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Tangerine LifeSavers, Unwrapped

As we head deeper into the holiday season, (This weekend is the annual caroling party.) I thought it was a good time to trot out some more Christmas-y foods to keep my eyes on the prize as things start to get a bit crazier. And they will get crazier. After several years of freelancing, this is the first holiday season in a while that I’ve had a full-time job, so time will be a bit shorter.

But the pleasures can still be huge. Take ice cream, for example.

After last week’s stocking stuffer, candy cane ice cream, I didn’t have to look too far to find my next source of holiday inspiration. When I was a boy (in other words,  until I got married), it was always a treat to reach into the bottom of my stocking and find two or three tangerines. That was back when the availability of fruit was determined by the season and you could only get great citrus in the winter.

Since tangerines, or clementines, have so many seeds, I tend to eat a lot more navel oranges, but tangerine has long been my favorite citrus flavor.

I remember when LifeSavers first came out with a tangerine flavor. It was incredible. After eating cherry, orange and grape* flavored candy that never tasted like any fruit I’d ever had, tangerine LifeSavers were a revelation. It was just like the fruit except that the flavor lasted longer and there were no seeds.

Since then there have been a lot of advances in candy flavoring and Jellybelly jelly beans are available  in every flavor you can imagine, but that first taste of tangerine candy still sticks in my mind.

The challenge was in recreating that flavor myself. It’s a lot easier than making candy but I wasn’t sure my love of tangerines was universal.

I looked at several stores to find tangerine juice and found a mixed bag of knock-offs, but not the real thing. The closest thing I found was an orange/tangerine hybrid, the worst was a tangerine juice blend. I won’t mention the brands here but only because don’t remember them. Then I went to Trader Joe’s, sure that they would have the right thing for me, especially given the season. They did not.

In the end, I just bought two 3 pound bags of tangerines, brought them home and squeezed them. The seeds were a bit of a problem as they were small enough to slip through the juice filter, but they didn’t make it through my china cap (a fancier filter).  So I got the fresh tangerine juice I needed and my family got a delicious new flavor or sorbet. A win for everyone.

I’d better be careful, though. As expectations for my frozen desserts go up, I’ll be forced to make something really good for Christmas.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

*When I tasted some Concord grapes, I finally discovered where the “grape” flavor of candy came from, but that was not something we ever had out west.

Tangerine Sorbet

(about 1 quarts)
1 ½ cups water
1 ½ cups sugar
2 cups tangerine juice

1. Combine the water and sugar in a sauce pan, heat over medium heat until the sugar dissolves, then cool. This is your simple syrup.
2. Combine the simple syrup with the tangerine (I couldn’t find any juice in the store so I squeezed a couple of bags worth).
3. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream freezer for about 35 minutes.
4. Put the now frozen sorbet into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Tangerine Lifesavers, Unwrapped,” stolen from the Internet by the author. 

There is still something exotic about tangerines. They’re little bite-sized fruits that only come around once a year. The names clementines, satsumas and mandarins all seem so foreign compared to standbys like apple, orange, pear and grape. They also have a highly volatile oil in their skin which I enjoyed during my ‘pyro’ phase. What tangerine dreams do you still have? Let me know in a comment.

Candy Cane Closeup

Since I’ve been married, the Christmas season has started right after Thanksgiving. Immediately after, in fact. Our holiday party is on the first Saturday in December, which means we shift into holiday overdrive the morning after turkey day.

We get the tree (still a fresh tree, for good or ill) and get out all the Christmas trappings—ornaments, decorations, glassware, etc—on that last Friday in November. Then we spend the rest of the weekend trying to put up the outdoor lights and evergreen garlands. By Sunday night, maybe, the boughs of the tree have dropped enough for my wife to start decorating the tree. (This year the whole tree dropped, but that’s another story.)

I have long since given up doing anything more than helping with the star because I “don’t know how to do it.” Before the kids came along that meant having a glass or two of wine and enjoying tree trimming as a spectator sport. Now the kids help hang ornaments and I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do.

Once the tree is up, however, party anxiety begins.

We’ve been doing the party for a while now, so you’d think it would run like clockwork, but during the holidays, nothing seems to work like that. At least the menu has been established for a few years and consists of vegetarian chili, caesar salad and cornbread for dinner. Festive beverages include a red and white sangria recipe that we borrowed from our friend the chef (Hi Monique). And as an hors d’oeuvres, I cure a side of salmon (two this year) into gravlax and serve it on bagel chips with cream cheese, onions, capers.

It all started as a holiday meal I used to host before I got married. It was a chance for me to try out new recipes, roast a leg of lamb and enjoy a few bottles of wine with friends. Then when my wife entered the scene, we suddenly had a lot more people to invite to the dinner party and it morphed into a much bigger deal, complete with extra non-sugar-plum-related anxiety.

One year, when it was still just dinner, I  became so frustrated trying to make my own pasta that I ran out of my building and threw a huge wad of pasta dough over the roof tops of the neighboring apartments. (That is, I hope the dough made it over the roof tops.) Another year, my wife feigned illness during the party prep so I would take over the vacuuming for her. (“It’s your stupid party!”)

Yet for all the nervous energy and manic preparations, the party has never been anything less than a terrific success.

(Sigh.)

Well, folks, the party is this weekend, which means the Christmas season has officially begun.

And what better way to kick off the season than with some candy cane ice cream? Fresh out of the ice cream maker it was wonderful. Everyone in the family thought so.

We’ll all think the party was wonderful too, but not until Sunday. For now, it’s back to work.

Candy Cane Ice Cream
(about 1½ quarts)
1 ½ cup milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cup cream
¼ t mint extract

½ cup crushed candy canes (4 medium-sized canes)

1. Heat milk to 180-190ºF with sugar, flour and salt, stirring until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium heat, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
2. As the custard is cooling, put the candy canes in a bowl or on a butcher’s block and crusth them into small piece.
3. When the custard has cooled, add the cream, mint extract and candy canes and freeze the mixture in an ice cream freezer for about 35 minutes.
4. Put the now frozen ice cream into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Candy Cane Closeup,” composed by the author. 

Can you think of any additional Christmas flavors of ice cream/sorbet/sherbet? Candy cane was the first thing that came to mind and now I’ve already run out of ideas. Tangerine sorbet could be fun. What else? Let me know in a comment.

Revising the Cranberry

With the coming and going of Thanksgiving, I thought I’d come clean about a staple of the holiday feast I have issues with.

Cranberry sauce.

I don’t like it. Never have. Never will.

Yet there it’s been in a place of honor on every traditional Thanksgiving table I’ve ever been at.

Editor’s note:  If you’re noticing a pattern here, you’re not alone. It seems to be a formula the author slips into from time to time—the ingredient/food/recipe rescue project. It involves something he doesn’t have a particular fondness for, yet because of a broader custom or tradition, he cannot simply ignore it.

We apologize if this seems predictable or tiresome, but please know that he’s not alone in doing this. It happens in the culinary world, the scientific world, even the literaray world. In fact, his father’s namesake, John Milton once fell victim to an attempt by T.S. Eliot to take Paradise Lost off the list of literary greats. Fortunately, even Eliot couldn’t justify it. The language was apparently too soaring and the poetry too good. (You’re in the clear, Dad.)

Right, well, back to ice cream.

Not that I’ve got anything against tradition. I’d just prefer it if the ones that don’t work receive periodic updates that make them fresh and new again. It was with this in mind that I brought Pumpkin Pie ice cream and Pecan Pie ice cream to this year’s gathering. (Editor’s note again: The author likes these pies as much as anyone. Therefore these ice creams are not so much a substitute as an homage. No offense intended, pie-lovers) And I’ve seen many such reimaginings over the years. For instance, brining the turkey prior to roasting has quickly become standard operating procedure. We also introduced a great roasted root vegetable recipe to the west coast feast but haven’t yet had the chance to insinuate it into the Midwestern proceedings.

We even started bringing fresh oysters a few years back in response to the oyster stuffing that has long been a standby at the Illinois table. That has been pretty well-received as well, particularly the red wine vinegar, shallots and black pepper condiment known as mignonette sauce.

The point I’m getting to is that traditions need to be followed because they continue to have meaning for the participants, not because, well, they’re traditions. Too much of the world works that way—because it’s always worked that way. Why not make things interesting again, delicious even?

For myself, I decided to put a little more flavor into the whole cranberry thing. A little simple sugar, some grapefruit juice and you have a tasty Thanksgiving palate cleanser. And after all those traditional main course dishes, we all need that.

Think of it as rebooting your tastebuds. It’s something everyone needs from time to time, and not just in the tastebud department. I know I do.

I just went through a major new beginning and I’m very thankful for all the changes that have come my way.

*FYI this is from a work by John Milton. Now you know.

Cranberry Sorbet

(about 1 quart)
1 ½ cups water
1 ½ cups sugar
2 ½ cups cranberry juice
¼ grapefruit juice

1. Combine the water and sugar in a sauce pan, heat over medium heat until the sugar dissolves, then cool. This is your simple syrup.
2. Combine the simple syrup with the cranberry juice (an off the shelf cranberry juice cocktail will do nicely) and grapefruit juice.
3. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream freezer for about 35 minutes.
4. Put the now frozen sorbet into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Cranberry Mosaic,” composed by the author. 

What traditions would you like to see changed? Better yet, which ones have you changed or established on your own? Let me know in a comment. It doesn’t have to be food related.

A Slice of Heaven

Cheesecake has always been a pretty big thing in my life.

When I was growing up, there was a picture of a slice of cheesecake floating in the clouds taped inside our pantry door. That was also as close to a discussion of heaven as ever took place in our house, which may have been the reason I went on to describe a particular cheesecake as the 7^th proof for the existence of God. (It’s the Apple Bavarian Torte and it may make you a believer too. See the recipe here.)

Cheesecake even played a part in my wife’s and my courtship, as she still tells anyone who will listen. I gave her a piece of home-made white chocolate cheesecake on the night of our 10-year-college reunion and that pretty much sealed the deal.

These rich desserts have evolved a lot since my younger days. They made their way into my life as refrigerator desserts that didn’t even require cooking. The basic graham cracker crust, a simple cream cheese filling and a sweetened sour cream topping was all it took. Fresh strawberries went on top. Since then cheesecakes have been variously marbled, water-bathed and topped with a strained glace of raspberries.

Yet despite the ubiquity of flavored cream cheese ‘schmears,’ and the rise of ‘factories’ devoted entirely to cheesecake manufacturing, it’s still the cheesecake’s simplicity that is its greatest appeal. The richness of the cheese flavored with vanilla and softened up with sugar and eggs is classic.

My kids love it, my wife loves it and I love it, because… what’s not to love?

Baskin Robbins sought to capitalize on cheesecake’s mass appeal back in my youth by introducing a Strawberry Cheesecake flavor of ice cream. It was pretty good too. So I thought I could give it a try too. My biggest problem was that I hadn’t had any luck putting pieces of fruit into my ice cream without having them turn into little fruit-flavored chunks of ice. That and I didn’t have any strawberries.

So, I made blueberry cheesecake ice cream instead.

I also did a little research on the web and learned the technique of blending fruit with sugar to draw out a lot of the liquid and keep the chunks from solidifying.

It was worth a try.

A half-pound of cream cheese, a half-cup of blueberries, some sugar and custard later, I got what I wanted. And the fruit freezing method worked!

The kids liked it a lot, as did the wife. I, on the other hand, wasn’t quite transported back to the days of ‘31 Flavors.’ I since learned that Baskin Robbins uses little chunks of cheesecake in their ice cream.

In other words, they cheat.

(sigh)

That’s no way to get into cheesecake heaven.

Blueberry Cheesecake Ice Cream

(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
½ cup blueberries
¼ cup sugar
8 oz. cream cheese

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
2. Add the blueberries to the sugar and set aside for 45 minutes to an hour, then strain out the excess juice. (Don’t throw it away, though. It tastes really good and might be great fro pancakes.)
3. When the berries are ready, add the cream cheese to the custard and puree it with an immersion blender so the cheese is thoroughly blended.
4. Then stir the blueberries into the custard and freeze in an ice cream freezer for about 35 minutes.
5. Put the now frozen ice cream into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Blueberries & Cream Cheese,” photographed by the author. 

Now that I know how to put chunks of fruit in my ice cream, there are a few earlier recipes you (and I, if there was any time) may want to revisit. First and foremost is the Strawberry Basil, but the Peach and Burgundy Cherry are worth a second look too. Let me know how it works for you in a comment.

Pecans

As an adult, I’ve come to associate pecan pie with Thanksgiving.

When I was younger, it was only pumpkin.

I don’t know when this gatecrasher made its way into my four-day weekend. But I’m not fighting it either. Pecan pie is a good thing. So much so that when the current generation of teen servers come around after the big meal asking whether we want pumpkin or pecan pie, I have a hard time deciding.

Actually, I don’t decide. I have both, with whipped cream.

My own kids are now old enough to take on server responsibilities at family get-togethers. They’re not quite up to tending bar or cooking or bringing dates (thank God), but they’re more than able to clear the table and take dessert orders so we old-timers can continue prattling on about this and that. An added perk for the teens is that our “elderly” conversations give them ample opportunity to practice their eye rolling and shake their heads in disbelief.

As long as I don’t have to get up, it doesn’t bother me.

We all have a hand in the feast, from mashed potatoes and gravy to stuffing, beans, salads, etc. and have earned the sit-down. I am the go-to guy for mashed spuds and various heavy lifting, but have yet to insinuate myself into the dessert course. This year that may change.

How else am I going to get rid of my freezer full of ice cream?

Eventually, I’d like to get my girls interested in cooking as well, perhaps by making the end result something sweet, like a nice pecan or pumpkin pie. But they’re not ready yet and I’m getting tired of waiting.

My mom made great pumpkin pies, but as I said before, I don’t remember anything else. She did make fabulous cookies called pecan tarts. She now calls them pecan tassies, but that’s way to highfalutin for me. Either way that’s the taste I will be aiming for when I bring my daughters in to do some baking.

As to the methods, they will all be old school. That’s how I learned.

My mom made everything from scratch—cakes, pies, cookies, everything. I saw commercials for cake mixes on TV, but never saw one of those boxes in my mom’s kitchen. I confess I haven’t always walked the straight and narrow in that regard. I blame Ghirardelli’s brownie mix and Costco for these lapses, but I want my girls to learn to bake the right way.

In the meantime, I went ahead and threw my ideas about pecan pie into the ice cream freezer this week and it turned out spectacularly well. The toasted pecans, butter, brown sugar, and maple syrup blended together to make another fabulous ice cream. Everyone in the house loved it.

Just when I’m going to kindle my daughters’ interest in the culinary or pastry arts is not clear.

(Sigh.)

At least they’re getting interested enough to eat.

Pecan Pie Ice Cream

(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
1 cup pecans
¼ cup butter
½ cup brown sugar
½ t vanilla
1 t maple syrup

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
2. As the custard cools, spread the pecans on a cookie sheet and toast them in a 350° F oven for 8-10 minutes then set them aside to cool.
3. Next, melt the butter and brown sugar together in a sauce pan and stir in the vanilla and maple syrup.
4. Chop the toasted pecans into small pieces and, when the custard has cooled, fold them into the mixture along with the butter and brown sugar blend, add everything to an ice cream freezer and freeze for 30 to 35 minutes.
5. Put the frozen ice cream into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Pecans,” photographed by the author. 

Because I’m so cheap and pine nuts were going for around $16.00/lb, I have been off of toasted nuts of late, but I am now officially back. The toasted pecans gave this week’s ice cream the perfect smoky taste to balance out the brown sugar sweetness. So I’m willing to get toasted nuts another chance. That and the price of pine nuts has been coming down thanks I’m sure to my low-key boycott. 

Chicklets

I should have seen it coming.

I should have known that my gum-hating wife would hate any ice cream that had chewing gum in it.

For me, as ever, it wasn’t about the gum so much as nostalgia for pre-teen flavors. In this case it was an old Baskin-Robbins ice cream that brought together two great childish treats: ice cream and chewing gum.

That was before Ben and Jerry’s and Cold Stone Creamery and all the other big business frozen desserts came along. The MBA mindset was still in its earliest stages. CEO compensation had not even gotten to the mountaintops, let alone the stratospheric levels of today. Ice cream was still a local thing. Baskin-Robbins was just a small chain of ice cream parlors known as “31 Flavors.”  In those days, 31 flavors was what passed for extravagant.

And for a kid, extravagant was (is) good.

Pre-adolescent fantasies always centered around having more stuff. I remember drawing an idealized boat in 7^th grade, a boat I expected to own one day. It had lots of guns and James Bond devices, of course. I was in middle school after all. It also had a TV room with a whole wall covered with screens, one for each channel. This was before cable so there wasn’t all that much programming available, but that wasn’t the point.

For a pre-teen, it was always about having more. That was what Halloween was really about—accumulation. Candy was the only currency we really understood and so on the night of nights we would empty the candy from our pillow cases (bags were too unreliable) and start counting our winnings. It was all there: candy bars, tootsie rolls, tootsie pops, sweet-tarts, candy corn, hard candy, taffy and, yes, bubble gum.

Double Bubble was what people typically handed out, which was disappointing, because the good stuff was Bazooka.

Each piece of gum had a little comic strip inside the Bazooka wrapper but the comics, although very droll in an early middle school kind of way, were not the main draw. What was great about Bazooka was the taste.

And somehow that’s what I captured with this ice cream.

During the mixing process, I added some grenadine to turn the custard pink before I froze it, but somehow that addition turned the ice cream into my favorite chewing gum. I also added some chicklet-style gum to round out the recipe because that’s what Baskin-Robbins had done, but that didn’t add much one way or the other.

Frozen gum doesn’t chew very well right off the bat. The ice cream was good, though, very good. My wife may dispute that, but she’s entitled to her opinion, wrong though it may be.

Pink Bubble Gum Ice Cream

(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
2 T grenadine
½ cup chicklet style chewing gum

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
2. Add the cream to the custard, stir in grenadine and chewing gum then add everything to the ice cream freezer and freeze for 30 to 35 minutes.
3. Put the frozen ice cream into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Chicklets,” photographed by the author. 

I’m not a gum connoisseur by any means, but I have my favorites. I particularly liked Adams sour gum growing up as well as Freshen Up. I didn’t care much for Black Jack licorice flavored gum. There was also hot dog bubble gum, blow pops and later on bubble yum which was the closest thing to Bazooka although it felt a lot more rubbery. What was your favorite gum.  Let me know in a comment.

Happy Halloween!

I’m reading a new memoir called “The Reading Promise.”

The book recounts an agreement made between a father and his nine-year-old daughter to read together every night for 100 nights. I’m not very far into the book yet, so I don’t know how easy it was for them to reach that first goal but , after they got there, they didn’t want to stop.

So they kept it up, every night, until the girl finally went away to college—more than nine years later.

I decided to try it with my girls. I told them about this father and daughter and asked if they’d like to do the same thing. We all enjoy reading together, but I said that didn’t have to be what our streaks were about.

Instead, I asked each of them what they’d like to try to do together for 100 days. The other father and daughter had committed to at least 10 minutes each day, so that seemed like a good place to start.

Right away, my eldest asked if we could play catch, as I had secretly hoped she would. My youngest had a harder time deciding. At first we decided to walk together, but when her mother heard about it, she wanted in, and that wasn’t going to work. Sure enough, by the next morning, my daughter had let go of the walk thing and settled on drawing together.

Drawing? I asked at first, but then I quickly agreed.

The biggest part of this “promise” isn’t the thing itself. It’s the private time between father and child—dedicated time, unshared with anyone else—no sisters, no mothers, just us.

We’ve been at it for three days now (97 to go) and already the oldest sister is burning a hole in my hand with the power of her throwing. Her catching is getting a lot better too. Just imagine what it’ll be like in February.

The youngest and I did some free form drawing the first night. We each sketched different cartoon characters of our own creation. (I seem to have settled on elephants.) The next night we did some still lifes. She drew a slice of lime in vibrant and true colors. I drew soup cans full of pencils and my slowly emptying bottle of beer. Tonight we brought back our cartoon characters and made our own comic strips.

Their mom was away in the city tonight, so the eldest felt a little left out by the drawing. Yet she understood that she had already had her time and respected her sister’s turn. She would up doing her own drawing anyway, almost secretly watching us from the kitchen counter. She’s a pretty good drawer too.

Tomorrow night’s going to be a lot busier. So we’ve already arranged to get up early to keep our streaks alive. We’re all pretty excited. They’re fun promises to keep.

Another promise I’ve made is to let my girls pick what ice cream I make every four weeks. My youngest asked for Pumpkin weeks ago, but I told her I wanted to hold off on that until Halloween.

This week I got to keep my promise.

Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream
(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
1 cup cooked pumpkin
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
2. As the custard cools, cut a small pumpkin in half, scoop out the guts, then place each half face down on a cookie sheet and bake in a 350°F oven for about 1 hour. After the hour is up, let the pumpkin cool slightly then scoop out pumpkin flesh (basically everything but the skin and stem) and place in a bowl to cool.
3. Add the cream to the custard, stir in 1 cup of  the cooked pumpkin and puree the whole mixture until smooth using an immersion blender.
4. Stir the pumpkin pie spice into the ice cream mixture then add everything to the ice cream freezer and freeze for 30 to 35 minutes.
5. Put the frozen ice cream into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Jack O’Lanterns, 2009,” carved and photographed by the author. 

If you’re like me, you think pumpkins are about Jack O’Lanterns on Halloween and pie on Thanksgiving. I made pumpkin soup once and some nice custards too, but I haven’t gone much further than that. I do like the carving, though, as you can see in this week’s picture. This year the girls are going to dress as a water sprite and “recycle girl,” whoever that is. We’re nowhere near ready, but we’ll get there. We always do. Let me know what you’re going as this Halloween. Or leave a comment about ice cream. That would be okay too.

Crusts On, Please

To be honest I don’t remember the first food I ever made.

It might have been a batch of Charlie Brown’s brownies from the Peanuts cookbook. That recipe stands out because I made it wrong the first time. I failed to mix the dry ingredients thoroughly enough and wound up with tiny, hardened, white clum

ps in the final product. My family was “nice” enough to label them artificial nuts.

It wasn’t pretty, still everybody ate them.

Perhaps I should have started with something a bit simpler, like Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwiches. That’s the first dish my own kids made all by themselves. It’s easy, has a fruity sweetness and a fair amount of protein too, so it practically qualifies as an entree. (Sure it does.)

What it definitely qualifies for is comfort food. For us Americans, it may be the ultimate comfort food.

Of course, not everyone shares this opinion. An instructor I once had in a table-waiting class thought Mac and Cheese ranked #1.  Jacques was at the tail end of his career as a maitre’d and was passing on the wisdom he had earned through the years. Did I mention he was French? Yes, he was. So his opinion might not really count.

Mac and Cheese is sort of a comfort food in our house. It’s comfortable to make, which the parents like. It’s comfortable to eat, for the kids anyway. But it doesn’t really have the soothing effect these foods need to have. My wife loves a baked potato. I love thick slices of crusty French bread, with or without butter. My dad’s comfort food is probably the ham with port and raisins my vegetarian mom still makes on occasion. (That’s love for you.) My mom’s favorites are confections from her Canadian childhood like maple candy, marzipan, or Mackintosh toffee (see my toffee ice cream here). The point is that comfort foods need to transport you to a warm safe place, a place that may not even exist anymore. That and it shouldn’t come out of a box.

If it comes out of a jar that’s just fine.

So PB & J definitely wins the comfort food battle, which is fortunate because I didn’t think anybody was going to want to hear about Mac and Cheese Ice Cream.

PB & J Ice Cream, however, arouses a certain curiosity, so long as you don’t put any bread in it. Not that a PB & J ice cream sandwich wouldn’t be delicious, but when was the last time you had an ice cream sandwich on real bread?

Anyway, the stage was set.

I made the custard then folded in the peanut butter. It tasted great.  Peanut butter ice cream would have been fabulous, but I wasn’t about to stop there. I had visions of a jam ripple against a base of peanut butter, so I drizzled the strawberry into the top of the ice cream freezer near the end of the freezing cycle. Alas it wasn’t near enough. The peanut butter and jam blended together less like it does on a sandwich and more like it does after the sandwich has been chewed a few times in a child’s mouth.

It still tasted great, it just wasn’t all that appetizing. My family was intrigued by the finished product but were quickly put off by the way it tasted. It tasted like a PB & J, but somehow that didn’t make it much of a favorite.

What I would recommend to the rest of you is to wait until the peanut butter ice cream  is frozen before you fold in the jam, and to do it by hand so it make a nice ribbon or red against the brown peanut butter base.

There is comfort in a PB & J. Maybe next time I’ll put it on ice.

PB&J Ice Cream
(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
½ cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup strawberry jam

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.
   
   HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.
3. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
4. Add the cream to the custard, stir in the peanut butter and let the flavor infuse in the refirgerator for a couple of hours (the longer the better).
5. Add the ice cream mix to the ice cream freezer then freeze for 30 to 35 minutes.
6. Just before the ice cream is done freezing, puree the strawberry jam and drizzle it into the frozen ice cream. If you’re lucky, this will give you a nice swirl of jam flavor and color. If you’re not, you’ll get a reddish brown ice cream. Either way it tastes very much like  a PB & J sandwich.
7. Put the frozen ice cream in the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “PB&Clipart,” Gratefully borrowed from MSWord. 

I must confess that I consider potato chips and French onion dip another of my primary comfort foods. And only the dip comes out of a box, the other parts come in a bag and a plastic tub. Am I playing a little loose with my definition here? Perhaps, but this combination takes me back to summer barbecues on the family picnic table. What are your comfort foods? Let me know in a comment.

What the Germans Call 'children's chocolate.' Fine by me.

Our freezer didn’t hold a lot of different flavors of ice cream when I was a kid. I remember a stretch when we went through a lot of Neapolitan—the Italian tricolor of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate—but most of the time it was just vanilla.

Part of the reason for this was that my dad is a borderline diabetic. He doesn’t quite have diabetes, but the fear is that he’s just a few helpings of sugar away from it. As a result dad has had to avoid the vast majority of sugary treats my mom made, and he’s done a great job, for the most part.

Vanilla ice cream was one of the few treats he was allowed to enjoy—in moderation.

Even so we’d often find dad standing at the open freezer door with an ice cream carton in one hand and a spoon in the other. It wasn’t really sneaking. He was just leveling the surface so the ice cream looked smooth and untouched. If the excess found its way into his mouth, well, who could blame him?

You can see why we didn’t have a huge variety of flavors.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t improvise.

Mom blended a terrific banana milkshake. And we kids used the occasional strawberry, caramel and various other kinds of sauce to mix things up a bit too. Our favorite was chocolate. We used Hershey’s syrup (which came in a can back then) to make our own chocolate ice cream. Of course, since we had to let the ice cream melt a lot before we could blend the syrup in completely, the result was more like a cold chocolate soup.

It was also a soup that never, ever, made it to room temperature.

That “soup” was the inspiration for this week’s recipe. Please note the italics on the word inspiration. My chocolate ice cream is a lot better. And you don’t have to take my word for it either. My wife called it one of my best and both kids thought it was great too. The big difference was the richness of the chocolate, although it didn’t hurt that the ice cream was actually frozen.

I started out by making the custard base for the ice cream. Then I folded in the cream, some vanilla and six ounces of milk chocolate chips, good ones, Ghirardelli. Because the chips were all the same size, they melted very uniformly (unlike blocks or roughly chopped pieces). And when I heated up the mixture over a double boiler, the chips blended easily into the custard turning it a rich brown color.

If you don’t have a double boiler, you can do what I did and put the unfrozen custard into a stainless steel bowl and rest it atop a pot with an inch or two of water in it. As you bring the water to a boil, it heats up the chocolate just enough to melt but not burn. Then you cool it down for a bit and freeze.

It’s probably not something my dad should have, but if he wants to sneak a few spoonfuls, I’m not going to tell anyone.

Chocolate Ice Cream
(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
½ tsp vanilla
6 oz. milk chocolate chips

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then fold in cream, vanilla and chocolate chips.
2. Heat over a double boiler, stirring frequently to blend the chocolate into the custard as the chips melt. When the chocolate is completely dissolved into the mixture, place a sheet of plastic wrap directly over the liquid’s surface to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
3. When the custard has cooled, freeze it in an ice cream maker for 30-35 minutes.
4. After the ice cream has been frozen, place it in your freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “100% Chocolate,” photo by the author. 

My dad, like all dads, taught us the classic rhyme ‘I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.’  I have since passed it onto my kids as well. If you also learned this from your dad , let me know in a comment. And if you’ve got any other good jokes your dad loved telling, pass those along too.

Golden, Delicious

Daylight savings time was still a month from being over, and that was fine by me. I needed all the savings I could muster. Things had been a bit busy at the Soup Blog household of late with extra work and afterschool activities stretching each hour as thin as it could get.

I needed a break.

But rather than actually taking a week off from making ice cream, I went with the fallback plan I discovered a few weeks ago—sherbet. Since sherbet is not custard based, it requires little more than blending together juice, milk and flavoring. All you have to do then is freeze the stuff.

The coming of fall also meant that there was a whole host of flavors I could feature in this week’s recipe. At first I thought about cranberry, but that seemed more of a Thanksgiving thing. Pumpkin, which my youngest has been clamoring for for weeks, would work, but I wanted to save it for closer to Halloween. Then I thought about apple.

Harvest time. Bingo.

Of course, there were plenty of apple orchards in Southern California, but they’re all up in the hills and required several hours driving to get to. As a result, apple picking wasn’t really part of my consciousness until we came here. In all honesty, we’ve only gone apple picking once, and the experience was more like an autumnal theme park.  The obligatory corn maze was there, the pumpkin patch, the fall-themed face painting and, of course, apple picking.

One ticket got you a ride on a flatbed truck deep into the apple orchard with the little white paper bag you were allowed to fill with whatever kind of apple you could find. I learned about several new varietals that day including Honey Crisp (my current favorite), Shizuka and Ida Red. After growing up with little more than Macintoshes and Pippins (all but gone now, thank you Granny Smith), this shameless biodiversity felt almost excessive.

Tasty, though.

That week we drank cider,  ate apple crisps, pies and raw apples until we were just about sick of them. We did not, however, have any apple ice cream…

Until now.

(Did I say ice cream? I meant sherbet.)

I folded some apple cider together with milk, sugar and cinnamon and put together a new dessert that was both delicious and refreshing. Look out World Series, there’s a new Fall Classic in town.

Unfortunately, in all the goings on of the week, I neglected to put the ice cream cylinder into the freezer early enough. So when I went to freeze the sherbet, it didn’t get as solid as I would have liked. A few more hours in the freezer fixed that up well enough, but it wasn’t ideal. Especially considering the fact that I was also making batches of coffee ice cream for a church ice cream social/ice-cream-off.

Boo-hoo.

Luckily, I had a few extra batches in the freezer, including last week’s Banana Fig recipe, so things turned out all right. My ice creams won the “best all-around” category and the coffee ice cream earned a “want more of that” prize.

If only I’d had the time to attend.

I’m hoping to get outside at last this weekend and enjoy some of this lovely fall weather. Perhaps even see some of the leaves change for myself. Unfortunately I’m heavily overbooked again.

(sigh)

At least I’ve got a fallback plan.

Apple Cider Sherbet
(about 2 quarts)
2 cups apple cider

⅔ cup sugar
½ t lemon juice

½ t cinnamon

1½ cups milk

1. Blend all ingredients in a bowl and chill.
2. Place bowl in your freezer until ice crystals start to form.
3. Transfer the mixture into your ice cream freezer and freeze. (35 minutes did it for me.)
4. Put the frozen sorbet into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it the chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Leaf Relief,” the spectacular color show going on right now. Photo by author. 

We missed out on most of the fall fruit picking when I was younger. We never had apples, pears or anything like that in our yard. Instead we had Valencia oranges, plums, persimmons, apricots and avocadoes. Speaking of which, my friend Meg just made an Avocado ice cream for the Ice Cream Off. It won “most unusual.” What’s the most unusual ice cream you’ve ever had?