(if i’m going to whine, ice cream is the very least i can offer…)

dear readers…  ceF is 2 days shy of turning one year old and well, i must tell you that as much fun as this is, in the short time that we’ve known each other i have recklessly and pitifully packed on some serious poundage. i have tried to be better about keeping it all in balance, but to date am failing miserably. i have tried to do all the things i know to do. but i am weak in the face of good food. 

to keep us all entertained here, i have been also trying to achieve some semblance of excellence with my cooking. ok, maybe excellence is going too far. but i am aiming high, and honestly, most of the time we’re eating pretty well here at kitchen central. but i’ve still got a lot to learn, and that means practice. and repetition. using it or losing it. and this tends to involve churning out a fair amount of food if you ever want to call yourself a cook.  and i aspire to that…

right now i’m in santa monica for 3 weeks. and guess what? i’m not going to any great restaurants or cooking. i’m in semi-radical cleansing mode drinking fresh juices and eating fruit and plain salads. as in vegan raw without the frills of nuts or seeds or oil or seasonings of any kind.  as in yes, you’re right this is not easy – and no, i don’t recommend you do this.  unless you want to. which you probably don’t. and man, i so do not blame you. because if i could find a way to eat the way i wanted to eat all the time, and not look and feel toxic, i’d be all over it.  you see, i am the quintessential plate cleaner. i love to eat and i can pack it away but good.  but i am terribly vain – and that’s a tricky combo to balance. so here i am – paying for my salty high-caloric intake.  because the fat lady has sung and it’s time to pay the piper. 

interestingly enough, the older i get the more he charges – the little flute playing bastard…

but to keep the blog fires burning, i have a few things that i recently whipped up and then stockpiled, knowing i’d be away from the kitchen.  and this is one of them.  fresh mint custard ice cream with pralus 75% chocolate.  i used david lebovitz’s recipe for the ice cream, always adding an extra egg yolk as a sacrifice to whatever god that thomas keller worships (i do believe he uses up to 12 yolks in his ice creams).  and then i went a little too heavy on the chocolate because well, one bar is 3.5 ounces and david calls for about 5 ounces (i don’t have the book with me) and i think i may have used over 1 1/2 bars.  but next time i think i’d stick to the one, as that’d be plenty. this batch was a bit heavy on the chocolate. not that it’d hurt your feelings, because the chocolate is so spectacular and plays well off the minty custard…  but still, live and learn.

the fresh mint is steeped in the warm milk/cream mixture and then the custard is made and chilled. to make the stracciatella, you add the melted chocolate in a steady stream at the very end of the churning process, keeping the chocolate away from mixing blade.  being a stracciatella making virgin, i did a so-so job… but it was really very, very awfully good. and i guess one day i will have to try again. and again. but not for a little while.

my inner child had hoped for the ice cream to be a bit on the greener side - but when thinking about the steeping/straining process, it seemed unlikely that the leaves would give up much color. but david had promised an emerald hue and dear readers, that just was not happening. also and for the record, i’m not a huge mint fan. and now i know why. because most mint things that we buy are made with some kind of extract that is way not my thing. this ice cream was minty, but subtle. it tasted real, because it was.

and i’ll be posting here and there, but for now, i’ve gone west to where the ‘beautiful people’ are. to where you are pretty much always – comparatively speaking (to like, anywhere) - too fat, too old and too poor.  i kind of never "got" LA but i want to.  and i am willing to love LA – if it will let me.  i will hang by the beach and soak up the califiornia vibe and then i am back to nashville for a night, only to take off the next day to nyc to do my usual thing – which totally revolves around food.  and as one might imagine based on my last trip home, i am still going to dine quite well. and so this is when i will get to practice balance. and then i get to practice even more balance a week later in chicago at alinea and trotter’s.

so, it’s looking like if all goes well i will be one helluva balanced woman come july.  and then i will throw a party and invite you and i will make this mint stracciatella for everyone and only eat one scoop.

which brings us back to all of you summer loving, ice cream eating people out there.  why not go and make yourself this minty custardy ice cream?  it is truly wonderful.  the recipe is in david’s book and if you’re an ice cream aficionado and don’t own it, i urge you to get it.

and oh by the way – if there is a next life? 

i am so coming back as a person with the metabolism of a hummingbird…

yes. it’s true. there it is. and it doesn’t have to be beautiful. because when you are "THAT FREAKIN AWESOME" looks just do not matter one little bit. unless you’re a woman.

this ice cream is brought to you by michael ruhlman who told michael symon who inspired david lebovitz. or something like that. but no matter who told who – from here on in it is now all mine. and i would just like to ask you, dear readers – just one thing. how in the hell could you ever possibly improve on this? you can’t.

sorry.

the coffee ice cream was david lebovitz’s recipe (plus one extra egg yolk) from ‘the perfect scoop’.  it’s a great book, go buy it. because the warm weather is approaching and it is time to make fabulous ice creams and sorbets and david will teach you how.  his blog has the post regarding the candied bacon ice cream which of course includes the process of candying the bacon.  except i wound up first doing it his way and then feeling the need to redo it the next day with another batch of bacon, a very different way.  because i was striving for perfect pig candy.  and my first batch was kinda lackluster – probably my fault – but i learned and moved forward with the second batch while the first batch now sits in my freezer anxiously waiting to get mixed into some sweet potato pancake batter. now there’s a reason to live…

so, first i put the bacon on a rack over a sheet pan with some foil – shiny side down at about 350f and let a fair amount of the fat drip off – about 10 minutes or so – although the ‘niman ranch’ bacon i used was not very fatty at all – for bacon. then i removed it from the oven and coated one side with brown sugar and placed it back on the rack and let the sugar caramelize on the meat for about another 10 minutes. then i removed it from the oven and spread another sheet of foil over the drippings and placed the bacon candied side down and sugared the second side – same deal. once that was done i removed it from the oven and cooled it on the wire rack. it was more steps then i’ve seen done – but it came out flawless – and while the bacon was getting candied, i was making the custard for the ice cream.

needless to say. it was a hit.

on sunday, day 3 of a 5 day quasi-fast that consisted of tea and agave with an occasional tangerine,  i decided on a whim to make my guy some chocolate sorbet.  it’s about his second favorite thing to eat, rice pudding being way ahead of just about anything else on the planet.  i knew i had all the right ingredients on hand – it only takes a few - and that it’d be a pretty simple thing to whip up.  my ice cream maker bowl was in the freezer wrapped in a plastic bag and ready to go.  and this kind of thing is easy for me to make when i’m not really eating.  no strong smells.  no onion or garlic.  no roasting meat.  or even worse, that boiling pasta smell that turns me on…

this is all it is.  this and some water.  oh and sugar,

which then turns into this…  a velvety smooth liquid that gets chilled for a few hours in the fridge.

which then turns into this. 

it’s liebovitz’s recipe from ‘the perfect scoop’.  after making his salted caramel ice cream, he’s my go to guy for all things frozen.  i used what i’d consider to be pretty fine ingredients.  the retail value on this quart and a half of sorbet was enough to kinda make me giggle in a wondrous kinda way because i can buy a pretty good rendition for about a fourth of the price.  cary said mine was less grainy than our fave market brand ciao bella but after accepting the complement and thinking on it, suddenly i realized why.  mine had a ton of fat in it from the cocoa butter in the pralus chocolate bars while ciao bella’s version is 100% fat free using only the dutch processed cocoa powder. 

so this sorbet, made with some of the finest chocolate money can buy falls under the category of sheer decadence.  it’s holiday sorbet.  certainly not yer every day sorbet…  nope, this is top notch restaurant sorbet.  thomas keller sorbet.  yeah thomas, how ya gonna beat this?  i can’t imagine one upping this icey confection.  for what it is, a plain, pure unadulterated chocolate sorbet, we’ve hit the pinnacle.

wow

the pinnacle…

wow

i was an ice cream making virgin. and i’m not counting that time at girl scout camp when we were hand-cranking a machine out in the woods and the rock salt bled into the ice cream rendering it inedible and well – i’m not counting that, ok? it was a classic adolescent near miss… and i’d love to expound on that metaphor, but let’s just keep it pg-13.

so i borrowed a machine, bought the ingredients, and with all the help in the world from david lebovitz, i did it. i made his salted butter caramel ice cream or as i so fondly care to refer to it as, ‘caramel fleur de sel glace’ because it sounds so much more affected and this recipe took some real work and i want it to come across tres impressive. but people, you go on and call it whatever you want – it makes no difference because this is so damn good that the stuff should be illegal. outlawed. or at the very least eaten in singular small scoops – as the french do – unlike our embarrassingly ridiculous american supersized portions of well, everything.

for those of you wondering how i could possibly go there due to my last FRET, i would like to formally announce that tonight i will be having my one very european scoop with a touch of bittersweet chocolate sauce. and that will be all.

so far i’ve only tasted it in it’s softer state, right out of the machine. but after a night in the freezer, it’s looking like full on ice cream. earlier today i went and bought one of those little cool scooper things with the quick release squeeze handle. so i’m ready for action. i also bought david’s book and it’s wonderful – a must have if you’re going to delve into the world of icy confections. so now after all these years of buying ice cream and having no idea what it was all about, i feel relatively caught up on the subject and would not feel out of place at an ice cream social where everyone had to BYOIC. and until it’s gone, which will no doubt be too soon – or not soon enough, depending on how you’re looking at it – when anybody shows up at my door i will greet them like my grandma often did…

with spoon in hand saying, "here bubala"