The Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World

There are a number of reasons this isn’t a food blog.  The obvious.  But then there’s also the fact that as much as I may know how to take pictures of children, I find that I don’t remotely know how to take attractive pictures of food, which is critical part of having a food blog (knowing how to cook in some fashion that moves beyond following a recipe word for word — a knowledge I do not remotely have — also helps).  I have a friend who is an amazing cook (you know who you are) — and food photographer — whom I am trying to persuade to share his brilliance in this food section.  But for the time being you get me, without any pictures, sharing a holy-cow-was-that-amazing recipe.

Last night I finally cracked open Jenis Splendid Ice Creams at Home  which I purchased a few weeks ago.  I bought it not only because I love ice cream, but above all because Jeni Britton Bauer has recipes for the most unbelievable sounding flavors.  Also, Bauer opens the book by saying, “I have never been a fan of ‘homemade’ ice cream.  It’s usually icy, goopy, soupy, crumbly, eggy, gritty, and too buttery.  So a few years ago I set out to try to create a better ice cream recipe for home kitchens.”  It’s AMAZING!  The recipes do require that you own an ice cream maker, but otherwise they are extremely easy.  Since I was working with a five year old last night, we played it safe and stuck to dark chocolate.  But I mean seriously dark.  The recipe is actually called The Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World.  It feels like a betrayal of Jeni and her book to share the recipe in all its detail since that’s really the crux of the whole book.  The secret ingredient is cream cheese, but you’ll need the book to get the quantities and all that good stuff.  The result was somewhere between eating gourmet ice cream and eating fudge sauce.  You have to like dense and flavor packed to like this one.

I will mention how I diverged slightly from the book, because I think it did make a difference.  Personally — not a big fan of the whole mocha thing.  Clearly I’m not in the majority in this, because there’s plenty of mocha around.  But I like my coffee, coffee, and my chocolate, chocolate, and never the twain shall meet.  I know there is coffee in a lot of chocolate dessert recipes there not to add coffee flavor but to shape the taste of the chocolate flavor.  There is obviously a chemistry behind it which I have never bothered to figure out.  But in this instance, when the recipe called for “1/2 cup brewed coffee” I just added water and the chocolate flavor definitely did not suffer for it.  But I think most important was the choice of chocolate.  At the beginning of the book, Bauer is emphatic about the importance of the quality of the ingredients.  So when the recipe called for 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, I dug out of the cupboard a couple of the more interested cocoa powders I had recently purchase through the Baker’s Catalog.  I used 1/4 cup Bensdorp Dutch-Process Cocoa and 1/4 cup Black Cocoa.

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Sup-Sup-Supertime – Just Like Grandma Used to Do It

One of my favorite food trends right now is slow cooking.  In part, I love it from a practical perspective – prepare the food in the morning and a hot dinner is waiting for you at exactly the appointed hour.  My husband thinks it is absolutely pointless, since what it boils down to is that you are dirtying one set of dishes in the morning and then you still have to clean the slow cooker after dinner.  Clearly this is not a man who has ever tried to prepare dinner while coordinating the after school activities of three children.  And yet, it is not the practical aspects of the slow cooker that sold me on the concept.  You say slow cooker, and I envision my grandmother making a casserole, but today’s slow cooker recipes make it easy to prepare really good food.  Meat gets tender and absorbs flavors in a way that you just can’t achieve with conventional cooking.  Okay, so truth be told, I only have one slow cooker cookbook – The Art of the Slow Cooker  by Andrew Schloss – and I am just guessing about all of the other slow cooker cookbooks I see on the shelves and on Amazon, but that one cookbook is my bible.  Without it, who knows whether or not my family would get dinner on a regular basis.

Favorite recipe — I am talking crazy good — is the Beef Carbonnade.

As with most slow cooker recipes, this one starts out by having you coat 3 lbs. of beef chuck with flour (1/4 cup), salt (1 tsp) and pepper (1/2 tsp), and then browning the meat in olive oil (3 Tbsp).  (This is the part my husband makes the most fun of, but trust me, it’s SO worth it!)

You then remove the beef from the skillet and cook 5 large onions, thinly sliced, in the same skillet for about 10 minutes.  (Husband is still laughing here … but it’s really not that much work.)  Lay the onions in the bottom of the slow cooker and then layer the browned beef on top.

Using the same skillet again, cook 2 slices of bacon, finely diced (the recipe calls for salt pork, but seeing as I have never had salt pork on hand, I substitute bacon and definitely do not hear anyone complaining).  Add herbs (1/2 tsp each of thyme, oregano, sage, rosemary and basil).  Here the recipe says to add the reserved seasoned flour, but personally I’ve generally forgotten to set aside any flour at this point.

Then comes the really good part.  Add 2 tsp dark brown sugar and one 12 oz. bottle of ale or lager beer.  A dark ale works nicely.  Simmer and then pour over the beef.  Add 2 bay leaves and you’re good to go.  Cook on high 4-5 hours or on low for 8-10 hours.  I serve over egg noodles, but that’s your call.

I just discovered – today actually – that The Art of the Slow Cooker  has an app, and it’s available for $1.99.  When cooking, I still prefer to work with an actual book.  But the app comes in handy for making last minute menu decisions at the supermarket.

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Everyone Has A Bad Day – Right?

To some extent, reality TV has pulled the curtain aside and revealed that everyone has a bad day sometimes. Every designer makes a bad dress. Every chef cooks a bad meal. Shit happens. Still, it cracks me up every time I fall flat on my face. Yesterday we had my youngest son’s 5th birthday party, and did I ever fall down on the job. It was one of those everything that can go wrong will go wrong kind of days, or at least that kind of party. Poor kid. It builds character, right? The most embarrassing part of the whole event — the icing on the cake, if you will (and a complete artistic failure on my part) — was the cupcakes.

When my oldest son had his third birthday party, we ordered the cake from the same bakery everyone else uses (at least everyone else in our neighborhood), Party Favors. If you don’t know Party Favors, it is a phenomenal party supply store/party bakery in Brookline, Massachusetts. If you live anywhere near Brookline and don’t know Party Favors, you should. They make the world’s best cupcakes, hands down. And their birthday cakes are fantastic. But the cake for Theo’s party, and this was some years ago, cost us nearly $100.  We asked for a cake with cows on it.  We got the whole farm.

The Cake That Started It All

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My Favorite Thanksgiving Recipes

I love to entertain.  I don’t do it often.  The anticipation stresses me out.  But once I actually get down to it, I find there’s nothing more gratifying than cooking fabulous food, pullin  I have always been dying to host thanksgiving dinner.  So when we redid our kitchen last summer (and most significantly, installed a second oven) the thing I was looking forward to, above all, was laying claim to our family’s thanksgiving. g out the table linens, platters and special plates, and arranging the table just so, and enjoying it all with a good drink and good friends. The huge turkey occupying the better part of my refrigerator right now, has me beyond excited.  I can’t wait to spend the day basting it constantly so that it comes out absolutely perfectly.  I know, I’m weird.  But it’s going to be one hell of a meal.

Here’s what I have planned:

1.  THE TURKEY

This year I’m going to try a new preparation for the turkey:  Tom Collichio’s Herb-Butter Turkey (published in Bon Appetit Nov. 2005, now available on epicurious.com.  This turkey is made with two sticks of butter!  It just doesn’t get any better than that, no?

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The Perfect Sugar Cookie

People have different ways of dealing with the holidays and the greying weather.  Personally, I bake.   One of my favorite things to bake, especially for parties, is sugar cookies.  Most of the fun is in the decoration, but people seem to love to eat them too.  When it comes to baking, I think you can’t go wrong with Martha Steward.  Martha Stewart’s Cookies is kind of my bible.  I know, Martha’s name instills terror in the average person, evoking images of anal perfection and intricate steps too numerous to mention.  It is tempting to take shortcuts.  All I can say is, when it comes to baking, I have found that it is absolutely worth following all of Martha’s steps.  It’s not actually that much more work, and the results are absolutely worth it.

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Just Don’t Serve This to Your Grandmother

Once upon a time, when I was just out of college and had my own apartment for the first time — no, we will not discuss when that was — I owned The Silver Palate Cookbook,  The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, The New Basics Cookbook, Great Good Food and All Around the World Cookbook, and everything I cooked came from one of those books.  Lukins & Rosso what would I have eaten without you?!  (And now I’ve gone ahead and dated myself, but if you recognize the references then chances are you’re as old as I am anyway.)

Those books have long since been supplanted in my repertoire many times over.  These days the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks take pride of place and The Silver Palate is up on a shelf that I can’t reach without the aid of a stool which, let’s face it, I’m really not likely to get out in order to pick the evening’s recipe.  But no matter how many times I consider throwing away those old cookbooks and freeing up the shelf space, I just can’t bring myself to do it.  There were some really great recipes in those books!  Even without mouth-watering pictures to tempt me, every once in a while I will come back to those books because the memory of the incredible dishes inside makes me hungry.

One of my favorite recipes, this one out of New Basics, is the Moroccan Chicken.  It comes in particularly handy when I’m having company for dinner.  I will warn you that I once prepared this for my grandmother when, after I had slaved away in the kitchen for the afternoon and proudly presented her with a plate of my masterpiece, she took one bite and said, “I tell you the truth, it’s a bit dry.  Where’s the sauce?  Isn’t there supposed to be a sauce?  This could really use a sauce?”  No, there is NOT supposed to be a sauce!  So if your grandmother is one of those folks who likes a sauce with her chicken, DO NOT serve her this dish.  Otherwise, by all means, go for it.

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Sinful But So Worth It

This brown butter apple custard tart is unbelievable.  If you have company coming, you must serve this.  The first time I made this I burned the apples slightly, which was pretty unfortunate.  But as long as you don’t do that, your guests will be dreaming about this dessert for weeks.  Most incredible is how nutty the tart tastes with absolutely no nuts in the recipe.

Granny Smith Apple and Brown Butter Custard Tart  (as published in Food and Wine, Nov. 2006)

Active time:  1 hr.      Total time:  3 hrs.      Serves:  8 to 10

image courtesy of "Food and Wine"

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