food commentary – Page 7

I made this dip/spread on Tuesday, but didn’t try it until Wednesday night. (We had D&D and I just forgot about it.) It is clearly not traditional Liptauer. But it’s still pretty good. I did a recipe search on the ol’ intertubes and just kind of synthesized a bunch of different things.

Hate anchovies? Use chopped gherkins instead. Don’t like heat? Leave out the chili powder. Want to make your breath smell even worse afterwards? Add some chopped onion.

I’ve been eating it with wheat thins. Yummy.

I made a new recipe last night! But I haven’t tried it yet. I’ll let you know how it turns out later today.

Zed made three kinds of pesto on Sunday. The first is like pesto butter. We’ve just been smearing it on bread. It’s very nice. There’s one with roasted red peppers and one normal one. He got pretty frustrated with the blender when he was making it. He was shoving skewers into the bottom to try and dislodge stuck basil. I thought he was going to electrocute himself or something.

Last night was D&D. Kaya got killed again. So sad. Stupid dwarven waraxes and their x3 criticals. The party got her reincarnated. She came back as a Lizardfolk. So now she’s a pretty hideous reptilian humanoid… but! She got a lot of nice perks with the body swap, the best of which was a +5 natural armor bonus. R☆ pointed out that that’s like I saved over 50,000 gold pieces (what an amulet of natural armor +5 would cost). So I guess it’s not too bad? Also, the +2 strength and constitution is nice. Even though she went down a level, Kaya has more hit points than before.

Blogger made me upgrade my blog. That annoyed me. But I guess it didn’t change anything, so that’s good. I was worried that since I have some special customizations (thanks Barbara May!) that aren’t part of the standard Blogger/Blogspot templates, everything would get screwed up somehow.

If you’re a LiveJournal user and want this blog on your friends page, click here. Rosy set up an LJ RSS feed thingy for me.

I keep making ice cream!

On Sunday I made honey-cardamom ice cream. I think it’s wonderful, although I’m guessing that I added a little too much honey, because it’s not hardening properly (the picture that accompanies the recipe? I could not do that). It tastes lovely, though. R☆ thinks it’s a little too cardamommy, but Zed and Jer seem to like it.

Last night I made mocha ice cream. I have high hopes for this one. But I always have high hopes. I’ll try it tonight.

I brought the subpar Earl Grey to work. We’ll see if the strategy of “there’s nothing else to eat for lunch, so why not ice cream?” works.

Fabulous. Go read this. It’s Anthony Bourdain being acerbic, what more do you need?

The Earl Grey ice cream? HORRIBLE. It tastes incredibly fake. R☆ said, and I agree, that it somehow tastes even faker than those milk teas we love so dearly (no bubbles, please). And beyond the taste is the texture. I’m not sure what I did, but I ended up making what is essentially butter clumps in it. I melted the ice cream, strained it, and refreezed it, but I guess I just made new butter. It’s weird. And disheartening. I guess I’ll just go over to Ice Cream Ireland and read in awe, because I am failing at this stuff.

I made another to-be-frozen custard last night. After work, it’s going to turn into Earl Grey ice cream. So the taste will be a little citrus, a little tea- I think it’s a great concept.

The recipe I used was confusing. It mentioned adding the sugar twice. Plus the recipe didn’t have enough sugar in it, in my (and R☆’s) opinion. And it never told me when to add the cream. So I was kind of winging it. The eggs coagulated on me a little bit because I was too overzealous with the heat.

But I think it’ll turn out well.

Last night R☆ and I made an ice cream which is probably an abomination against nature. It’s… very, very peculiar.

I wasn’t sure if I should post this recipe… it’s so full of “semi-homade”-ness.

But since I haven’t written anything in almost two weeks, here goes.

Last night, I had what can best be described as a religious experience.

Popcorn popped in bacon fat.

It was AMAZING. Thank you, Aleta Watson of the San Jose Mercury News and Joanna Pruess, author of Seduced by Bacon!

I tried the Bailey’s ice cream last night, and it was quite tasty. First there was a pretty strong hit of vanilla (I used my new double strength vanilla from Penzey’s, a Christmas present from J and Barbara May), and then the Bailey’s came across in the aftertaste. Mild, as R☆ mentioned in the comments, but very nice and smooth. It’s a pretty soft ice cream because of the alcohol. I think if I were to make this again, I might try a nonalcoholic vanilla extract (I know it exists, I think I’ve seen it at Trader Joe’s) or soak a vanilla bean in the Bailey’s.

I’m always freaked out about tempering eggs. I’m so afraid I’m going to scramble them. In the past, I’ve probably erred on the side of not cooking them thoroughly enough. However, the custard base thickened properly, so I guess I did it right this time.

Recipe follows.