I'm still waiting for local berries to come into season so I dug into the non-seasonal list and pulled out an idea for an ice cream pie. I made a simple crust using crushed Oreos. I followed my normal recipe for crust, 1 1/2 cups of crumbs plus 1/4 cup of melted butter, but skipped the 1/4 cup sugar since the cookies took care of that nicely. The crust worked out well, having a nice flavor and a nice crunch but was not crumbly.

For the filling I made vanilla ice cream, from scratch of course. My sister had gotten me a vanilla bean many moons ago. It seemed to have some flavor left, but I added some vanilla extract just to be safe. The big debate was whether to use egg yolks or not. In the end I opted to leave them out as I thought the bright white would look better. I was satisfied with the results.

The flavor was great. My wife came back around with this pie, having been burned out by the overly chocolate pie last go around. I wanted to make some caramel to drizzle on the plate and on top, but I lazied out. It would have been a nice addition I'm sure. This pie will certainly make a repeat in the future, but I might opt for store ice cream just to save time. It would be fun to try some different flavors.

For this pie I took a journey down chocolate lane. First I opted for a crumb crust. You've undoubtedly had pie with a graham cracker crust before, and that's fine, but as a wonderful chef taught me, crumb crusts can be much more interesting. We happened to have some store-bought cookies on hand (my son came home with them from school inexplicably a few days ago). Chocolate chip cookies to be precise. I ground them in my food processor and mixed them with some melted butter. The butter melted the chocolate and it turned into somewhat gooey mess. I added some graham cracker crumbs to crunch it up and make up a little volume since I was a little short with just the cookies. Baked it for 10 minutes at 375° and left it to cool for a few hours.

For the filling I set my sights on a chocolate mousse. I melted 11 ounces of dark chocolate in a double boiler and let it cool a little. In the mean time I whipped 1.5 cups of heavy cream with a tablespoon of sugar to stiff peaks. Following the standard procedure, I added 1/3 of the cream and beat it into the chocolate. There was a brief instance where the chocolate wanted to seize. I've done that before and it ain't pretty. Luckily it was on the verge and I whipped it fiercely until the chocolate recovered. Following that near miss I folded in the remaining cream and then dished it into the shell. Quickly I whisked it into the fridge to set up over night (couple of hours would have been fine).

The texture of the pie was excellent. The shell was a nice balance of sweet, salty and crumbly. It was maybe a little hard to cut through with a fork, so probably a little more graham cracker and less chocolate chip next time. The flavor of the chocolate was great but oh so rich. My tummy is still churning from eating a full slice. My wife opted for just a sliver and now I think she was on the right track. There was just too much chocolate and not enough cream. I was worried that it would be too light, too airy but those fears were very much unfounded. Probably should have gone for the egg whites as well.

Luckily the kids have stomachs of steel and have promised to polish off the remainder for us. What a surprise!

On a recent trip to Sheri's I was glancing through the pie selection and realized that a) I don't make nearly enough pie and b) all their pies seemed simple enough that I could do them on my own. I could possibly be wrong about the latter, but certainly not about the former. And so begins the Summer Of Pie, wherein I will make many pies all through the summer and document the process here. The rules are that it has to be made of good ingredients and I can't directly follow a recipe. Referencing recipes is OK, but the final creation must be my own.

First up was what I call the Triple Berry Attack. I had some canned blueberries, some frozen blackberries from last fall and I bought a pint of strawberries. Nothing else is really in season yet.

The problem with blackberries is the seeds, so I cooked them down with the blueberry syrup and strained out the pulp. I added lemon juice and sugar to taste, then thickened with tapioca flour. I was worried that it would thicken too much but it was just about right, and without any off flavors.

At the last minute I added the blueberries and diced strawberries, mixed quickly and then dumped into an uncooked pie shell. Baked for about 30 minutes at 400°. The hardest part was waiting until the next day to taste. Had I known how good it would taste, the wait would have been even harder. It was not too sweet, a problem that many sweets have these days. The flavors balanced well and the syrup was just runny enough.

A great start to what is sure to be a great summer.

I started seeing alerts today which said the following:

CableONE is excited to present the new in-browser notification system!

CableONE wants to keep you informed about critical service changes, maintenance events and important account information on a more timely, and therefore useful, basis. In order to do so, CableONE may periodically send you bulletins, like this one, which will automatically appear within your Internet browser. This process does not involve collecting any information about your activity on the Internet and, other than this initial communication to receive your preferences, will be a one-way process. To learn more about this new communication method, as well as how to change or configure your notifications, please click the “Learn More” button located above. Thank you!

I immediately opted out of the system as it frankly creeps me out that they're hijacking my HTTP traffic for whatever purposes they want. I can see the temptation. They're planning weather alerts and amber alerts. They want to alert me to network issues which may be affecting me. I get the benefits. Call me old school, but I want an ISP that just connects me to the Internet and leaves my traffic alone.

I also worry about the precedent. Maybe they start sending me notifications of really good deals from their partners. Maybe they start changing banner ads to be from companies they select. Perhaps they start blocking sites they don't like, or that don't pay them a fee. It's a trend I wouldn't like to see started.

Bottom line, if I wanted somebody mucking with my bits, I'd sign up with Comcast.

I sadly discovered today that nothing on my MythTV was recording, and even live TV was not viewable. "What gives?" I pondered as I poured through the logs.

# tail -f /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log
2010-02-21 22:06:29.747 TVRec(2): Changing from None to WatchingLiveTV
2010-02-21 22:06:29.757 TVRec(2): HW Tuner: 2->2
2010-02-21 22:06:30.768 HDHRChan(xx/1), Error: device not found
2010-02-21 22:06:31.780 HDHRChan(xx/1), Error: device not found
2010-02-21 22:06:31.782 HDHRChan(xx/1): SetChannelByString(6-1), Error: Channel object will not open, can not change channels.
2010-02-21 22:06:31.783 TVRec(2) Error: Failed to set channel to 6-1. Reverting to kState_None

Well, that didn't bode well. I sauntered into the data center (the nook under the stairs without adequate power, lighting or cooling) and found the power light on my HDHomeRun was blinking and worse, so was the light on the power supply. A quick google turned up a known failure with the power adapters on some versions of the HDHomeRun. Guess who was lucky enough to receive one of them?

So this post is just an FYI to anybody else who bought an HDHomeRun. The RMA process is dead simple, just enter your device ID, and they'll send you a replacement for free. But the question is, what are we going to do for 3-7 business days while we wait? Back to live TV again? Oh the humanity!