Karen and Ice Cream!!!!!

Lots of exciting stuff happening now that it's officially summer! My performance today at CF was less than stellar, but my performance in the kitchen more than made up for it - I made delicious, almost paleo, homemade ice cream!

To start, I went to Crossfit for a good workout - I'm doing my "weigh-in" for the paleo challenge on Thursday, time for my "after" Bod Pod results! Our skill today was weighted push-ups (5 sets of 5 reps), which are HARD if you don't have good pushing muscles. Deb and I paired up, and I fared MUCH worse than she did:

15 / 12.5 / 12.5 / 12.5 / 12.5

I don't think I was able to do 5 in a row at all during one set, but I usually got to 4 before my arms just totally gave out - ugh! Deb got all the way to 45# without barely breaking a sweat. Way to go! On to the WOD.

"Karen" for time:
150 wall ball shots (20# / 14#, 10 foot target)

The last time I did this workout in November, I technically made the "record" at CF Minneapolis using a "prescribed" 10# med ball and the 8 foot target - only took me 8:53. This time around, I used the prescribed 14# med ball and aimed for the 10 foot target. I didn't always hit that target (hey, it's 5 feet above my head and that's not exactly even playing field with the rest of the CFers), but as long as it hit above the blue marked line going around the gym (about 8.5 feet), I counted the rep. I finished in 15:04, the last person in class today. I will say that I was tempted to stop a few times at the 100 rep or 125 rep mark...but I remembered that by cheating, I'm only cheating myself.

This workout sucked not in my legs, but in my arms and wrists the most. I think the pressure and shock of catching the heavy ball really slowed me down. I had to take several breaks not because I was tired, but because I was getting sloppy with my ball catching and had difficulty re-launching it. Lame.

But it's ok because I made ice cream afterwards! Over the weekend I experimented with vanilla-honey-lavender ice cream in a coconut milk base. It turned out alright, but the coconut milk and water separated funny, making some parts more like sorbet and other parts more like ice cream. Also, the lavender was a little strong tasting and in hindsight, I probably should have strained out the buds. But here's a picture of it anyway:

Onto my better recipe for just plain vanilla bean-honey ice cream. The yield was pretty small on this, so next time I'll have to double it:

1 can (13.5 oz) coconut milk
1 vanilla bean (12 inches)
2 TB raw honey

First, I froze the coconut milk in the can for about 2 hours to separate the cream from the water. I spooned out just the cream into a tupperware dish and popped it in the fridge for when I was going to use it later this afternoon. When I was ready to actually start cooking, I gently boiled some water in a skillet. While waiting for the water to bubble, I slit open the vanilla bean and scraped all the little black seeds into a heat-safe mixing bowl. Toss in the rest of the vanilla pod and add the cold coconut milk.

By now, the water was boiling, so I set the mixing bowl in the hot water so that it would heat coconut milk contents. This is better than just heating up the coconut milk directly in a saucepan (more control). I stirred everything together and let it "infuse" for about 8 minutes. Then I removed the bowl from the hot water and let the mixture cool for about 10 minutes. When the mixture was cool, I added the raw honey - you want to add the honey when it's cool because if you add the honey to the hot mix, it'll cook and not be raw anymore!

Once well-mixed, I popped the bowl in the freezer for about 30 minutes to chill it. Then it was time to churn it according to my ice cream maker's instructions. It was actually done in about 18 minutes and thickened much better than my first recipe (which still wasn't frozen after about 45 minutes - I think chilling the mixture prior to churning is a key step!). Here's the final (but measly) product:

How easy and simple was that? Pretty paleo too with the coconut milk base and minimal honey. My next adventure is going to be chocolate peanut butter ice cream! More on that this weekend.

In other news, Mike approached me today about competing in the USA Olympic Weightlifting Open that's being held in Minnesota in October. Heck, why not? I'm not all that great at the snatch, and my clean and jerk could definitely use some work, but it's always fun to have a goal to work towards. So we're putting a little training team together to send some people to that competition - stay tuned!