Pudding is the New Ice Cream

Really, I mean that! This isn't just a snowclone or a marketing concept. It's ice cream; the ice cream I made:

Last week Julie, got a craving for cardamom rice pudding. So she looked at a variety of recipes on line and settled on this one, from the man who Julie used to call my "boyfriend." We didn't have any cream in the house at the time, so I increased the amounts of cow and coconut milk instead. The pudding was delicious, with the sharpness of the cardamom cut against the sweetness of the creamy rice and raisins and the great nutty crunch of the pistachios.

Then I thought, I haven't made ice cream in a little while, and most ice cream uses a custard base, so maybe this stuff would work. Armed with something closer to the correct ingredients (I basically doubled the liquid part, using one cup of rice with two cups milk, one cup coconut milk, one cup cream. 1/2 cup sugar, one full teaspoon ground cardamom, and about 1/2 cup each golden raisins and pistachios) I tried to make my vision a reality. And, what do you know, it worked! Julie still finds the rice in the ice cream confusing and it tends to freeze harder than I'd like it to, necessitating long warm up times for serving. I tried soaking the golden raisins in a little rum, but I think that I should have done that longer and use more. Hmm, future pudding based ice cream strategies to ponder.

The cardamom rice pudding ice cream is served here with a decent but forgettable chocolate hazelnut cake. I think I overburdened the cake by adding twice the amount of hazelnuts (I had some booze soaked one left over from liqueur making) and it ended up too dense and dry. I think I need to work on my bundt cake mojo.

Blood Orange and Hazelnut Salad and Dolmas

This is another one of those meals that was midway between an everyday fridge cleaner and a what-the-hell-are-we-doing-cooking-like-this-when-we-don't-have-company-coming meal.

Tis the season of bountiful citrus, and the co-op lately has been running specials on these gorgeous looking blood oranges. We first started buying blood oranges at the Dekalb Farmer's Market, and I only realized recently, after reading everyone's favorite food book from last year that their flesh has a flavor in between oranges and raspberries. Our standard salad recipe lately has been: lettuce (usually green or red leaf), possibly sliced carrots, some form of nut (thanks to Trader Joe's our freezer is generally stocked with an an assortment), and, at least for Julie, some form of citrus. These blood oranges seemed to call out quietly, but insistently, for hazelnuts, so we toasted some, rubbed the skins off and sprinkled them over the top. After sectioning the blood oranges, I made a quick vinaigrette with some zest and the juice of the remaining fruit. Such a nice combination textures and of bitter, sweet and sour flavors.

I don't remember the first time I made dolmas. My parents' time living in Chicago meant that they were well acquainted with the deliciousness of Greek food long before we could afford to go to the few Greek restaurants in the Twin Cities, and I know that they made dolmades once or twice in my childhood. It was probably sometime after becoming a vegetarian in high school that my mom and I first made their vegetarian, middle eastern cousins, dolmas, for some holiday gathering.
Julie and I made dolmas for a pot luck dinner that we hosted recently with folks from the History Center, and they were a big hit (or as much as anything can be when you're trying a little bit of everything from seven or eight tasty dishes). However, the big jar of grape leaves from Bill's costs about the same as the small jar of grape leaves, and so it seems wasteful not to buy the big jar and then wasteful not to make more within a couple of weeks so that the remaining grape leave don't get forgotten in the fridge and eventually turn moldy, like they did the last time. Anyway, once you get the hang of rolling them, it's really not that much work, and we put them in the oven to cook while we went to the gym for an hour. We used this recipe, without the green onions, and we baked them in the oven uncovered at 375 for an hour (This gives a chance for the dolmas to cook to tenderness and most of the water to steam away, so they're not soggy). Serve with some form of tzatziki or yogurt sauce. Wonderful lemony, pine nutty, oniony, ricey goodness.

Pea, Onion and Broccoli Soup, with Chard

Split pea soup was one of my Dad's favorite dishes, but something I never learned to like. It always just tasted of dust and salt and, I don't know, sadness?, to me. Every so often, Julie will ask me if split pea soup sounds good, and I say, no, it will never sound good. If you want to make it, I will eat it, but I will never be excited about it.

And so it came about the other week that we had an abundance of broccoli and notions of making it into a soup. Julie was in charge of finding the recipe, and, after disqualifying the countless milky and bland cream of broccoli soups she found, she looked inside the modestly titled The Best Ever Vegetarian Cookbook, which she had purchased on clearance a couple months back after falling for its many lovely and helpful pictures (Julie being a visually oriented cookbook shopper). There, she found a recipe for Pea, Leek and Broccoli soup, which sounded tasty enough, since the peas would be (frozen) fresh, rather than dried and split. Leeks, however, are expensive at the moment, and we didn't have any in the house, so I decided to substitute onions and to up the flavor component by caramelizing them. I made it for our friend Monique along with a quick saute of chard, and Julie enjoyed the leftovers the next day.

It was amazing. The sweetness of the peas really complemented the deeper green flavors of the broccoli and the sweet richness of the onions brought it all together. You could grate a sharp cheese over the top of this, or just enjoy it with some toasted bread. I may make it again in a couple of days. Here's the adapted recipe.

Dice one large onion and saute in a dutch oven or sturdy soup pot with two tablespoons olive oil and one tablespoon butter over medium-low heat until soft and brown, about fifteen minutes (part way through, you may want to deglaze with some wine and add three or four cloves of garlic, sliced). Add one quart vegetable stock and two medium potatoes, diced. Bring up to a boil, stirring to work in any caramelized bits. Cover and simmer about ten minutes. Add half a pound of fresh broccoli, cut into one to two inch pieces, and one and a half cups frozen peas. Cover and simmer ten minutes more, stirring occasionally. Blend the soup to your desired consistency. (I used a hand blender, so it still had some texture to it, which we enjoy. For smoother puree, work in batches with a blender.) Season with salt and pepper and garnish to your heart's content.

Healing Thai Soup

So Julie's been dealing with a cold for the past week and I've had my tonsils kicking at me as well, so we decided that it was time for some healing and nourishing soup. So Julie stopped by Shuang Hur and picked up lemon grass, galangal and kafir lime leaf. I made some vegetable stock from the vegetable odds and ends that we keep in the freezer for just such occaisions. To make the soup from there: take about two quarts of vegetable stock and simmer it with six lime leaves, three lemon grass stalks (peeled and chopped into sections) and one three inch knob of galangal sliced into 1/8th inch coins for an hour. Add a couple of dried shitake to rehydrate in the stock for the last fifteen minutes.

After an hour remove the aromatics and discard (set the mushrooms aside until they're cool enough to handle, remove the stem, slice and return to the pot). Add vegetables of your choosing, spacing them out through the cooking process so that they finish at roughly the same time. We added first carrots and sweet potatoes, followed by onions, thai red chilis, garlic, sliced mushrooms and swiss chard, then chopped gluten and coconut milk to thicken and enrich the stock (we've made this before as a dinner party main dish, and added two full cans of coconut milk and a couple of tablespoons of red curry paste; this time we were feeling more basic, so only added about half a can of coconut milk). When the soup was in the bowls, we sprinkled on cilantro, sliced green onion and toasted cashews.

Ahhh, the healing powers of soup.