Adventures in Home Cooking!
Posted November 11, 2011 at 11:00 am in butter, ice cream, Menlo Park, soup
Today and tomorrow I’m out with Zia shooting another Punjabi wedding – I’m really excited to get to use my 24-70mm/flash combination again at the reception on Saturday, especially after the fantastic shots I got at Gloria and Ryan’s wedding. Also, Claire and Zach’s, but I’m delaying posting that wedding until Adam gets his photos up. 🙂 In the meantime, I thought I’d throw up another personal post.
If you follow my tweets, know my friends, or know me at all, I’m a bit of a foodie. I don’t have the energy to cook all the time, especially since James has a voracious appetite that demands a variety of foods daily. I eat what I consider one serving, he has four! And, of course, I don’t have time to make a 10 course meal daily if I want to get any of my own projects done. STILL, I have been on a major “make it at home” kick lately. It started innocently enough when I was browsing Simplifried and discovered… wait – I just need to put heavy cream into my food processor and go until it turns into butter?! The next thing you know, I got a pint of heavy whipping cream, and it turned into an absolutely beautiful butter. You can see it in the red butter bell in the middle.
This dairy obsession quickly spiraled out of control, and on Monday, my new Cuisinart ice cream maker arrived and I immediately set about making the richest, darkest chocolate ice cream I have ever tasted. And the best part? Because I made it myself, I can make it EVEN DARKER next time! Words can’t describe my joy at this decadence.
Finally, James tends to buy things and forget about them. He’ll often browse through the fridge and find something he’s completely forgotten about, shouting out loud “Tomatoes!” or “I have rutabaga?!” This is all well and good, until I go to retrieve my peppers and find they’ve fused with the head of cabbage he bought 6 months before and refuses to throw out. It’s gross, but more to the point, in early October, James bought a butternut squash and put it on top of the fridge. For the past month and a half, every time we went to the grocery store, he’d suddenly say, “Butternut squash!!!” remembering that he’d forgotten about it back at home. Yesterday, at last!!!, terrified that it had gone bad, he roasted it up, scooped out the flesh and just started eating it raw. I insisted on taking the 3 cups of the leftovers from his post-nibblings and turning it into a curried butternut squash soup. I fried up an onion in my homemade butter, threw in some garlic, chicken broth and a tablespoon of curry powder, added the squash meat, and simmered for thirty minutes. Then, I took all of it, and ran it through the blender, and now James has what he calls, “The Most Addictive Soup Ever.” Not half-bad, if I do say so myself!
Nom nom! I can only hope this leads to more delicious, completely homemade adventures for Thanksgiving!
Please share the dark chocolate ice cream recipe!!
1) Get an ice cream maker.
Ingredients:
2 cups of heavy cream
4 large heaping tablespoons of baking cocoa powder
About 1 cup and just under 1/4th cup of chocolate chips, dark chocolate – I used 62%, but I feel the recipe can withstand up to the 80% varieties.
1 cup of whole milk
5 egg yolks
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract
In a medium pot, heat up 1 cup of cream with the cocoa powder. When it’s mostly mixed together and non-lumpy, just barely bubbling at the edges, remove from the heat, add the chocolate chips, and mix until the chips have all melted into the mixture. It should be warm enough to work. Add the 2nd cup of cream and pour everything into a bowl on the side. Personally, I put the second bowl in an ice bath to cool it faster when the custard comes in later. In other words, the bowl containing the chocolate cream sugar mixture sits inside an ice bath cooling while we make the custard. Put a mesh strainer over your chocolate mixture.
Now, in the pot, pour in your milk, sugar and salt. Heat this up while you’re separating out your egg yolks and whisking them together. Remove pot from heat again and, ladleful by ladleful, pour the milksugarsalt very very slowly into the egg yolks, as you whisk constantly, tempering the eggs. When all combined, put it back in the pot, and with a heat proof spatula, mix the soon to be custard continuously until it thickens into custard. If you find your custard gets a little too cooked and eggy, for the purposes of ice cream, you can usually get away with blending it for about 30 seconds to make it smooth again.
Pour the now done custard into your strainer and push it through into your chocolate mixture. Add your vanilla extract, and mix mix mix until all is smooth and wonderful. Place the pot in the fridge and cool for awhile – I did about 18 hours, but I bet you can get away with 7-8 hours… I just prefer to over-chill everything to do with ice cream after witnessing one too many failed ice cream experiments. You may also want to place saran wrap over the top, actually touching your chocolate mixture while it sits on the fridge. This prevents a weird skin forming on the top.
Prepare according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. Then dump into a freezer safe container and let chill for a couple hours. You CAN eat it straight away, if you want, but I like my ice cream more solid than homemade usually creates. 🙂
Let me know if you think I’ve left something out. I suspect a Philadelphia version of this can be made if you don’t like eggs, but I haven’t futzed around with it yet.