Peppermint Ice Cream with Hot Fudge Sauce

We always had a tacky Christmas tree growing up- I mean really tacky, just how I like it. We used multi-colored lights, garlands of both silver and gold, lots of shiny ball ornaments, tinsel, and candy canes. I think I even remember adding a few popcorn strands to that mess one year. Well, I love nostalgia, and I love a good tacky Christmas tree, so I still tend to follow my old family tree-decorating traditions. We forgot the tinsel this year, sadly, but not the candy canes! The problem is, what to do with all of those candy canes when Christmas is over? I usually put them in a bowl by the front door in the hopes that someone will eat them, but inevitably end up throwing them away after a month or so. Not this year! I believe I have started a new tradition for our little family- peppermint ice cream!

What better way is there to avoid being wasteful and still have a tacky tree than to smash your leftover candy canes to smithereens and pour them into homemade ice cream, I ask you? Ice cream is simple to make at home as long as you have the proper equipment. I always keep my ice cream maker in the freezer, because I am sort of a last-minute cook: I rarely plan my culinary adventures in advance, and the ice cream maker takes fifteen hours to chill. I use basically the same recipe for all of my homemade ice creams, and just tweak the flavors to suit my mood and ingredients. This recipe is half and half cream & pet milk, mainly because I had the pet milk in my pantry and preferred to use that than to use up all of my daughter's milk. You could use whole milk in place of the evaporated milk, or you could just omit the milk altogether and use all heavy cream. You will get basically the same end result with any of the above combinations, with just slightly varying levels of richness.

Peppermint Ice Cream
makes a quart plus one bowl


2 c evaporated milk
2 c heavy cream
3/4 cup of sugar
6 egg yolks, beaten until pale and smooth
1 teaspoon peppermint extract
5 or six candy canes, placed in a ziplock bag and beaten with a rolling pin

Combine milk, cream, and sugar in a medium sauce pan and stir to combine. Cook over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved and the liquid has almost come to a boil. Slowly pour about half of the liquid into the egg yolks, stirring all the while. Then pour the egg mixture back into the saucepan with the remaining liquid and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture coats the back of a wooden spoon. Add the extract and stir to combine. Pour the mixture through a sieve and into a bowl set over an ice-water bath. Stir with a whisk to chill. Once the mixture is cold, follow the instructions for your ice cream maker and chill in the freezer. Serve with hot fudge sauce.

Note: I added a few drops of "soft pink" gel food coloring to my ice cream to make it pink, but you could leave it out or substitute a few drops of plain ole red food coloring if you like.

Growing up, we always had our peppermint ice cream with hot fudge sauce, so here is my version:

Hot Fudge Sauce
makes about 1 1/2 cups

1 stick butter
3 T cocoa powder
1 t vanilla
1 t instant coffee granules
pinch salt
6 T evaporated milk (or just use whole milk)
1 c powdered sugar

Heat all ingredients except the sugar in a medium sauce pan over medium-high heat until melted and smooth.  Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the sugar until melted and smooth.  Enjoy!

Chicken Pot Pie

I went to the grocery on Tuesday to stock up on a few items because snow was predicted for today in Memphis, and goodness knows that Memphians completely lose track of their senses when they think there is going to be weather. I successfully avoided the snow crowds at the grocery (don't get me started on the midtown Schnuck's) and made it home with my fryer, intended for Zuni chicken, one of our favorite dinners. Chad came home for lunch, however, and casually mentioned that he might like to have chicken pot pie sometime (picture light bulb over head), so I decided to go with that. Aren't I just a good little wife?

The sauce for this recipe starts with bacon. Bacon makes everything good. I used the drippings from the bacon to cook the vegetables, then added flour to thicken the sauce, which was eventually made from the fryer I got- a carrot, half an onion, a few cloves of garlic, a rib of celery, some peppercorns and water to cover, cooked for a couple of hours=stock and boiled chicken. Two birds, one stone! No pun intended. Anyway there was only one bird, but I digress. Added the stock to the flour and vegetables, thickened with a buerre manie (pronounced burr monyay) and topped with pastry...voila! Chicken pot pie!

I used only a top crust, and I think it was just the right amount of pastry for this recipe. You could certainly do a bottom crust if you like, just double the recipe for the pastry and blind bake the bottom crust.

Shortcuts: use canned stock and store-bought pie dough (gasp!). On pie crust: if you have a food processor, it really is easy. Just have your ingredients measured out before you begin. You'll feel like a pro in no time. You can use all butter if you are queasy about shortening- the shortening just makes the crust easier to deal with.

Chicken Pot Pie

for the stock:
1 whole chicken
1 carrot, broken in half
1 rib celery, broken in half
1/2 onion (you don't even have to peel it!)
3 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
3 cloves garlic, smashed
salt to taste

for the pastry:
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup shortening, cold and cut into pieces
1/4 cup butter, cold and cut into pieces
1/4 cup cold water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar

for the filling:
3 slices bacon
1/2 onion, chopped
1 rib celery, chopped
2 carrots, cut diagonally into 1-inch chunks
2 tablespoons flour + 2 more tablespoons for the buerre manie
3 cups chicken stock, warm
2 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
1 cup frozen peas
salt and pepper to taste

egg wash made with one egg yolk and a tablespoon of water

First make the stock. Place the first 7 ingredients in a large pot and fill with water to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for a couple of hours. Season to taste with salt. Strain the stock through a sieve and discard all except the chicken. Take the meat off of the chicken bones and set aside 2 cups for the pot pie. Save any extra meat for chicken salad!

Make the pastry: In a food processor, pulse the flour and salt and sugar to combine. Scatter the butter and shortening over the flour mixture and pulse a few times until it looks like coarse meal. With the motor running, add the cold water and process until the crust starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl. Take the dough out and press it into a disk and wrap in plastic wrap, then let it rest in the fridge for an hour.

Make the filling: In a large saute pan over medium-high heat, cook the bacon until just crispy. Remove to a paper-towel-lined plate and let drain. Chop the bacon when it is drained. In the meantime, cook the onion and celery in the bacon drippings until softened. Add the carrots and cook for a couple of minutes more. Sprinkle two tablespoons of the flour over the cooked vegetables and stir to coat the vegetables. Add the warm stock and stir to combine. Let the remaining stock cool off a little and then pour into ziplocks to store in the freezer for future use.

Using a fork, combine the remaining two tablespoons of flour with the softened butter to make a buerre manie. Stir the buerre manie into the sauce and bring to a boil, cook until thickened. Add the frozen peas and the chicken. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Pour the mixture into a pie pan.

Use a rolling pin to roll out the pastry into a circle just slightly larger than your pie pan. Roll the crust onto the pin and unroll it over your pie pan. Crimp the edges of the pastry onto the pie pan. Brush the pastry with the egg wash and cut a few slits in the center of the pastry to allow the steam to vent.

Bake for about thirty minutes, until the pastry is golden brown. Check your pie about halfway through. If your edges start to get too brown before the center of the pastry is done, cover them with tin foil.

Let the pie rest for about ten minutes before cutting into it. Enjoy!

Biscuits are better at home

Biscuits are one of those things that I just can't make. I have tried various recipes over time, and they never turn out how I want them to. They're either too hard, too flat, taste like nothing, or are just plain ugly. That is, until today.

I went to a friend's Christmas party Saturday night and really did my part helping her get rid of her red wine. Ugh. So, Sunday morning when I wanted sausage biscuits from the Barksdale to ease my pain, getting showered and dressed and out into the cold seemed like far too much effort to exert just for some breakfast. The good news: we had half a package of sausage in the freezer. So, time to make biscuits! I checked my favorite southern cookbook, The Lee Brothers Southern Cookbook, and located a recipe for bird eye buttermilk biscuits. Problem #1: no buttermilk. Problem #2: not even any milk! We did have some heavy cream leftover from a recent baking extravaganza, so I squeezed a little lemon juice into the cream and went with it. The recipe was also for little 2-inch biscuits, but I went ahead and used a juice glass to cut mine out. I wanted to make sausage biscuits after all, not hors d'oeuvres. Prepared for failure due to my long history of ruining biscuits and to the fact that I tweaked what was probably a perfectly good recipe out of sheer laziness, I made biscuit dough. I checked them a couple of times while they were baking and began to realize that I had, in fact, made biscuits! They were rising beautifully and turning brown on the tops...breakfast was on the way!

An important thing about biscuits: don't overwork the dough or they will be tough. For this reason, I chose not to make any biscuits from the scraps, but if you need more biscuits, you can always roll out the scraps to make a few more. They'll just be a little tougher than the first round.

Cream biscuits:
makes 6-8 biscuits

2 cups flour
1 T baking powder
4 t sugar
1 t salt
4 T cold butter, cut into small pieces
2 T cold shortening, cut into pieces
3/4 c cream with a squeeze of lemon juice

Preheat oven to 400. In the food processor, mix together the dry ingredients. Scatter the butter and shortening over the dry ingredients and pulse a few times until the mixture looks like coarse meal. Add the heavy cream and pulse a couple more times, just until the dough comes together. Remove the dough from the bowl of the food processor to a floured board and knead for about 30 seconds. Pat the dough into a rectangle about an inch thick. Fold the left third of the rectangle in towards the center, then fold the right third in towards the center. Fold in the same manner a couple more times. Roll the rectangle gently out into a rectangle about an inch thick, and use a 4-inch round cutter or a glass to cut biscuits. Place the biscuits in an ungreased pan (I use a cake pan) with the sides almost touching. Bake for about 20 minutes, until the tops are golden brown.

Baked Pappardelle, or the pot roast that lived on...

Believe it or not, this cheesy (and delicious, if I do say so myself) baked pasta dish began as a pot roast! The same day I made the duck rilettes, Chad and I also made a yummy pot roast dinner for friends. We browned the (red wine-marinated) chuck roast we got from Neola Farms in bacon fat, then braised it for a few hours with red wine, vegetables, and a bouquet garni. When it was tender to the point of falling apart, we removed the roast from the cooking liquid, reduced the liquid, and used it to glaze the roast at a higher temperature in the oven.

Since Chad and I didn't really have any idea how many people to expect for dinner, we ended up making far too much. (As opposed to our usual m.o. of making not enough? Ha!) Result? A large plate piled with leftover braised beef. What to do? Make bolognese! And make it I did.

Chad was out of town for a week or so, and I seem always to be inspired to make long-cooking recipes when I am in the house by myself. I used an onion, a carrot, some garlic, six big cans of organic whole tomatoes, the leftover beef, and a heck of a lot of olive oil, as well as some red wine vinegar to make my bolognese. The sauce cooked for about three hours, and by then the meat was completely changed from lovely tender pot roast to a wonderful, melty texture in the bolognese. I froze the sauce and gave half to my grandmother, who lived in Italy for a good while with my father and the rest of the family way before I was born. Incidentally, I was at her house a few days ago, and I noticed that the sauce is still in the freezer untouched. Hmmm...

The other half lived in my freezer for a couple of weeks until Chad and I decided to thaw it out and have it for dinner with some homemade pappardelle. Our pasta dough: 3 cups white flour, 1 cup wheat flour, a sprinkling of cornmeal, and six eggs. We rolled out the dough with the trusty kitchenaid pasta roller (gasp! I know, I'm just lazy that way) and cut the noodles with a pizza cutter. This was a delicious dinner, and the pasta was so easy to make that I really feel bad for ever eating boxed pasta.

And finally, after a very long day this week, we tried to go to Bari, our most favoritest restaurant in the whole wide world, with the kids to grab a quick dinner before heading home for bath time and bed time, but were unable to stay because the bar was packed (yes, we eat at the bar with our children. Big deal, wanna fight about it?) so we went home and had to scrounge for dinner. Enter the leftover pappardelle from two nights previous...put it in a baking dish, poured a little heavy cream over it and topped with bread crumbs, grated parm, and salt and pepper, and voila! The third and best incarnation of the pot roast: baked pappardelle.

Phew!

By the way, wonderful and more exact recipes for the pot roast and the bolognese can be found in one of my favorite cookbooks, Cooking by James Peterson.

Gjetost Ski Queen "cheese"

Ski Queen is without a doubt the weirdest cheese I have ever tried. My cousin Alison sliced me a bit after she tasted ski queen at Fresh Market, where it was paired with apple slices, which makes perfect sense for a cheese that looks and tastes like a big caramel. I know it sounds gross, but it isn't. It's more...intriguing.

I looked at the website for this strange Norwegian cheese, and I am now convinced that you go to Oslo for the sweaters, not for the food. Check out this recipe for a stew that includes ski queen cheese and reindeer meat, just in time for the holidays! And apparently, if you add ski queen to your gravy, you'll never want to make gravy without it again. I don't know about you, but I'm not buying it. Well, I mean, I bought the cheese, but I'm sure as hell not putting it in my gravy!

Duck Rillettes

Rillettes is a spread similar to pate that is made with meat poached in its own fat until it is falling apart. Not a bad start, eh? Since this type of preparation of meat is exactly how you end up with duck confit, I thought it would be a brilliant use of the enormous can of duck confit that Marion and Conan brought me from France ages ago. We had some friends for Sunday dinner recently, and I decided it was time to use the can of duck confit. It was a toss-up between rillettes and cassoulet, neither of which I had ever made, and both of which I really wanted to make. Since time is always a consideration when you have two small children, and the rillettes are infinitely easier to make than any cassoulet recipe I read, I made the rillettes.

The first time I had rillettes was at Les Halles, Anthony Bourdain's restaurant in New York, and it was pork rillettes (traditional) rather than duck. As far as I'm concerned, you could cook almost any kind of meat in a big pot of fat and it would probably be delicious, so I was a fan of rillettes before I ever tasted any. The recipe that I followed used butter instead of additional duck fat, and was seasoned with cognac, pepper, and parsley: oh-so french!

Duck Rillettes
adapted from foodnetwork.com, Emeril Lagasse

* 1 recipe Duck Confit (4 legs)
* 1/4 cup minced onions
* 1 tablespoon minced parsley
* 10 garlic cloves, reserved from the Duck Confit
* 1 tablespoon cognac
* 1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) butter
* 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 2 tablespoons fat reserved from the Duck Confit

Pull duck meat from the bones and shred. Discard skin and bones.

Combine the pulled meat, and all of the remaining ingredients, in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the dough hook. Beat at medium speed for about 1 minute, or until everything is well mixed. Or use a food processor, taking care not to puree the mixture or let it turn into a paste. The texture should be like finely chopped meat.

Serve rillette with crostini.

If not using immediately, spoon rillette into ramekins and cover with reserved fat from the duck confit. Store in an airtight container, in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.

By the way, you end up with a lot of extra duck fat when you use the meat for the rillettes. I roasted fingerling potatoes in some of it that same night to go with the pot roast...dang! Good stuff.

Midtown Farmer's Market

I visited this market Monday and, while I wouldn't really call it a farmer's market, it is definitely not your typical Memphis grocery. The produce was a little sparse, but the store did carry a wide variety of Neola Farms meats as well as the ridiculously low-priced seafood from Muddy's. A friend and I got a pound of head-on shrimp for $10 and a really nice grouper filet for $7. (Frozen, FYI) The store carries a selection of Aunt Lizzie's products, and also frozen entrees and sides from No Time to Cook. I hope this market sticks around for a while!



The Midtown Farmer's Market is directly across Union Avenue from Wiles-Smith Drugstore, where you can get yourself an orange freeze to reward yourself for being such a responsible shopper! (Or make yourself one at home by blending orange sherbert and orange juice together)