Smoked Ham Hocks and Cranberry Beans
(om nom nom)
Category: food commentary
I took a picture of this dish, which I’ll post when I get home. Delicious, although I’m not very good at dismantling ham hocks. If you cook the time-intensive beans, ham hocks, and onions in tandem, you can have this dish done in a morning. I overbrowned the onions a bit, but all that really did was make them more delicious. I did have to up the salt in the dish to compensate for their resulting sweetness.
New recipes! The reason behind this ice cream extravaganza is that I bought a half gallon of cream last week. (Also, it’s summer.) It is SO MUCH CREAM. I’ve made three batches of ice cream, and I still have four cups left.
The first batch I made was the bourbon and brown sugar ice cream. I had been planning on making a relatively simple, non-cooked ice cream involving chocolate chips and Reese’s Pieces, but when I started getting my ingredients together, I found that we had no white sugar. The local minimart had already closed, and I forgot that I had a neighbor who would totally have given me a cup had I asked, so I went on the internets to see if I could use brown sugar. Answer: yes, but it’d have to be a cooked custard-style ice cream. Glad I did, because the texture in this batch was so wonderful. The bourbon was kind of a last minute add, but I think it tastes great.
The cardamom-honey ice cream I had made once before, and since I was seeing Lydia on Friday, I decided to make it again. I changed the recipe a bit from the first time (different cooking method, different dairy ratios, fewer yolks, etc.), and it turned out better. The ice cream hung together better. My problem with it before was that it turned out too soft. I made another change for the recipe (but not in my batch), which was to cut the cardamom down by half. I just don’t think you really need two tablespoons. That’s a TON of cardamom. I’d like to see if I can made this better by maybe using the seeds inside whole cardamom pods instead of ground cardamom. The texture currently is a little too grainy (the sieve can’t catch all the particles), and I’d like it to be smoother.
I was inspired by the strawberry-sage ice cream recipe over at Ice Cream Ireland, but after talking with my friend Eddie, he put the idea in my head of the classic strawberry-black pepper-balsamic vinegar combination. Well, I didn’t end up putting the balsamic directly into the ice cream (although I am thinking that either a balsamic reduction or some straight good balsamic vinegar drizzled over the top would be PURE WIN), but the resulting ice cream was very tasty. It was my first time doing a fruit ice cream, and I’m not entirely sure I froze it correctly. (Are the strawberries supposed to freeze solid? I guess so. I mean, the water content in them would really dictate that happening.) I also think that just a black pepper, or maybe a black pepper and vanilla ice cream would be lovely. Since the peppercorns were just broken and not ground, they were easily strained out, and the resulting texture on the ice cream base was much better than in the cardamom-honey.
YAY ICE CREAM.
Mother’s Day was on Sunday, and as has come to be expected, J and I made brunch for the moms. J made French toast and a strawberry/balsamic salad, and I made quiche. Kiddo didn’t seem to like it, but everybody else did. I used a prepackaged crust- the horror! It was an organic, whole-wheat crust I got from Whole Foods. And it came in a pan. I’m so lazy. But honestly, my crust skills would not pay any bills (no matter how tiny). Quiche is really easy apart from the crust!
I also made a failure this weekend. While looking at quiche recipes in an old edition of The Joy of Cooking, there was on the same page a recipe for “Nut, Bread, and Cheese Loaf.” (I think that was the name.) I had all the ingredients, and it looked pretty simple. It looked like it’d be meatloaf sans meat. (Wheatloaf?) Anyway, it tasted all right, but the texture and the overall look of the whole thing was disgusting. I attempted to cut it into slices, but it fell apart, and I was left with an unappetizing tan/grey pile. It kind of looked like I had thrown up on the plate and was attempting to eat it again. Lovely thought, isn’t it? I threw it out yesterday, after trying to eat it for lunch.
Good times. D&D tonight.
It’s pathetic when all I have to offer is drinks, isn’t it? Well, I’ll have a new recipe after this weekend. Mother’s Day brunch and all that, you know. The Gin Daisy I tried last Sunday. I was flipping through Jer’s copy of the Williams-Sonoma Bar Guide, looking for something we had all the ingredients for. This seemed simple. It’s quite nice. Stronger than I thought it would be.
R☆ and I were at Target, and we saw some wine cooler-type things made with chai tea. We thought that was kind of a good idea, but that we could make it better (and chepaer). We made the Irish Chai last night. It’s perhaps not quite as thick as it should be- R☆ suggested that maybe the milk should be frothed. That would probably work, but it adds extra complications for those of us who don’t have one of those little frothy wand things.
I’d like to take a moment to recognize one of my favorite lunch places.
It’s not a very glamorous name. And it hasn’t gotten a lot of buzz on the Intertubes, unfortunately. (Here it is on Yelp as well as a couple mentions on Chowhound.)
It’s a very small deli/market run by a very friendly Polish guy from Chicago. He grills the sausages on a Weber grill on the patio out back, then puts them on a roll with sauerkraut and spicy mustard. It’s good! The market section sells a bunch of Polish foods- jams, mustards, etc.
Note to my dad: the next time we go out for lunch, I’m taking you here!
No cooking for Sarah. Bad Sarah.
Jer, Zed, and I tried Potsticker King on Friday. Apart from some weirdness with our waiter, who would not let me order the
I was going to go to the Cherry Blossom Festival up in San Francisco yesterday to meet up with Lydia and check out the cosplay events. But I couldn’t find anyone to carpool with, and last year I drove up, spent about an hour failing to find parking, and drove back home, annoyed beyond belief. So I skipped it. Instead, I biked up to Mountain View and had a giant burrito at Los Charros, more than negating any good effect the biking may have done for me. Tasty!
Then I went with R☆ and Zed to Chili’s for dinner. My salad was lamer than usual (not much lettuce but a ton of croutons), but our waiter kept up with my Diet Coke consumption like a pro. So thank you, Peter from the Cupertino Chili’s.
I started a new costume on Saturday. I need to make a dress and a shrug, plus some accessories. It’s been pretty tough so far, but hopefully I’ll have something done by the end of the week.
Nothing new on the cooking front, I’m sad to say. I have a box of matzoh that needs using, so I was thinking about making the matzoh kugel my mom made for the seder. It was really, really tasty. Also excellent were the lamb chops my dad made. He used a mixture of matzoh crumbs, mustard, rosemary, oregano, and garlic on them. So good!
I started biking to work last week. It takes roughly forever (where forever equals an hour each way), but it’s good for me to do some sort of physical activity besides walking to McDonald’s. Before last week, I hadn’t ridden a bike in eight or nine years. Last week (and probably this week, too), I was so damn sore. Sitting on a bike hurts a lot more than I remember.
I signed up for a YouTube account the weekend before last. I’m very slowly capturing and uploading The Marvelous Land of Oz, a (surprisingly faithful) musical version of L. Frank Baum’s second Oz book. The sound and picture quality is pretty terrible, since this is a homemade VHS copy from a 1981 production.
After I finish this, I’m planning on uploading an Oz/Baum documentary and then a fairly rare Douglas Adams special.
Kiddo’s birthday party was yesterday, and it was great fun. Barbara May and her family had made a ridiculous cake, as usual. 🙂 It was a tall cake, with four faces, and it rotated so that you could pair up different heads, bodies, and legs in the manner of a children’s book.
I brought along my bean dip and liptauer, as well as some syrup for drinks that didn’t get used because I couldn’t find club soda at Target. I didn’t really have high hopes for it, anyway.
Last weekend, my roommates went to Dave and Buster’s, an arcade/bar/restaurant thing. They got a lot of tickets on the machines and exchanged them for a large plush Batman figure, which they then gave to me. I noticed that Batman was just about the same height as my American Girl dolls (even though his head is tiny in comparison). And that discovery led to Batman attending a tea party. Hurray!
Today’s my birthday! I’m all cube-y.
And check out the new pasta recipe I made last night. Zed and I both enjoyed it. I should’ve used my brain, though, and remembered that R☆ doesn’t eat beef (pepperoni is a mixture of pork and beef). So he was unable to eat it. Sorry!