hot-for-my-mouth line, I wolfed them down. I would like to submit hot, freshly hardboiled eggs as perhaps the easiest-to-prepare ultimate comfort food.

Think about it, though. Even macaroni and cheese from a box requires you to boil water, then drain the pasta and cake on the powdered cheese mix. I suppose mashed potatoes from a box are easier, but there's something less homey about them. I think I can appreciate instant mashed potatoes for their general palatability and ease, but they lose their comforting edge when you take the shortcut.

Eggs, you just pop into a pot with water, bring it to a boil, snap off the heat and let them sit for however long you can wait. Or forget about them until later.

Then I ate a peach that I sliced into eight mostly-even slices. It was a little mealy, but the flavor was still there.

Speaking of. We're having some serious fruit fly problems with the trashcan, of all things. Maybe it is actually very common for flies to multiply in great numbers in the kitchen trash, but I don't know what the solution is. When I lifted the bag out this morning, I was pretty revolted by the great fruit fly exodus of July 27, 2015.

I mean, what do I do? Do I waste trash bags and take the trash out more frequently? Do I have to bag up all of my produce waste and take it out separately, like I sometimes do with chicken waste if the can is still pretty empty? We have traps everywhere and they work, but I don't understand why we can't just eradicate them.

This is all Stop and Shop's fault. Ben and Kate use Peapod, which is their delivery service, because they hate going to the grocery store. As a weekly grocery-store-goer myself, this sounds better and better every time I trip over a small child or wait ten minutes for someone who is texting to get out of the way of the milk.

Anyway, a couple of months ago (yes, it's been that long), they ordered a pineapple and ended up with a questionably overripe monster that carried the pests in with it. The produce conundrum is my main complaint with delivery groceries. I like to pick out my fruits and vegetables myself. Since then, we have not been able to get rid of the fruit flies, and there are just a couple of mass fruit fly graves in the kitchen and pantry.

I think I will clean out the red wine trap this evening and refill with fresh wine plus just a dash of dish soap. Then again, the presence of hundreds of dead fruit flies doesn't seem to stop any of the rest of them from diving in to their vinegary demise.

On a happier note, we made ice cream on Saturday. Kate found a recipe for maple bacon crunch ice cream. She is a bit of a maple syrup aficionado, hailing from Vermont, apparently land of the maple syrup festival. I kind of wanted to go to that sometime, but neither of us have cars, so it may never happen. Her parents have supplied her with what I believe is a half-gallon of maple syrup, and it's lasted close to a year now.

Side note: today marks the one-year anniversary of our living in our apartment here. July 27.

Anyway, this recipe was kind of a weird one, I thought. Half as many egg yolks in the custard, a full cup of maple syrup, no other flavoring, just milk and cream, and all of the cream was reserved so the custard was made with just whole milk, sugar, a little salt and some egg yolks. Then stir in the syrup. I strained it afterward, nervous about having scrambled some egg yolks. My fine mesh strainers get a lot of work in the ice cream process.

After it cooled, I stirred in heavy cream and dumped it into the ice cream attachment for Kate's Kitchenaid. It took 10-15 minutes longer to freeze appropriately than I had expected, and that made me nervous, but it got there eventually.

I also made bacon brittle with sugar melted down to caramelized amber, a little butter, some baking soda (? I don't know either, maybe for texture because I suspect it releases carbon dioxide bubbles to help make the sugar brittle instead of hard-as-diamond?), then stirred in the crumbled bacon bits and a generous couple of shakes of cayenne pepper, and poured it out onto a buttered cookie sheet to set.

The brittle is interesting. Ben likes it a lot. Kate thinks it tastes a little like burnt popcorn, but not in a bad way, and I don't think she's too far off. I like it too, for the record, but it's a hard flavor to describe. Ben likes it plain, but I like it the way I swirled it into the ice cream. It adds texture and crunch, smashed up into shards, and the creamy almost-vanilla maple flavor with a dark little peppery crunch...

I don't know how to explain it, but I like it. One little scoop at a time.

Maybe someday we'll try some plain chocolate ice cream. Then again, maybe we won't. I think this is one of the prettier ice creams we've made, in a purely aesthetic sense.

I sat out on the porch last night at dusk, because it was kind of sweltery in the apartment and because I'd forgotten to water the plants in the morning. I sat by them and slowly tipped water into each pot, watching it sink into the soil. They are fragrant now, the mint especially, and thriving. I hope the hot weather will be good for them. I will be vigilant about getting them enough water.

There was a breeze last night, and the sky was blue until it wasn't, the moon a bright constant in the sky. I sat and didn't think. I sat and I was, until the air grew cold enough to prickle my arms with goosebumps. It was quiet except for some small noises from the surrounding apartments with open windows, one playing some Bruno Mars song. It was a moment where I wondered if I'd remember it because it seemed so inconsequential, but kind of heavy at the same time.

When I went back in, Kate and Ben had returned from dinner and were watching something on television, but I didn't join. I took a shower and washed the sweat and grease out of my hair, and eventually I went to sleep.