The first of many sleepovers + ice cream
Our friends Josh & Jill are finally moved and mostly settled into their adorable stone home. There's still plenty of projects to do (as you may notice in a couple photos) but it's completely livable, and a pretty sweet space. Eric and I finally got to take a little trip out to spend the night, and since things aren't completely put together for them, we brought our tent to sleep in. Their property is teeming with black raspberries, so we decided to try our hand at making black raspberry ice cream. We cooked outside over a fire (lamb, stuffed pitas, a beet salad & lentils!) and ate the entire bowl of ice cream afterwards. We enjoyed taking a little walk to watch the sun set over the field near their house, a place I'm sure many more photos will come out of. 
(Props go to Eric on the bubble pictures)
(Props to Josh on these next two) 
We finally have enough room in our freezer to keep the base part of our ice cream maker, so we've been utilizing it as much as possible lately. I mentioned before that I was curious about Jeni's Splendid ice cream, since I've heard such good things about her, so we found this recipe using her base, and changed a couple things. Instead of using cream cheese, we used mascarpone (+ doubled the amount). The ice cream pictured here was black raspberry & lemon zest. We used about a quart of berries- juiced them the best we could, cooked them down a bit, added the zest of one lemon, and added a teaspoon of vanilla to it at the very end. Seriously, this was delicious. Not icy, not too sweet, the lemon & vanilla complimented the berries oh so well, and I don't think I've ever seen such a beautiful color for ice cream. I highly recommend making this, it's way too good.
In the morning the boys left early for work, so the kiddos, Jill and I enjoyed french toast/ham & cheese sandwiches, topped with a poached duck egg, out in the gazebo before I had to head out as well. Visiting them is now pretty much a little mini vacation, just 30 minutes away. Pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.
