The best ice cream in the world

We are finally done interviewing job candidates and initial offers have been made. We are hiring multiple positions, and the two that are permanent and have the potential to be permanent were offered to my two favorite job candidates, neither of whom I went to dinner with. Now I have my fingers crossed that the offers are accepted, and we won't have to do any more interviewing!

On Thursday morning we woke up to a cold house. Jeff got out of bed about an hour before me, as he often does, and noticed that it felt very cold, so he went to the basement and huddled up in blankets to play video games. It wasn't until he came to get me out of bed that he thought to check the thermostat – it was 12°C/54°F, which is more than just a little bit colder than we normally keep the house. It became clear that our furnace was not working at all, and it was about -20°C/-4°F outside so something had to be done immediately. We brought our only space heater from the basement into the bedroom, and called the phone number on a note that was taped to the furnace. Fortunately, within half an hour someone was at our house. He said that fixing the furnace would probably be a five or six hour job, and they had a full schedule that day, so he wasn't sure they'd get to it. We left the back door unlocked for him, went to work, and tried not to think about it for the rest of the day.

It was a long and busy day at work, and we didn't get home until after 6 PM. We had gotten no phone call from the furnace guy, so were fully expecting to walk into a cold house. We were thinking about the possible need to either buy more space heaters and close off rooms or spend the night in a hotel. We were suddenly worried about our pipes freezing. However, I opened the door and felt a wave of heat. They had come and fixed the furnace, just figuring everything out by themselves (including where the space heater was, as they needed it in order to work) without bothering us. We called the furnace guy immediately, and he said that he was able to move other service jobs until after the weekend, knowing that our situation was urgent. Amazingly, a large portion of what they had to do fell under warranty, so the hours of work and complicated parts hardly cost us anything (comparatively speaking). It is a very good feeling when something goes wrong and then instead of being a huge difficult problem it winds up being smooth and easy, and people are competent and nice.

Now for something completely different: ice cream. I have mentioned before that I believe the best ice cream in the world comes from Prince Puckler's in Eugene. My favorite flavor is called Muddy River, and consists of malted milk chocolate ice cream with a ribbon of caramel running through it. Since there is nothing like it anywhere near here, I have been working at trying to replicate it on my own. I am pleased to say that this weekend I think I succeeded. At the very least I made something that I like a lot, and even if it is not quite the same as Muddy River from Prince Puckler's, it shares enough of the major qualities to satisfy me. I have borrowed heavily from other recipes, but the specifics of the ingredients and the process are important and reflect my own testing. So, here is the recipe:

Possibly the best ice cream I have ever made

3 cups half and half (10% milk fat)
1/4 cup sugar
4 egg yolks
1 cup malt powder (Horlick's, which is available at British grocery stores, online, and I am told at Mexican grocery stores though we don't have those here)
6 ounces milk chocolate (I used Ghirardelli 30%)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 can dulce de leche caramel (I made my own using this method)

1. In a medium bowl, stir the malt powder into 1 1/2 cups of cold half-and-half. It is important that it is cold, because the malt powder does not mix in properly if it is hot despite what it says on the package. Set aside.
2. In a large bowl, break up the milk chocolate. Set a fine wire mesh strainer over the bowl, and set aside.
3. In a heavy bottomed medium saucepan, whisk together the remaining 1 1/2 cup half-and-half, the sugar, and the egg yolks. Set over medium-high heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture reaches a temperature of 160°F (the temperature at which salmonella is killed). Remove from the heat immediately, being careful not to over cook.
4. Pour the cooked egg mixture through the strainer into the bowl with the chocolate, and let the chocolate melt for about a minute, then whisk together the chocolate and egg mixture. Add the malt mixture by pouring it through the strainer (to catch any lumps of malt powder that did not dissolve), and whisk together. Stir in the vanilla.
5. Refrigerate this mixture overnight (less time is probably fine, but I don't know how long it takes to get fully chilled). Freeze in an ice cream maker according to directions (I use this one, or at least the version of it that they made eight years ago).
6. Transfer this newly frozen ice cream into an airtight freezer-safe container, in the following manner: layer about one fourth of the ice cream into the container, and then drizzle about one third of the caramel on top. Repeat two more times, then finish with a layer of ice cream. Cover tightly, and freeze in the freezer for at least four hours before serving.

Let me know if you decide to try it, and whether you run into any problems. Meanwhile, there is still some left (though not much) and I will be having some tonight!

I should be better at saying no

I went to another job candidate dinner despite saying I wouldn't. I ended up being sick afterwards again, and missing the job talk because of it. I should follow the rules I make for myself because I usually know what I'm talking about! Still not feeling great today, so I will have to post more next time :)

Reviewing Applications

It is application season in our department – we're hiring  for three new positions (one tenure-track and two term positions), and graduate students and honours students have submitted their applications as well. So at every level, we have the extra job of evaluating people to decide whether we want to work with them. It is an exhausting process.

I am on the graduate application committee for our clinical program, and this weekend reviewed forty-five applications, rating them as excellent, good, acceptable, or unacceptable. Tomorrow I meet with the committee and we compare our ratings and decide which students are high priority for an offer, taking into consideration which faculty members are high priority to get students. I am happy to have taken graduate students each of the last two years, and have decided that it's best not to take a student this year. After reviewing all of the graduate applications, there was no one who applied to work with me who stood out as excellent, so I think this is a good decision. It also makes being on the selection committee a bit easier, because I don't have to worry about the politics of advocating for myself.

I am only minimally involved with the faculty search, attending meet and greet sessions and job talks. I went to one awkward dinner (awkward not because of the job candidate but because of a particular faculty member in attendance) at a steakhouse (looking back, I don't know why I agreed to this at all, since there was obviously nothing on the menu that a vegetarian could eat), but after that decided not to say yes to any further requests of this nature. We have had three of four job candidates come through, and the last one is next week. If we are unable to hire for all of the positions from this pool, there will be more interviews, and more awkward dinners to say no to.

The applications for the honours program are technically not due until tomorrow, though we have already been given a spreadsheet with information about the applications that have been handed in so far.

Once again, I am happy to be on the other side of all of these applications, but evaluating people based on limited information to decide whether you want to work with them for a period lasting from one year to potentially thirty years (in the case of the faculty hires) is not so easy. It seems easy to make a mistake, and although the anxiety is much lower being on the side of things, there is a sense that these decisions are something of a heavy weight. I will be glad when this is all over!

Ice

We have been having an unusually warm January, and that has meant that for the past couple of days temperatures have risen above freezing. It would seem that this would be a cause for celebration, except that it dips back below freezing at different points during the day, and melting + refreezing = slippery slippery ice.

This weekend has been all about ice for a couple of reasons. First, I had the opportunity to try out an adaptive form of cross-country skiing called kneeling sit ski. I first learned about this through a chain of clicked links after searching for something related to learning to ski when you have balance problems. As it turns out, Saskatchewan is the place to be if you want to use adaptive technology for cross-country skiing. I was put in touch with a woman named Colette Bourgonje, who has been a long time member of the Canadian Paralympic ski team. After a number of conversations and email exchanges, we set up a time for me to try a brand-new type of sit ski called a kneeler. It is basically a sort of chair that you kneel in, that hooks into the bindings of regular cross-country skis, and you propel yourself with your arms. She came down from Saskatoon with her sit ski set up and the kneeler, and on Saturday morning we skied at a park that is about a half-mile from our house.

It was super fun, and a really cool thing to be able to try. And, it turned out that the weather was excellent because ice makes everything a little slipperier and makes gliding on a sit ski set up that much easier. It sounds like I will be able to have access to this equipment by joining the Regina Ski Club and a wheelchair sports club. I'm pretty excited, as I think this will be an awesome way to get outdoors in the winter.

When we got back to the car after about forty-five minutes of skiing, everything was extremely icy as there had been some freezing rain. As Jeff started driving he said he hoped I didn't mind if our top speed on the way home was 15 km/h. Of course I said I was glad he was being cautious. So as we were inching along, we had to make a slight right onto a neighborhood street, and Jeff lost control of the car. We were headed ever so slowly toward a parked truck, and no matter what he did Jeff could not change our trajectory. So we slid at about 10 km/h into this parked truck, and the passenger side headlight and body above the front wheel well got completely smashed in. No one was injured, but the car is not drivable, and now we have to wait for an insurance adjuster to look at the damage and tell us where we are supposed to go to get it fixed. In the meantime, after everything melted later in the afternoon we got a rental car.

There is still so much ice around that I can't really go places by myself because I need someone there to give me a hand to get across patches of ice. The weather is supposed to be this way for the next several days. It sounds a little bit crazy, but we are all waiting for the temperatures to get back to the usual -20°C, so things aren't so slippery and I can get back to normal!

Happy Belated New Year!

I can't believe that my last blog post was three weeks ago. That time has gone by extremely quickly, and yet lots has happened. I went to Eugene and back, the semester started, and everything around here is in full swing. However, first things first:

Jeff had a follow-up doctor's appointment on Thursday, and the news was good. The doctor cleared him to do any activity he feels like, including running and shoveling snow. Jeff says he feels completely back to normal, and yesterday he went for a short run. He had absolutely no problems with breathing, but having been away from running for a while, his knee started acting up a bit. He will need to ease back into activity slowly, but more because the rest of his body will need to adjust and not so much because his lungs need to adjust. It is a huge relief to hear that he is out of danger, and although he will need to continue the blood thinners for another five months and then get some tests done to see if a cause for this event can be determined, it feels good to have things pretty well back to normal.

So, my trip to Oregon was great – I got to visit with friends and family, got a break from the cold weather, and generally had a good time. The only exception to this was the part about getting there and back. I ended up spending hours and hours in the Denver airport on the way there, not getting in until something like 2 AM. Then on the way back my flight from Denver to Regina ended up getting canceled, and I spent the night in a hotel that was neither close to the airport nor to the city of Denver, with none of my luggage (no toothbrush, no hairbrush, no clean underwear, and no pajamas). I ended up buying an XXL T-shirt from the hotel gift shop to sleep in, and washing my clothes in the sink so they wouldn't be unwearable the next day. I got home about eighteen hours later than I was supposed to, and apparently I was lucky because there were eighteen people on standby for that flight (who presumably were also supposed to be on my canceled flight) and only one got on (I was fortunate to get a confirmed seat). I think we have dealt with delays or flight cancellations on every single flight we have taken in the past year. I could complain about the specific airline, but when I think about it it hasn't mattered much which airline we are flying. They are all terrible.

The semester has started with a bang, and in some ways it feels like I have been teaching my classes forever, and yet it also seems like they've barely started. I am teaching two undergraduate classes, and both are full to their maximum of fifty students. I was asked if I would be willing to increase the enrollment limits, but the way I have the classes set up is for this maximum, and it would take some reworking (so that my TA and I are not overwhelmed with grading of assignments, exams, and final papers) so I said no. I am not sure what forces have led my classes to be completely full (with students on the wait list) when this has never happened before (and I have been teaching these classes since I started here), so I am not ready to change the format of either class for what might end up being a passing bump in enrollment.

We have been quite busy jumping into this semester, though when I look at my to do list, it seems quite a bit smaller than it was last semester. I am hoping that things settle down soon, and I think they will!