Calas

Did a Mardi Gras-themed dinner last night with JP. Got to break out my new New Orleans cookbook (thanks Aimee and Craig!) for the first time. Tough to kosherize those entrees, but the desserts were no problem. Pictured here are calas, fried doughy balls of rice, rolled in cinammon and sugar. Interesting because there's yeast and flour in the batter, like a bread, but also mashed up cooked long-grain rice. The recipe recommended serving them with cane sugar, which I don't even know how to find around here. Honey turned out to be a good substitute. Maple syrup, not quite as much.

Lemon-Rosemary and Lime-Mint Sorbet & Martinis

At my sister's birthday dinner a couple weeks ago, one of her roommates made these awesome lemon-rosemary martinis. I asked for the how-to and was off to the market the next morning to buy lemons and fresh rosemary. The process is really interesting. You heat up sugar and water and then steep the herbs in the liquid, like making a tea. Then you strain it out, mix in the lemon juice, cool it, and finally freeze it in an ice cream maker to produce a sorbet. To serve, put a scoop of sorbet into a martini glass and pour vodka over it. After a couple minutes, the sorbet starts to dissolve and the rosemary scent starts to become more and more pronounced. Delicious. I did a lime/mint version as well, although the flavor of that came out more subdued.

Date-Filled Citron Shortbread Cookies

Last weekend I worked on a revision of the cookies I made back in December for the business project. This time, I used the candied citron, instead of orange and lemon, to make the recipe even more applicable to the holiday theme. I also punched up the date filling a bit, increasing the amount of lemon juice and adding lemon zest and a pinch of salt. I'm pretty happy with the date filling and the new flavor of the cookies, but one thing I didn't like was that the shortbread didn't stay crispy for very long. I may play around with a different style of cookie for the sandwich.

Chocolate Pudding

I needed to use up the rest of the milk and cream that I bought on Monday to make the ice cream, so I found a recipe for chocolate pudding in David Lebovits' The Great Book of Chocolate. I did a little tweaking of the recipe. First doubled it to use up all the milk & cream, although the recipe only called for regular milk. Instead of using 2 tsp chocolate extract or 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, I doubled it by using one of each. Also replaced some of the unsweetened chocolate with bittersweet and reduced the amount of sugar. And used some egg yolks I had previously frozen, rather than crack fresh eggs. Ugh, it's a wonder it came out at all. But it did, and it's delicious. Way more chocolately than that stuff from a box.

Roquefort and Honey Ice Cream

Last night I made the Roquefort and Honey Ice Cream from David Lebovitz's recent blog entry. Reading about it, it just struck me as such a bizarre combination of flavors that I had to try it. And bizarre is pretty much how it turned out. My brain was like, "mmm, ice cream.... sweet... delicious... uh, salty? Smelly?" The roquefort by itself was excellent. I don't think I'd ever tried it before. It's a sheep's milk blue cheese that can only be made in particular caves in France. Very strong flavor, but appealing, at least to me. At $27/lb, it didn't make for the cheapest pint of ice cream ever, but it was well worth the experiment. I need to try it again later (and try to come up with something that it would go well with) before I make any real judgement.