Skip to main content

Cooking Friday, now on Sunday

My oldest came back from her semester in China and threw herself a welcome home party last night. She invited camp friends, high school friends and college buddies. Amid the chatter and the laughter, my job was making ice cream and washing dishes.



I won't bore you with the dish washing, but I did make three batches of ice cream. We had some pomegranate ice cream left over from our Christmas Eve fondue dinner with friends. So Saturday night, I made pumpkin ice cream, chocolate ice cream and espresso ice cream. I made the pumpkin and the espresso with a mix of half and half and milk. It was teeming last night and I hadn't the energy to run out and buy more half and half for my daughter's charming friend, who begged me to make him espresso ice cream, so I made it with the 2% milk we had on hand.



The espresso expanded at an alarming rate, so now we have three containers of espresso ice cream waiting to be eaten.



We own an electric ice cream maker, so making ice cream is not all that difficult. I throw stuff in the hopper and about 30 minutes later it comes out as ice cream. The important thing to remember is that cold tends to inhibit flavor, so you need to make your mixture have an intense flavor at room temperature, or else you will end up with bland ice cream.



I like to make flavors that you can't usually get in the store. My middle son has a great sense of taste. I usually consult with him about how to make the ice cream mind-blowing , rather than simply good. He is great at suggesting contrasting flavors that build the central taste of the ice cream. The two of us are mad scientist cooks together. We both cook well on our own, but are awesome together.



My brother in law, and his wife and son are showing up at some point this evening. So I have chicken roasting in the oven awaiting their arrival. I already made a potato, acorn squash and mushroom bake. The vegetable bake, as you can see is in the looks ugly but taste's good category of food. The chicken looks adorable. All that's left to make when they walk in the door later this evening is a salad.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...