A delightful Fourth

We had a lovely fourth of July! Daddy picked up some kabobs and hot dogs from a nearby meat store and we had them with a huge salad (mostly from Farmers' Market, but a few choice tidbits leftover from out CSA box). Of course, it wouldn't have been the Fourth of July without handcranked ice cream. I used milk, cream, and eggs from the usual suspects at Farmers' Market, which made it even better than usual. Also, a fortuitous miscalculation was made. I hadn't realized that we were almost out of vanilla flavoring, so I decided on the fly to use half vanilla and half almond extract. Let me tell you: This WILL be repeated in the future. I really like the taste (and smell) of almond flavoring to begin with, but when it is combined with strawberries...oh boy. All I can say is that I'm pretty sure it should be illegal if it isn't already. We topped our ice cream with strawberries macerated in sugar and a little balsamic vinegar. Everyone got a turn with the crank. Bean cranked:

Bug cranked:

Beeb would have cranked if his arms weren't so short, so he just held it down while Daddy cranked:

Of course, I cranked, but didn't manage to take any pictures of myself! After cranking was the traditional licking of the dasher:



That's my girl! There are a whole bunch of similar photos of a wee (and not so wee) KittyMommy covered with dasher ice cream.

After good food and good ice cream, we went down to Stoughton to walk around the fairgrounds and watch fireworks. I love me some fireworks, but with the wet weather we have been having, we were a bug buffet, in spite of generous layers of repellent. Or for Stoughton, maybe it would be more appropriate to say a bug smörgåsbord. Unfortunately, poor little Beeb seems to have gotten the worst of it. Those darn buggies just couldn't resist such sweet, succulent, tender little fella, and were clearly willing to put up with repellent stink for the treat.

The biggest fireworks though came from west of us. My baby brother and his wife had a little firecracker baby! Our brand new niece was born in the wee hours of the morning on the Fourth. Baby, mom, and dad are all doing great and will be heading home some time today. My parents went down to visit yesterday and sent along a few pictures by email when they got home and she is even cuter than I imagined! I'm getting worried that my parents are going to start getting cocky with all these cute grandbabies running around!