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I finished this project in December but just managed to deliver it to its intended recipients — it was a wedding gift for Ruby Nite and her now-husband — last week. In the interim between finishing it and delivering it, the pillow lived in my office, so all my colleagues who saw me working on the embroidery during many long meetings and teleconferences also got to see the final product.

The raven and word design on the front and the thorn design on the back are hand-embroidered, mostly in a split backstitch. It’s a bit clearer on the larger version on Flickr: front, back. The actual pillow-cover construction I did on the sewing machine, though — my taste for hand-sewing doesn’t extend quite that far.

The cover is designed to come off for washing and ought to hold up through a fair number of machine cycles. I figure whenever one is making something for people with kids or dogs (they have a dog [so far]), it had better be something that can stand some chewing and some washing.

I’m pleased with how it turned out!

…and now I need a new project to keep my hands busy and my mind clear for meetings and teleconferences…

I mentioned this recipe on Facebook and got requests, so here it is. It’s adapted from the KitchenAid ice-cream maker book, but of course any ice-cream maker will work.

I should mention that making your own ice cream, although pretty easy, is a vanity project and not a money-saving one. This is REALLY good ice cream but it is not cheap to make. It is not the slightest bit low-fat. It creates an impressive pile of dirty dishes. And it takes three days.

This recipe makes about two litres.

Before starting, make sure you have room in your fridge for a large bowl of proto-ice-cream. Also, if you have to put some part of your ice-cream-maker in the freezer for pre-chilling and it isn’t already there, do it now.

Day 1
Step 1:
1/2 cup whipping cream
120g mint-flavoured dark chocolate, cut into chunks. You want good-quality chocolate here — hit your local yuppie gourmet food emporium. If you can’t get mint-flavoured chocolate, buy good dark chocolate and add a bit of peppermint extract.

• Put the whipping cream and chocolate in a small saucepan and heat over medium-low heat, stirring frequently, until the chocolate melts. Remove from heat and set aside.

Step 2:
2 cups table cream

• In a medium saucepan, stirring often, heat the cream over medium heat until very hot and steamy but not boiling. Remove from heat and set aside.

Step 3:
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
8 egg yolks (put the whites in the fridge and pretend you’re going to make meringues with them)

• Combine the sugar and cocoa in a small bowl and set aside.
• Put the egg yolks in the bowl of a stand mixer. Use the wire whip attachment. On low speed (speed 2) gradually add the sugar mixture and mix about 30 seconds, until well blended and slightly thickened.
• Continuing on low speed, VERY gradually add the chocolate mixture and then the cream. Mix until very well blended.
• Return the mixture to the medium saucepan. Heat over medium heat, stirring constantly, until small bubbles form around the edge and the mixture is steamy, but don’t boil.

Step 4:
1 1/2 cups whipping cream
4 teaspoons vanilla
1/8 teaspoon salt

• Transfer the hot mixture to a large bowl.
• Stir in the whipping cream, vanilla, and salt.
• Cover and chill thoroughly (at least overnight, preferably 24 hours)

Day 2
Step 5:
200g mint-flavoured milk or dark chocolate, chopped into tiny bits. I use leftovers from Step 1 here plus some Laura Secord Frosted Mint bars for this part, mostly because I like a bit of green in my mint stuff.

• Follow your ice-cream maker’s directions to turn the chilled mixture into ice cream. Add the chocolate bits in the last couple of minutes of stirring.
• It’ll now be the consistency of soft-serve, so transfer it to containers and freeze it overnight for the best texture. In the meantime, content yourself with licking all the ice-cream-maker parts clean.

Day 3
Step 6:

• Eat!

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Starting in Senior Kindergarten, it seems to be traditional to send kids home with a badly-photocopied Canada Food Guide and some badly-photocopied grocery store sale flyers and assign a Food Groups Collage as homework.

For SK, fine, this is more-or-less appropriate: you’re five years old. You can practice reading and cutting and sticking and since it’s your first go-around with the Food Guide you might learn something. Grade 1… OK, maybe it’s a good review. Grade 2… WTF? This again? And now again in Grade 3, by which time the whole thing is just a waste of paper and gluesticks and everyone’s patience, even with the novel additions of “Good Tooth Care,” “Physical Activity” and “Safety Rules” to the assignment. This time the photocopied food pictures were so bad you could barely tell what they were, so we cast about for alternatives.

I thought it would be more interesting to do something a bit more active and connected to reality, as well as finding some way to inject some actual new learning in there somewhere.

First, we needed some pictures of food. Being lazy, I figured taking our own pictures would be faster and easier than doing a whole pile of image searches. We have a camera, we have food. Ta da! So I settled on having M explore the kitchen, pull out foods from each food group and stage a bunch of pictures. So far so good.

I have strong opinions about teaching kids to use technology appropriately — so how to work in some learning on that? I remembered I had a demo of Comic Life, which makes photo montages super-easy. M could learn how to use it in about three minutes (thus actually learning something), and then we could all escape the whole cut-and-stick part of the assignment which, by Grade 3, is neither fun nor appropriate. Excellent.

It took us about an hour to do the photos, since not only did M need to dig about in the fridge and cupboards but the various foods had (apparently) to be artistically arranged with some stuffed animal models (and we had the Physical Activity, Dental Care, etc. photos to do). I think searching for all the images we needed would have taken much longer.

It took M about another hour to put together her seven collage pages and get them all properly labelled in Comic Life.

My only involvement was to take the pictures I was told to take (I could’ve let M do it but my camera is new and I’m still a bit overprotective of it, and her own camera is not great) and to get M started on Comic Life — no helicoptering necessary. I’d share the final result but the 7-page PDF is 358Mb (oof).

Anyway. I thought I’d share the idea since this assignment seems to be issued annually to pretty much everyone and I think this version of it a) is super easy, b) is more active and less tedious than the usual cut-and-stick, c) helps the kids connect their own foods and activities to Food Guide concepts, and d) involves an appropriate bit of technology use.

Also: no effing gluesticks. Hallelujah!

Edited to add: here’s a screenshot of one page