This Slug Walked into a Beer

It seems so idyllic to plant an organic vegetable garden in the spring and harvest your own produce for salads, spaghetti sauce, and gazpacho. Getting in touch with the earth, feeling the warm, gritty soil between your fingers, inhaling the green earthy scent of growing things feels almost like paradise. Which is why I forget to weed and water the garden in the mornings, especially when it's raining. I'm letting nature take care of itself, right? It was working for me until my husband asked our teenage daughter to harvest some lettuce for a salad. She returned empty-handed within minutes, complaining that there were slugs all over the lettuce leaves. Slugs are not idyllic. I was unable to restrain a comment about the extra protein slugs would provide in the salad, particularly when steamed and dipped in a garlic butter sauce, but thought did make my stomach tremble. After using her smart, teenage brain, my daughter decided to cope with the slug problem using chopsticks. The sight of her heading out to the backyard to dislodge slugs from our salad with a pair of chopsticks stirred both me and my husband into action. True to form, my husband intended to harvest the lettuce himself. I, being an incurable planner, chose to tackle the problem armed with an old, plastic bowl and a bottle of beer. Everyone knows that slugs love beer. The sight of the slug perched on the underside of a lettuce leaf was impressive. I didn't think lettuce leaves would be strong enough to hold a slug. I wanted to surmise that lettuce is stronger than I thought, but I decided it was more likely the strength of the slug slime that kept the beast sticking to the plant. I shook it off and my husband harvested the salad, while I buried the bowl and poured in the beer. My daughter, not begin legally old enough to use alcoholic beverages as pesticide in an organic garden, simply watched. Did it work? Being afflicted with a cold, I didn't check my slug trap until two days later. Okay, so I was also afflicted with nausea at the thought of retrieving a bowl filled with drowned slugs. Still, I found only one slug floating in the bowl muddy beer. I tossed the contents of the bowl, slug and all, into the bushes nearby, reflecting gloomily on the appeal of bagged, pre-washed lettuce. Sometimes you can feel too close to your food source.

We Scream for Ice Cream

My husband and I bought an ice cream maker attachment to our Kitchen Aid Mixer as an anniversary gift to ourselves. So naughty. We figure the family that makes ice cream together stays together, and we bought it to make ice cream for our daughter. We're making ice cream for her because it's the only way she's going to get any ice cream other than Alden's Vanilla. Alden's vanilla ice cream seems to be the only ice cream on the planet that is not sweetened with corn syrup. Corn syrup (and other nasty additives, such as artificial colors and flavors and preservatives) send my daughter's brain into rapid orbit around distant galaxies so that she cannot sit still, keep her attention focused on any subject for more than a second, or maintain anything resembling age-appropriate behavior. Since I'm not interested in parenting a toddler tall enough to look me in the eye, I do my best to feed her pure and natural foods. In order to make ice cream from scratch, first you need one hard-working, generous husband, four gallons of motivation, and a cup of patience. You also need half-and-half, egg yolks (what can I do with the egg whites?), sugar, whipping cream, homemade vanilla extract made by the above-mentioned hard-working, generous husband, and salt. Then you heat the half-and-half, mix the egg yolks and sugar, and begin to gradually add the warmed half-and-half. When the half-and-half runs down the side of your saucepan, you tell yourself, "Gradually be damned," and dump the rest into the egg yolk and sugar mixture. It should still turn out, right? After mixing the egg yolks, sugar, and half-and-half, you'll need to transfer it back into the saucepan to heat until bubbles form around the edge and it starts to steam. I'm already lost by this point. Any time I have to dump my mixture from the pot to the mixing bowl and back to the pot, I look for something easier to make. I personally don't need ice cream that badly. But if you have more moral courage than I do, you'll pour the confounded mixture in a large bowl, add the whipping cream, vanilla, and salt, and cover the bowl with plastic wrap. If you haven't managed to shrink wrap yourself with the plastic wrap by this point as I would have done, you can put the bowl in the fridge to chill for at least eight hours. Cliffhanger: Will it turn out to be ice cream or will the sudden addition of warm half-and-half to the egg yolk and sugar mixture ruin the whole business? Stay tuned.