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Posts from the ‘Frozen desserts’ Category

Feb 15

Caramelized banana malts (and a tiny little excuse)

Hello there! Happy day-after-Valentine’s. I bet what you need right now is another dessert recipe. Yes? Great. We’re on the same page.

Caramelized-banana-malt

Many apologies for my disappearing over the last few months. Three months, to be exact. Three fairly queasy, fatigued, food-averse months. That’s right, I’m using the little, tiny human growing inside me as my excuse, and believe me, it’s a pretty good one. I wouldn’t wish a job working with/talking about/thinking about food upon any newly pregnant lady, not ever.

But I’m coming back to life, step by step, or at least figuring out what life looks like in these somewhat disorienting circumstances. I’m certainly not in fighting form – a few days ago (one of my first non-teaching cooking attempts in the last three months), I transferred a skillet of pan-roasted chicken thighs from the oven back to the stove and almost immediately grabbed the searing hot handle of the skillet with my bare hand. After a few less-than-ladylike words and some quality time with a running tap of cold water, I turned back to the stove – and proceeded to do the exact same thing with the other hand.

This is your brain on pregnancy. Read more

Aug 9

Watermelon sorbet with rose, mint, and gin

Watermelon_sorbet

I realized recently that this move to Madison is really only the second time in my life that I’ve had a significant move. The first was moving to California for college. I’ve moved up and down to Oregon a few times, but always for a defined period of time, and even the first few times it was with someone who already knew the lay of the land. College was a pretty easy transition, complete with a summer camp-like few weeks of orientation and activities, but this is an entirely different beast. We have little idea of where even the simplest things are in town, and the list of administrative tasks to take care of (e.g. new driver’s licenses) is about a mile long. We sold or otherwise disposed of most of our household items when we left California last summer, meaning we’re starting almost from scratch in a lot of ways, and after five days of driving across the country we were left with mountains of boxes to unpack and an ever-changing collection of shopping lists and errands to run.

It’s been a little exhausting.

More than a little. Read more

Apr 1

6 Comments

Orange-cardamom ice cream

When we were in San Francisco (Remember? Remember when we went to San Francisco and frolicked in its culinary pleasureland? Remember how amazing that was? Sighhh ….), we went to this place. I’d heard and read about it for a few years and had always wanted to go, but it suffers greatly by being a dessert-oriented business in close proximity (as in within 1 block) to this other place, which means my Mission-based dessert capacity is almost 100% always directed elsewhere.  But a 4-day trip to San Fran meant  daily trips to the Mission, finally a good time for Bi-Rite (as well as a stop to Pizzeria Delfina, since my Mission-based lunch capacity is also generally spent at Tartine). Read more

Oct 6

A perfect substitute for those frappa-whatevers

Do you like ridiculous sugary blended coffee drinks? I do. Despite how they make me feel – physically and emotionally – I find them irresistible. Especially in airports. When I worked at a Peet’s I could justify drinking them every once in a while because it really was just milk, ice, espresso, and flavor syrup whirled up in a blender. And because I could alter those ingredients at will without sounding like a fool (“half-caf, soy, 1 pump vanilla, please”). But at most places (and I’m pretty sure even at Peet’s now), blended coffee drinks are a near-lethal combination of milk powder, coffee-flavored ooze, whole milk and/or heavy cream, and flavored syrups so sugary that your innocent little Starbucks purchase is suddenly on-par with a gallon of ice cream.

Read more

Sep 11

9 Comments

The joy of the challenge

{Note, April 13, 2013: Not sure why this post from three years ago was just republished on RSS feeds, and I’m not sure how to remove it … there are some great recipes here (but some incredibly old/poor quality photos), so you may want to revisit this post, but it’s not a new one! Sorry about that …}

I’d say about 75 percent of the time that I’m cooking, I like to do something just beyond my comfort level. Whether it’s doing a recipe I’ve never done before or changing one I know in a way that makes it slightly different, I generally like to learn a little something new when I’m cooking. But every once in a while – usually on a fairly empty weekend day, or when we have people over for dinner – I like to do something really new and different, or something that scares me a little. That’s part of the reason I put together Food List 2010 – to push me to make the more challenging things I want to have as a part of my arsenal. I figure this strategy will help me learn not only to cook the more everyday items with skill and comfort, but will also lend me the ability to reach out every once in a while and try something a little more ambitious with some reasonably certain rate of success. Read more

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