tea berry-blue

I made a ricotta-based gelato today, with a flavor reminiscent of cannoli filling.

This was so incredibly dense and thick and velvety smooth; I have never made a gelato like this before. I could inhale the whole thing, except that it’s too rich for that!!!

Mirrored from Nommable!.

Lately, I’ve developed a fondness for homemade marshmallows. I’ve been making marshmallows on and off for a few years now, but never really started experimenting with them, although I Had Ideas.

Let me start with a secret: making marshmallows is easy. It is so ridiculously easy, and fairly reasonably-priced, and the results are so good, that if you have forty minutes to make them and don’t mind waiting overnight to have marshmallows, you might never buy store-bought marshmallows again.

I’m serious.

Basically, marshmallows are simple: you boil a mixture of 1 cup sugar, 1 cup corn syrup, 1/2 cup water, until it reaches about 250 degrees Fahrenheit on a candy thermometer. You pour the sugar solution into a blender where you have .75 oz of gelatin in another 1/2 cup water. The solution will foam up; you will turn the mixer on to its highest speed and mix for ten to fifteen minutes, at which point you will feel like Bartholomew Cubbins fighting off the Oobleck. You will coat a rubber spatula in margarine, which will make the Oobleck miraculously slide off the spatula, as you scrape it into a greased baking sheet lined with a mixture of 1/2 cornstarch, 1/2 confectioners’ sugar. You will let it sit overnight. In the morning, there are marshmallows. You can cut them apart with scissors, and then toss them in more sugar-cornstarch.

The basic trick to marshmallows is just to have a really good mixer. I destroyed two hand mixers making marshmallows, which had a lot to do with why I didn’t make them very often– but then, for Christmas this year, my parents gave me a standing mixer. And it makes a huge difference in the marshmallow-making process.

The thing with marshmallows is that they required heavy whipping for an extended period of time. So if you have a hand mixer, you had better have a book in the other hand or a television in the same room as your mixer. Or something. This is why having the standing mixer makes such a difference.

So once I got the mixer, I really started spending a lot of time playing with flavors. I started logically– infusing herbs in the sugar syrup, peppermint once, and lavender and tarragon another time. Then I moved on, realizing I could substitute some of the unflavored gelatin for Jell-o, and get day-glo marshmallows with delicious artificial candy flavors. Lately, I’ve been playing with boozemallows, and I’ve done three flavors that are all quite good: Angostura, Fernet-Branca, and Sazerac.

The Sazerac marshmallows were the first ones I made that actually approximate a cocktail instead of just having a bit of a specific ingredient flavoring the marshmallow. They’re very mild, but if you eat them alone, you can taste all the subtle flavors you expect from a Sazerac: whiskey, absinthe, and Peychaud’s, and they even have the tiniest tinge of pink to them (though it doesn’t come across much in the photo).

To the recipe I related above, I added about 1/4 cup Catoctin Creek Roundstone Rye, about 1/8 cup Tenneyson Absinthe, and about ten dashes of Peychaud’s bitters– I added these right at the beginning of the whipping process, into the mixer. Use a splash guard for your mixer if you have one. You can taste the marshmallow to see if you want more or less of any ingredient, and it’s easy to add a little bit more later on– as long as it’s not too much, it mixes in well.

Of course, once the marshmallows are done, I recommend popping a couple of them into a glass of whiskey.

Mirrored from Nommable!.

When I was a little girl, my mother was one of those Kitchen Goddess moms, the ones who made ten or twelve kinds of cookies for Christmas, as well as fudge and sometimes some other candies. Christmastime, or the time leading up to Christmas, was an absolutely magical time for me, and I would arrive home from school every day to discover new delicacies stored neatly in containers and tins, new smells wafting from every corner. But the best part was that once school was over for the day and homework was done, it was time to help. There was something even more magical about practicing the alchemy that created the treats we would serve and give away to friends and family.

Now, we’ve cut back quite a lot. We don’t have big parties or huge family get-togethers anymore, and for the most part, we don’t really miss them. But there are a few kinds of cookies that we make every year, no matter what, although maybe in smaller quantities than we made when I was a child. (There is a note on one recipe, hand-written by my mother, from the year I graduated high school: 1996, 6 recipes= 375 cookies.) These are the cookies that make Christmas Christmas for me. They don’t really make an appearance the rest of the year, but at Christmastime, they are on every tray. They might not be the shiniest or prettiest or most colorful cookies, but they’re the ones that taste the best, or remind me the most of happy family times.

The cookbook shows above is the 1966 Woman’s Day Cookie Cookbook. It’s torn apart (missing the back cover), dogeared, yellowed, and covered in ballpoint-pen-notes. We don’t use it for much, apart from one very special recipe.

Mirrored from Nommable!.

Have you ever had a quail egg?

If you haven’t, they are tiny and delicious:

They are often just served raw or lightly poached over other food, or pickled.  Anyway, I was at the market (if you can’t get them at your usual grocery store, try an Asian market; they cost around $3 for a package of 18 near me in New York City) and quail eggs were on sale, so I thought it would be fun to try ice cream with them.

The ice cream was actually a bit lighter and milkier than a traditional custard-based chicken egg ice cream, which I found to be very interesting, especially with those extra raw eggs added in.  Other than that, there is not too much of a difference.  It was pretty good lightly sweet ice cream.

Mirrored from Nommable!.

Mirrored from Nommable!.

 

Mirrored from Nommable!.

 

Please also take a moment to check out my recipe for blueberry-peach gelato on Nommable!

Mirrored from Nommable!.

This is the very first post on Nommable! And it is delicious!

A few weeks ago, I asked the folks who read my recipe posts to suggest ice cream flavors they would like to see. The consensus was overwhelmingly for bacon ice cream! Here’s what I’ve got for you! It’s an easy recipe that can be made at home with a regular consumer-grade ice cream maker. I used a gourmet bacon toffee for the toffee chunks, but you can replace that with your favorite toffee bar or chocolate chips if you can’t find a bacon toffee. Bacon seems to be trendy right now, though, so check out your local chocolate shop– a lot of them have chocolate-covered candied bacon around here!

PS– A few of you have expressed an interest in writing for Nommable! If you’d like to post regularly or semi-regularly, you can email me at demiurge@antagonia.net with your preferred username, and I’ll set up your account. If you have a single submission you’d like to send my way, you can go to the contribute page on the website.

Mirrored from Nommable!.