July 4th and Oatmeal Ice Cream Sandwiches

The flash burned a ghostly image onto my retina, and the gray fingers clawed into the edges of my brain. I blinked and blinked again. After a few minutes I could see, but the negative was in there real good. It was a few hours before I stopped seeing the explosion when I closed my eyes.

July 4 in the country's an opportunity to blow stuff up, far away from city lights and scaredy-cat dogs (like ours). An essential ingredient is duct tape, used to bind bigger and bigger rockets together, and wired onto things like styrofoam airplanes and mannequins. The smell of gunpowder was in the air when we ate our oatmeal ice cream sandwiches, melting the lemon ice cream faster than we could eat.

A long weekend with Todd's family is always a good excuse to try new things, and these ice cream sandwiches were something I had in mind after I'd made similar ones with chocolate wafers and passionfruit ice cream. The cookie was based on a David Lebovitz recipe from The Perfect Scoop, and the ice cream came from the same book. The first night everything was a little soft and melty, but by the time I'd frozen everything hard (including the cookies), I was able to make pretty respectable sandwiches that Todd's nephew (and budding chocolatier) Adam was willing to pose eating. I don't even think he pretended to enjoy himself!

Later that weekend, Todd and I took to a bouquet of pheasant, a gift to his family from another. Between a dozen birds, vegetables from his dad's garden, and cherries I'd brought from Yakima, we pulled together a respectable meal. Two different kinds of pheasant (he braised, I rolled, stuffed, and poached), sauces, and a mean bean salad, the only thing left were the reptilian feet.

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