Easter Eggs

We never got around to decorating out eggs, but we did lots of cooking with eggs on Easter. Our neighbor brought over some goat milk earlier in the week and I wanted to do something fun with that. I was surprised at how delicious the goat milk was. I remember trying some from the store before and thought that it tasted a little "grassy." The fresh milk was just sweet and creamy and yummy! We definitely have to get some goats soon.

I am still a little unsure about using unpasteurized goat milk however, so I decided to do something with cooked milk. I decided that with that milk and our eggs, we just had to make some gelato. There are a ton of recipes online, but I was looking for something very simple. I ended up mostly following the recipe at FoodNouveau because they had a nice simple base that you could add anything too:
2 1/2 cups of milk,
5 egg yolks and
1/2 a cup of sugar.

I used all goat milk for the cream and added about a tablespoon of vanilla to the milk. When it was time to heat the mixture including the eggs, I just put it all back in the pot that I was heating the milk in, I didn't use a double boiler. It came out delicious! It freezes much harder that regular ice cream. Strawberries and blueberries make it even better!

Since you only use egg yolks for the gelato, I had 5 egg whites left to do something with. The only thing I could think of was meringue cookies. I followed the recipe from my Joy of Cooking cookbook. Again a very simple recipe with just egg whites, cream of tartar and sugar, It calls for superfine sugar, but I just used regular granulated sugar. They came out perfect, nice and dry and crispy.

Pest Control - Red Ant Battle: Round One

As anyone in San Diego County (and probably the whole Southwest) knows, we live on a giant ant hill. We are constantly battling ants in our houses and in our gardens. For the most part, ants can be ignored when they are outdoors, but when they come in the house or they infest the vegetable garden, sometimes they just have to be killed. There was a big ant hill in our garden and we had to get rid of them. We are trying to avoid using poisons in the garden since we want to eat the food and we don't want the friendly animals, such as lizards, frogs, birds and our dog, to eat either the poison or poisoned animals, but ants are really hard to get rid of!

We are trying Amdro Fire Ant Bait. The ants take the bait to their home and all the ants, including the queen, eat the poison. The dead ants pretty much stay underground, so hopefully it won't affect the lizards, frogs and birds. We've done two applications. It seems to work at first, but then we see more after a few days. Hopefully this second application will do the trick. 

Our First Bounty

We have enough ripe sugar snap peas to make a meal, well at least a side dish for a meal
If the kids don't eat them all as we pick them, we will make a recipe Ron found with blanched peas and a ginger citrus dressing.

Pest Control - Earwig Battle: Round One

We think that our vegetable garden is being attacked by earwigs. We see them everywhere around the garden (and house for that matter - which is really disgusting by the way!). Thanks to Google, we discovered a pretty simple trap for them. You put about an inch of vegetable oil and something smelly like soy sauce (some of the articles and YouTube videos suggest the water or oil from tuna) in a shallow container (we used yogurt containers and small cans) and bury the container in the ground so that the opening is at ground level. The earwigs are attracted by the smell and fall into the container and the oil coats them so that they cannot get out. When you go out in the morning to check your traps you will be both delighted and disgusted at the number of dead earwigs in your containers.

We've only done it for a couple nights so far and it seems like there are less holes in the new leaf growth. Hopefully it will help a lot.