Mardi Gras Party: Sweet Potato Ice Cream with Praline Pieces

So I think I've told the story before about how I hated yams and sweet potatoes so much as a kid, I got a note from my parents to let me get out of making them for the Thanksgiving dinner final in Home Ec.

Well, not a lot has changed, but upon a second tasting, I will grudgingly call this tasty. As my friend Carolyn put it, the praline pieces make it.  Also in its favor, this is a pretty easy recipe in that you get a rich ice cream without having to deal with making an egg custard.

In the original recipe in Beans, Greens and Sweet Georgia Peaches, the author notes to be sure you get a mature sweet potato because an immature one can seize up during freezing.  I just got a big giant one and crossed my fingers. 

Also be sure potatoes are smooth and free of lumps before adding cream in order to afford overbeating cream.

Sweet Potato Ice Cream

Adapted from Beans, Greens and Sweet Georgia Peaches

Makes 1 quart

Ingredients

• ½ lb sweet potatoes, scrubbed and dried, with any root tendrils removed
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1.5 cups half-and-half
• ½ cup heavy cream (minimum 36% milkfat)
• Grated zest of 1 lemon
• Pinch of grated nutmeg
• Pinch of cinnamon
• 1 cup chopped New Orleans Pecan Praline Pieces

Directions

1. Position rack in center of oven, preheat to 400.
2. Pierce the potato in several spot, the place on a baking sheet in the center of the oven.
3. Bake until potatoes are tender and easily pierced, about 45 minutes.
4. Cool until you can handle the potato but it is still warm.  Peel and force the potato through a ricer or coarse sieve until you have about ½ cup of puree.
5. Stir sugar into puree until it is dissolved, then let mixture cool completely.
6. Gradually add half and half and then cream, stirring well after each addition until it is smooth and the consistency of a custard.
7. Add lemon zest, nutmeg and cinnamon. Stir well, and put into the fridge overnight.
8. Freeze according to directions on your ice cream maker, adding the praline pieces when it tells you to add mix-ins.

Short & Grown-Up Sweet: Pineapple Rum Cilantro Sherbet or Granita

Continuing with my series of burning off somewhat boring but potentially useful posts, here's this one in time for your holiday partay.

I had a bunch of cilantro left over the other day, and the answer to "What do I do with this now?" was, as it so often is: frozen dessert.  

I looked around and found this recipe for a Tequila-Cilantro Sorbet.  I didn't have enough lime and no tequila, but I did have some leftover cans of pineapple juice and some rum, so I made up this recipe for Pineapple Rum Cilantro Sherbet (cuz to my American mind, sorbets don't have dairy).  

It worked really well.  While the rum does make this more a grown-up treat, I wouldn't skip it as it helps keep the texture smoother.

If you don't have an ice cream maker, there's also a granita method below.

Ingredients 

• 1 1/4 cups whole milk
• 1 1/4 cups water
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro
• 3/4 cup pineapple juice
• 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
• 3/4 cup rum
• Pinch of salt

Process 

1. In a saucepan, bring milk, water, and sugar to a boil, and stir to dissolve the sugar.
2. Remove from heat and add cilantro.
3. Chill overnight in fridge.
4. Strain mixture through a fine sieve set over a bowl.
5. Stir in pineapple and lime juices, rum and salt.
6. SHERBET: Freeze the sorbet in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.
7. GRANITA: Pour mixture into a chilled 9x13 baking dish. Freeze for about 2 hours or until the mixture has frozen around the edges.  Use a fork to break up the ice crystals around the edge and draw them into the middle.  Repeat this process 3 or 4 times, about every 1/2 hour or so, or until the mixture is completed converted to ice crystals. (The goal of the breaking up is to keep those crystals small to make the mixture smoother.)
8. Serve!

The Best Dessert I've Ever Made: Chipotle Gingerbread, Caramel Ice Cream & Coffee Sauce

(Hey check out the Summer Ice Cream Social Poll over to the left there. I'm trying to whittle down some ice cream choices. Help me out and you will be rewarded with the warm glow of self-satisfaction!)

Elizabeth Falkner was on Top Chef Masters tonight.  She lost on the episode, but she is still a winner in my book, because one of her recipes is the base for the dish that won me the most praise of anything I've ever made.

I was involved this guy for a while who had a habit of making a lot of backhanded critical comments that I was too naive to understand were backhanded critical comments.  (The naivete, incidentally, also explains the "for a while" part of why I continued hanging around someone who liked to make backhanded critical comments to me about me.)

One time, we were talking about a meal we were eating (it was, in fact, one of the first times I had Pad Kee Mao, the Thai dish I'm still obsessed with), and he said, pointedly, "I'm not one of these people who's always saying 'This is the best thing I've ever had' but this is seriously one of the best things I've ever had."

It was about three months later, when I was no longer hanging out with him, that it hit me in one of those apropos-of-nothing waves of epiphany that you have after climbing your way out of a confusing whirlpool of a situation: he was talking about me.  Because I AM one of those people who is always saying something is the "best thing I've ever had."

And whatever, man.  I'm trying to come to grips and accept the fact that I am hyper and overenthusiastic. I'm constantly simmering over with too much too-muchness no matter how much I try to rein myself in.  I'm not cool or reserved. 

But imagine for a minute that I am.  I am a cool customer, rarely moved to effusive exuberance, to hyperbolic excess.  And imagine it is that person, that phlegmatic, calm, impassive person who is exclaiming to you: "This is the best dessert I've ever made."

  

Remember this dessert?  Of course you do, because who doesn't have an encyclopedic recall of this blog?

This is the Chipotle Gingerbread with Cinnamon-Vanilla Ice Cream and Dulce deLeche that I made for Thanksgiving last year.  And at the time, I thought, it was pretty awesome.  But I made another version of it for my Memorial Day party and you know what it was? Awesomer.

What I did this time was the Chipotle Gingerbread + Caramel Ice Cream + Coffee Sauce (So just imagine the above picture, but with a dark brown sauce.)

I didn't make up the recipes, I just made them and put them together.  But I did think of the combination all by myself, so look what I can do!

It was a huge hit. I mean HUGE. People are usually very forgiving of desserts, and sweets usually please most folks. I am used to bringing an ice cream or cake to a party and people being excited.

But I feel like there was some real genuine amazement at just how well these three flavors worked together.  My friend Jan also said it was one of the best desserts she's ever had.  Even a real live food professional, Becky of the great blog, Chef Reinvented, liked enough to tweet about it.  (Yeah, I linked to her tweet. That just happened. I did that. I can't unbecome becoming a person who linked to a complimentary tweet about herself. The slippery slope has slipped. Hemingway-esque unassuming stoic machismo is off the table as an option.)

Anyway, the great thing is, although this is a multiple recipe dish, it really isn't that hard, and totally worthwhile to consider making if you are entertaining and want a crowd-pleasing dessert.

Here are the recipes and a few other tips.

• Chipotle Gingerbread.  I do NOT use the crystallized ginger called for in the recipe.  This recipe fit into 2 12-mini muffin tins.  It is very very quick and easy, and could be made in advance. The actual cupcakes I used were, in fact, leftover from last Thanksgiving (!) that Will and Carolyn had in their deep freezer. 
• The Caramel Ice Cream could be swapped out with storebrought if you don't have a maker. 
• The Coffee Sauce is probably the only "challenging" part, just because it involved the scary caramelizing of sugar, but other than that, it's very fast to prepare.

Cooking Resolution #5: Reward

This rather indulgent resolution was supposed to come last...but sometimes I don't save dessert for last either, so what?  What are you going to do about it?  You're not the boss of me.

I was going to move this one up anyway as I realized the (now) last one is sort of more important to me as, like, a human.

But it also appropriate to be posting about this today as it’s about booze and I had the kind of work day that makes one think “I need a stiff drink,” even when ice cream is usually your vice of choice.

I went to bartending school, and was a bartender at a nondescript restaurant* in the Village in NYC for a little while after college.

(This is not the restaurant, this is a much cuter-looking place now inhabiting the same space and I am showing it to you just to break up the text.  Okay, vacation's over, back to words now.)

But I’ve never really been too much of a drinker myself, and when you work days at a nondescript restaurant in the Village, you don’t serve a heck of a lot of mixed drinks, so everything I learned at bartending school quickly slid out of my head.

I served shots of well vodka to some jerky artist dude who came in after being up all night painting, and whiskey shots with breakfast to a couple of young guys who worked the night shift at the 24-hour Kinko’s around the block.

I sometimes served beer and wine, but really my greatest bartender challenges centered on not humiliating myself when I tried to open a bottle of wine or trying to dredge up what's in a Greyhound from hazy bartending school flashcard sessions when some Stern School of Business student inexplicably brought some girl into the place for dinner. 

Most of the time, though, I was too busy with other activities to really work at being a Mixologist, a word I’m not sure existed in 1998. I was trying to deal with the kind of insane cheap regulars the place attracted (though some were nice, like this dude Neil Cooper, who realized it was me playing all the dub reggae all the time and brought me in a bunch of free CD’s from his label ROIR records)...

Or scrawling out a thoroughly confusing bill for the Europeans who had only ordered espresso (the place attracted them like flies to carrion) so that they wouldn’t be able to decipher that I had added on a gratuity. You know, in case they forgot...

Or attempting to figure out how to get the Easter Island-headed busboy Doro to actually bus tables.

Point being: not being much of a booze drinker, even with this bartending blip, I don’t really know much about cocktail making.

Over the past year, though, a little spark of interest has been growing

It started last winter with a couple of visits to the Oliver’s Twist up in Phinney. I’d met owner Dan Braun when he taught at the cooking school, and I loved his food and concept so much, I made sure to take a trip to his spot. I wasn’t disappointed – the food was great – and the care put into the cocktails intrigued me.(Le Petit Hiboux pic from Chow.com)

I then had a little experiment in the spring, making this recipe for Le Petit Hiboux – a wine cocktail with Lillet and apple juice – for a dinner with Sarah.

Then there were two Good Food features from earlier this year (repackaged into the New Year’s show)...

...one on the Michelada, a Mexican beer-based drink, and another on the history of cocktails evolving from punch, that also piqued my curiousity.

And Carolyn’s husband Will likes digestifs, so he’s introduced me to some interesting flavors of those (and got our server at Poppy to bring over basically the bar’s entire store of them for us to sniff).

But I think it was actually that delicious St. Germaine sexy cough drop cocktail that Carolyn ordered at Poppy that tipped the scales: I want to make some drinks like THAT.

So with this resolution, I’m prioritizing learning about cocktails – for no other reason than the fun of it.

I think cocktails appeal to me the way ice cream appeals to me: the idea that the end result is always texturally identical (frozen/liquid) and so the creativity is all in the flavoring. Much like my love of doing side-by-side tastings of various foodstuffs and beverages, I enjoy having one constant in things so that the other variations can be really highlighted.

Booze is pricey, so I don’t know how much experimenting I can do, but I do know this: I probably won’t mind mistakes in cocktail mixing as much as I do in ice cream making.

*I guess it wasn't entirely nondescript.

Three Bowls, Now with Less Words than Usual!

Normally, this is an economy-sized blog. Such value! So many words before I get to the point!

Well, although the global economy is currently wagging its finger as such Rabelaisian excesses, I will persist.  Just not today.

I am making I think over 30 things – literally, not hyperbolically – for this holiday season and I simply don’t have the time to write 5000 words on that time I was broke in college and ate leftover delivery Chinese white rice with bottled teriyaki sauce that was given to me in pity by my older roommates and it was the best thing I ever ate at that moment and how it relates to the cupcake I just made and What It All Means.

So I will finish up my reports and recommendations from the recent Thanksgiving Dessertaganza in brief. Brief, I tell you!

Venetian Apple Cake: From Dolce Italiano, full recipe available via link to the left.

Nice! Nice and simple apple cake! Flavorful, moist and with a little crunchy from the polenta. Keeper!

Black Pepper Ice Cream: From David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop.

Nice, kinda weird! The process to make it is very simple..., just infuse the ice cream base with black peppercorns cracked in a mortar and pestle.

You might not guess it’s black pepper if someone didn’t tell you, just sweet and spicy and floral in an unusual way.  But it's not something I would want to eat on its own. I made the apple cake to eat with it, but I think the ideal thing for it would be a pear tart. Something with a lot of cooked and tasty fruit. David’s recipe isn’t online, but Epicurious has a recipe that is similar and with another possibility for a complete dessert with Walnut Cake and Sauteed Pears. (David has recently posted a modified black pepper ice cream – milk chocolate and black pepper).

Cranberry Granita: For Carolyn and me, this was WAAAAY too much cranberry flavor. The beginning flavor was nice, but the astringent aftertaste was off-putting to me. But! a couple people at dinner like cranberry and they enjoyed it, with one person even taking seconds (when you have 7 desserts, that is saying something).

The process is simple: cook the cranberries with sugar, water, and OJ...

...then blend, strain...

and freeze per the usual granita process.

Next time I would make it with half the amount of cranberry and twice the amount of OJ and see if that works better. On the bright side: a granita is a simple frozen dessert anyone with a freezer can make: no ice cream maker required.

This Epicurious Cranberry Granita recipe will probably be as puckery as David’s, for true cran lovers only.

This other Epicurious one uses Cranberry Juice cocktail and cooked sauce, so might be slightly more palatable to a broader range of tastes. It’s also topped with an Orange Whipped Cream which I think is a great idea for this dish no matter which route you go.

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.

Pumpkin Pecan Pie and Sweet Bay Ice Cream

This dish was based on a misunderstanding.

A few weeks ago, I was brainstorming some seasonal ice cream flavors while cooking at Carolyn and Will’s. Will suggested using a bay and pumpkin combo, which he had seen in a recipe for a savory pumpkin tart infused with bay leaf in Jerry Traunfeld’s The Herbfarm Cookbook.

A couple weeks later, we all had the chance to try that very flavor combination in the sweet form at Traunfeld’s Poppy.

So when Will asked me to bring a dessert to Thanksgiving, and referenced The Herbfarm recipe again, my brain latched on to that. I missed that he was actually suggesting I go with a sage-pumpkin combo.

Oops. Well, I certainly aim to please, so was sorry I missed that tidbit. I think what I wound up doing, though, turned out well enough to make up for it.

So first, the pie. I did a lot of searching on Epicurious and finally decided on this recipe for Pumpkin Pecan Pie with Whiskey Sauce. It got a lot of really great reviews, and I liked the way the pie, made in an 8-inch springform pan, looked in the picture that accompanied the recipe. (With all the cooking frenzy, I didn't get to the Whiskey Sauce part, but the reviews mainly really recommend it as well.)

Carolyn and Will have been chastising me for using canned pumpkin. Since I am easily peer-pressured into making my cooking as complicated as possible, I decided I better start the pumpkin puree from scratch.

This turned out to be a LOT of effort for not a whole heck of a lot of pumpkin. I had to still use a couple of tablespoons of canned puree, risking (and, when I admitted it, eventually receiving) further chastisement.

I had some slight concerns when making the pie filling, as the pumpkin mixture seemed exceptionally sweet. I dialed back the sweeteners in and added a little extra salt to the pecan topping in order to try to mitigate the sweetness, but the finished syrup was still also pretty darn sweet. I started to get a little nervous as I poured everything into the shell.

Now, I could have used this pie-making opportunity as a chance to improve my pastry dough technique but I didn’t. When it comes to pie dough, I just can’t be bothered, which is odd, because I can otherwise always be bothered.

Canned pumpkin aside (which was really just because it hadn’t yet risen to conscious thought that the home cook can start from a whole pumpkin), I am normally eager to do as much from scratch as possible in every recipe.

Someday, I imagine I’ll be part of some snobbish cooking sect that’s all like “You cook with whole molecules? I guess if you like processed food. I only use fresh quarks.”

But there’s still a good chance I’ll be piling those quarks into a Trader Joe’s Pie Crust like I did with this pie because...eh. Can’t be bothered.

So it all went into a storebought crust, and into the oven...for...almost...two...hours...

(Cat also waiting patiently for pie.  Or maybe warming himself by the oven, it's really a mystery that can't ever be solved.)

Despite the storebought crust, two tablespoons of canned pumpkin puree, and slightly-worrying uncooked filling sweetness, the end result was one deeeeeee-licious pie.

(Purty!)

I am realizing I am a contrast lover in my favorite foods. Mixing pecan and pumpkin pie makes you realize how much better each pie’s natural texture is contrasted against the other. Honestly, after eating this, the custardy-ness of a regular pumpkin pie probably won’t do it for me anymore. That was a gateway pie, but now I’ve moved onto this pie equivalent of a speedball.

And as to the Sweet Bay Ice Cream I served with it...Even though it was her dessert at Poppy that used a similar flavor combo, I actually didn’t set out to use a Dana Cree recipe. But as I was google searching for The Herbfarm recipe Will mentioned, I happened upon this recipe of hers on her old blog, so figured I’d give it a shot.

There is a gospel of fresh herbs with many chefs, so I was surprised that she used dry bay leaves. Once I tried the results, I realized ice cream might be one dish that is better served by dry, at least for my tastes.

I’ve made a fresh mint and fresh thyme ice cream, and both of them wound up tasting vegetal. I got more of the note of the fresh leaves breaking down than the actual essential flavor oils they released.

Whereas when the moisture has already been removed with a dry herb, then that cooked-green taste (which, let’s face it, can taste a little rotted) isn’t an issue. I think I might re-do the thyme ice cream with dried and see if that tastes more pleasant.

And while I love to make weird ice creams, my dirty secret is that I usually just like to eat pretty...um...I guess you could say vanilla flavors. I’m more of a freak-in-the-streets, lady-with-my-own-eats kinda ice cream gal. So usually when I make something unusual like this Sweet Bay Ice Cream, I’ll have a couple of bites, but not love it.

But I really loved it with the pie. I’m feeling really challenged trying to explain how bay comes across in a sweet recipe. I keep feeling like imagine the flavor of a eucalyptus cough drop, but take away all the harsh and menthol elements, and then add that to the clean, straight-line taste of a good dairy ice cream. On top of the rich and sweet pie, it was just a lovely combo.

So all in all, while this dish came across because I am a bad listener, ultimately I feel it’s a winner winner, turkey dinner.