Chipotle Gingerbread with Cinnamon-Vanilla Ice Cream and Dulce de Leche

I spent most of my adolescence and early adult years thinking I wanted to be a filmmaker. I went to NYU, made some student films, spent a lot of money on an independent short after I graduated, and then...moved back to Phoenix, AZ and did a whole lot of nothing about it.

I still thought about it, I still made vague attempts to write, even finished another short script and starting putting together the production team before that all sort of petered out.

I wasn’t doing a whole lot of anything beside being a working stiff during those years anyway, so even if it truly was My Calling, who knows if I would have been able to drag myself out of the general stupor I was in to actually make anything happen.

But here’s what my current theory is: I just couldn’t get past that it’s just so...frivolous.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad other people still do it. (Although, other than David Lynch and documentarians, I’m not generally that excited by anyone still doing it since the ripple effect of Jaws and Star Wars put an end to the Golden Years of Films by and for Grown-Ups - aka the ‘70’s).

For me, personally, though, I was just never able to quite recover from my horror at the amount of resources used in the re-creation of reality. The decadence!

That’s what I like about cooking. While it’s a stretch to think of my ice cream experimentation as anything approaching utilitarian, the idea of using my creativity to result in something people can actually eat appeals to the my more pragmatic side.  I like to aim low on Maslow's Hierarchy.

And, as another person who transferred her interest in film to food pointed out, food is also a hell of a lot more instantly gratifying. Not just for the eatin’, mind you, but also for the audience response. Elizabeth Falkner’s background in film is all over her book Demolition Dessert...

...and it's reflected in the name of her restaurants Citizen Cake and Orson.  She speaks in the below about why she loves desserts and why she made the transition from film to food.

I’ve been eyeing a lot of different recipes in her book, but the one that was jumping out at me loudest as I planned the Thanksgiving Dessertaganza was the Chipotle Gingerbread (full recipe in link) component in her Gingerbread Bauhaus. I didn’t want to do the whole composed dessert from the book, which involves pear sorbet, shards of royal icing and pomegranate gel.

But I thought the gingerbread, baked into mini-muffin tins, might make a nice tiny composed dessert topped with a little bit of something like that cinnamon-caramel ice cream we had at Poppy.

I experimented by trying to caramelize the some cinnamon sticks in the sugar in this Chow.com Caramel Ice Cream recipe. I don’t know if I actually caramelized the cinnamon, but I know I didn’t caramelize the sugar itself. Paranoid after too many caramels that went from just right to burnt in some nanosecond lost to A.D.D., I removed the cooked sugar too soon. It tasted sweet, not caramel-y.

Luckily, though, the cinnamon flavor was present, and the addition of a scraped-vanilla bean meant that a tasty cinnamon-vanilla ice cream resulted even if caramel continues to be a wild mustang I am unable to tame.

You know what I can tame, Caramel? You know who plays nice and isn’t a occasionally injurious jerk? Dulce de Leche. That’s right, I am taking advantage of NAFTA and going south of the border for my tasty light brown dessert sauce.

What do you have to do to make Dulce de Leche?

OPEN A CAN. Open a can of sweetened condensed milk, pour it into a baking dish, cover it tightly with foil, set that baking dish into a larger one filled with water, and cook it at 425 for about an hour or until it’s the color of MISBEHAVING CARAMEL.

You can also do it in a slow cooker or go the daredevil route – boil it in the can, risking explosion. (Oh.  Well, I guess this sauce is also occasionally injurious.  Hmm.  Why is making dessert sauce so high risk?)

Okay, so my composed dessert results from these three doesn’t look as good as something Elizabeth Falkner would create...

...but this is the one dessert that blew past my usual underwhelmed response to “New Favorite Thing.”

The Chipotle Gingerbread – which, incidentally, is quite quick to make – doesn't have too much heat, it’s just like a tiny extra kick to the usual spice of gingerbread. The Cinnamon-Vanilla Ice Cream is rich while not being excessive sweet, and then the smidge of Dulce de Leche adds that final bit of caramelized but not cloying sweetness that brings it all together.

And I hate to second guess myself, but you know what might even be better than Dulce de Leche with this? This Five Star Holy-Crap Coffee Dessert Sauce from Chow that I've made before, although it does require the basic caramel sauce process, so it's nowhere near as easy as the DdL.

If you’re not an ice cream maker, I would still recommend trying this. Again, the gingerbread is pretty quick to make, and the Dulce de Leche is effortless. Buy a pint of cinnamon ice cream (if you can find it) or caramel or just the best vanilla you can get and give it a whirl.

Follow-up re Tom Douglas' Pan-Roasted Blah Blah Blah

So...as I mentioned in my previous post on the dish, the cooking process for my first batch of Pan-Roasted Halibut with Toasted Breadcrumb Salad and Green Lentils was as excessively lengthy as the dish's name itself.

That said, I made the dish again yesterday, using some of the leftovers, and it took like 25 minutes. 

So to review:

FOUR+ HOURS

25 MINUTES

They didn't taste much different, either.

So here's the shortcutting way, I think, to have quicker access to this meal:

• Don't be going through some kind of bizarro Cook It Yourself project where you feel obligated to do everything from scratch and instead just buy some veggie stock and coarse bread crumbs.
• If you do want to make everything from scratch, don't also be going through some kind of freshly-made-everything-is-the-best weird obsession that you caught from all the chefs you're always around WHO HAVE ACCESS TO SOUS CHEFS AND DISHWASHERS.  Keep some stock and breadcrumbs on hand in the freezer or make them on a different day, not as part of the cooking process for this meal.
• Once you make the meal (assuming you like it) freeze up extra lentils for future dishes. 

If the lentils are prepared, and you have breadcrumbs, the rest of the prep is actually super fast. 

• You could probably get away with skipping making the full fresh Lemon Vinaigrette by just pressing a clove of garlic into some lemon juice, shaking up with some olive oil and S&P and using that instead.  (Mince a shallot if you have time, but this is a quicker option.)
• Zap the leftover lentils into the microwave or reheat on stovetop.
• Quickly pan-fry your breadcrumbs, cool them, and then mix with lemon zest, S&P, chopped parsley and most of the lemon juice mixture (save a smidge for topping the fish).
• Throw a piece of halibut into the same pan you just used for the breadcrumbs (don't bother cleaning it), cook it up, put it on top of the reheated lentils, drizzle the rest of the lemon-garlic/shallot on the fish, top with the salad, and you have a fancy-times dinner in a not-so-fancy-times time.

Recipe Results: Tom Douglas' Pan-Roasted Halibut with Toasted Breadcrumb Salad and Green Lentils

I was chatting with one of the cooking shop class assistants the other day as we tidied up after class, and she mentioned a cookbook from one of our local Seattle top-rated restaurants.  She said that the food was very delicious, but that many of the recipes were multi-component-oriented and complicated so she didn’t cook from it that often.

This statement was one of those innocently-delivered comments that nevertheless set off a nanosecond long maelstrom of intense thoughts.  This was the gist of it:

• Oh!  That’s a good idea, I thought, look for recipes that are simple and not complex.
• Wait.  I’ve totally had this conversation with myself before.
• Why don’t I ever remember to do this?  See how bright this person is, all careful in her recipe selection.  Why can’t I be like that?!  I’m so dumb sometimes!
• A visual memory of a short-and-sweet basic recipe from my favorite teacher drifted into mental view.  It’s dish that I loved when he made it in class.
• My immediate reaction to the idea of this short recipe was lack of enthusiasm, despite how much I liked the dish.
• I realized that my emotional reaction to completing a short and simple recipe is the same satisfaction I would get if I jogged around the block.
• I realized my emotional reaction to completing a punishingly long recipe is akin to the euphoric high you get after a particularly grueling workout.
• I remembered why I rarely pick short recipes and returned my attention to the conversation.

This is not to impugn the short recipe.  After all, if you have skillz, you don’t need a lot of ingredients or steps to make something amazing.

I don’t have skillz, though. 

So I gravitate towards the complex. 

Or maybe it’s because of the ADD, as counterintuitive as that might be.   It’s like how can’t ever read short stories, I bounce around too much and can’t relax my brain enough to pay attention.  But the long form of a novel seems to click me into deep focus and I have that lovely floaty feeling of loss of self (aka “being in the zone”) that you get from being really deeply engaged in the present moment of any activity.  The exact same state I enter in, oh, say, the third or fourth hour of a cookathon.

That big preamble is all to say that even I, though, have my limits, and Seattle food guru Tom Douglas just about reached them with his recipe for Pan-Roasted Halibut with Toasted Breadcrumb Salad and Green Lentils.

The title alone has too many words.  And it’s actually four components: there’s a Lemon Vinaigrette that’s used that’s not mentioned in that novella of a name. 

(You don't know the half of it.)

But if you think that’s as complex as it gets, you’d be wrong!

Because I also had to make stock in order to make the lentils. AND I had to make breadcrumbs to make the breadcrumb salad.  AND both the breadcrumb salad and the lentils are a two-step cooking process, where the main ingredient is cooked solo and then processed again with flavoring agents.  

(Approaching hour four)

In the recipe’s defense, I will say that other than the chopping of all the 1.2 million different ingredients, it was time-consuming , but due to a lot of unattended cooking time, not necessarily super labor-intensive. I realize this statement, coming from me, after reading the above preamble, is pretty meaningless.  Basically, although about four and a half hours elapsed between the time I started cooking and the time I actually sat down to eat, I didn’t feel completely exhausted and annoyed by the process. 

And I did choose to make two-step roasted vegetable stock and breadcrumbs from scratch on the day of cooking.  If either had been prepared prior, it would have cut down on the time considerably.  If you made a double-batch of lentils the first time, you could freeze them for another serving later, which would also make this dish a heck of a lot easier to serve on something other than a special occasion.

(Finished Breadcrumb Salad)

And you would want to because despite all the effort…this shit is delicious.  DEEEEE-licious.  There’s a reason why there are 1.2 million ingredients and 25 steps and four components in this dish.  Every component was tasty on its own.  I might take the lentil recipe and use it just for making plain old lentils for salads, etc.

(Finished Lentils)

And when you put them together, each complemented the other without any one asserting itself too strongly.  The crispiness of the breadcrumbs, the brightness of the parsley, the tang of the lemon vinaigrette, the seared smoky outside of the halibut, the tenderness of the inside, and the mellow earthy and herby lentils…it all worked together brilliantly.

(Yes, once again highly staged but this meal earned it)

I am fascinated by chefs for many reasons, but the ones who really get me going are those who seem to have something that really feels akin to magic, where you might know every ingredient in the dish, but when you taste it, it’s that mysterious alchemy of creativity where 1+1=3.  I’ve loved almost everything I’ve ever eaten at a Tom Douglas restaurant, and although I’ve only so far made two of his recipes at home (although I think this one counts as about seven), it’s pretty cool when you can achieve that alchemy yourself just by following some instructions.

But I’m not posting the recipe, mainly because lord.  This is long enough already.  It would take up the rest of this blog.  It’s in Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen.  If you have a spare weekend sometime and want to make it, email me.

Giving it 5-star Holy Crap rating for taste, but just with the caveat that you better be ready to log some serious kitchen time if you want to make it all from scratch..

Update on Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 01:31PM by Leslie Seaton

Looking for the recipe?  I see you Googlers!  Mr. Tom Douglas himself has now posted it.

Dinner for Sarah Menu and Recipe Results Pic

As mentioned, when I do one of my seven-million hour cookathons, I am no longer going to post a seven-million word postathon.  Rather, I'll separate each dish out in order to make this site more useful for people looking for info on one particular dish. 

Unfortunately, for this dinner I made for myself and my friend Sarah, I only have one (bad) photo for the below three recipe results:

• Left is Risotto with Seven Wild Herbs
• Middle is Portobello with Eggplant and Gorgonzola
• Right is a salad with homemade Candied Hazelnuts

For starters, we had some Mushroom Pate, which I'll post on tomorrow, and for dessert, we had Pink Grapefruit and Champagne Sorbet.

Recipe Results: Risotto with Seven Wild Herbs (Actually Four)

This is the second recipe I’ve made from this book:

So far, neither recipe (other was Risotto with Arugula and Gorgonzola) has really been to my taste, but I still think this book has potential as the actual risotto base was nice even if I didn’t like the flavorings.

For this recipe, you make a standard risotto with Arborio rice, wine, veggie stock (more delicious Mark Bittman roasted vegetable stock for me) and seven million shallots. 

At the end, you add a “handful” of chopped herbs.  She recommends sage, parsley, basil, thyme, mint, oregano, and marjoram, but says you can use any.  I used sage, marjoram, thyme and rosemary.  Sounds tasty, right?  But I think I messed this up in a few ways specifically related to the addition of the herbs.

For one, if you use a fewer number of herbs, you will be using more of any one herb which opens the door for the individual herb flavors to be more assertive than she probably intended. This was the case with the sage I used: it made it just taste strongly of sage. 

Natalie Goldberg, my favorite writer who writes about writing, once wrote something to the effect that even if you are writing about something very dramatic, the writing itself should be calm, so that the big subject doesn’t “bolt upright like a rodeo horse and run out of the sentence.” This is the phrase that came to mind when tasting the risotto because the sage was definitely bolting out of the risotto like a rodeo horse. 

In addition to the issues with herb selection, I think I also might have minced instead of chopped, which creates more open surface area and ergo stronger flavors.

Unlike the arugula and gorgonzola, this also did not improve in flavor when made into a risotto pancake the next day.  Still just a bunch of creamy-textured sage kernels.  Not wholly unpleasant, but not what I was aiming for.

So I would recommend and make this again, but would also do the following differently:

1. Actually use seven herbs.
2. Use a smaller proportion of especially pungent herbs like sage.
3. Make sure I chop the herbs, not finely mince.

Overall, the dish as made was probably a two, but I’ll give the recipe a three-star rating because I think it has potential.

Picture here.

Recipe Results: Portobello Mushrooms Stuffed with Eggplant and Gorgonzola

I was looking for a satisfying meatless entrée since I was making dinner for a vegetarian.  I am not terribly fond of eggplant, but this Epicurious recipe for Portobello Mushrooms Stuffed with Eggplant and Gorgonzola has other ingredients that I love a lot (mushrooms, gorgonzola, sundried tomatoes, basil) so I thought it had potential.

I followed the advice of one of the reviewers of the recipe, and sort of blind-baked the Portobello cap by itself for ten minutes prior to stuffing and baking (and subtracted that ten minutes from the stuffed baking time).

I really enjoyed this format and look forward to making more Portobello “pizzas” and other Italian flavor-profile stuffed cap dishes, but this particular one was not for me.

For one, the eggplant, which I cooked according to the instructions precisely (for once) could not stand up against the strong flavor of the cheese, so its role in the dish was just, it seemed, flavorless texture. 

As I complained about to my guest Sarah, this is my issue with a lot of vegetarian recipes that are piles of cooked vegetables: the flavors are often so mild as to see absent and so it seems like just a bunch of varying textures of some kind of weird not-frozen water solid. 

So the eggplant just seemed like a blank texture with the gorgonzola flavor sitting on top of it, no tasty melding.

I think also this might be the kind of recipe where you want to use the good cheese.  I used Trader Joe’s crumbled gorgonzola, and while it’s not bad by any means, it’s pretty one-dimensional, which also created a more one-dimensionally flavored final result.

Giving this one a two because while I didn’t like it, maybe someone more skilled at eggplant seasoning can make it into something, and at least it gave me a good format for a future revision for a nice meatless entrée that isn’t a ton of work.  I am interested in tracking down some more stuffing possibilities for a Portobello cap; I’m thinking some kind of grain or maybe a tomato + breadcrumb mixture?

Picture here.

New Feature! Recipe Results

Many times I see from my blog tracking stuff that people arrive at this website because of searches they did on specific dishes and/or recipes.  I see the posts that the search pointed them too and I always feel a twinge of bad-blogging-guilt when I realize the person probably had to pick through seventeen paragraphs of me writing about - ahem - me before actually getting to the recipe they wanted to know about.

So although this blog will probably never be free of me writing about me, I did think that it might be better if I separate out each recipe I try in one of my marathon cooking sessions so that it's easier for someone curious about a certain dish to just navigate directly to it.

I had my friend Sarah over for dinner on Friday and made about 30 million different things so I'll be posting about some of those over next few days.  One hit, one almost-hit and several misses.