The owner of the Eastern European restaurant across from my office was an even more colossally bitchy today than she usually is until I ordered the stuffed cabbage with mashed potatoes -- her favorite dish. She says she "eat it for lunch everyday!"

Now we're best friends.

This is what I did today.

Research for a LA Weekly assignment. Get excited.

lavendar vanilla frozen custard

Complete dive school. That's what's at the top of my New Year's resolutions list. It's a carry-over from last year's list and has nothing to do with this post except I figured you might be curious about my number one when you read my number two.

Number two is Make a perfect vanilla ice cream, a new addition on which I'm already hard at work. Since my roommate Ryan and I bought an ice cream maker last year I've been toying around with ingredient combination and have yet to find something I'm thrilled with. Granted most everything has been delicious, excepting a couple major flops, I'm trying to find something else. Something really transcendent.

Here's what I know: I won't use cornstarch or corn syrup, no matter how much David Lebovitz says they'd help. I want to use only natural ingredients and not because I care so much about the health issue -- I mean, it's ice cream -- but because you can buy perfectly good corn syrupy ice cream at the grocery store.

I'm not a ludite. I have no resistance to technology or "progress," even if I still don't know how to make sound come out of my TV at times. (It's really not easy. There are a lot settings and a lot of wires that sometimes get unplugged.) Still, the point of making ice cream at home, to me, is to create something basic and knowable. To wonder at the fact that combining milk sugar and eggs in just this certain way changes them fundamentally. It's like magic, only better because the trick is still amazing even when you know how it's done.

Corn syrup, on the other hand, is a laboratory food, made by boiling corn solids down for a long time under specific, controlled conditions. It may help my ice cream but it'd take the magic out of it for me too.

Final note: As you can see, this is a recipe for lavender vanilla frozen custard, not vanilla ice cream. I'm playing with other flavors to help me figure out what works and what doesn't, and maintain the interest of my tasting audience, of course. Also, in the way that people say you can judge the quality of a restaurant on whether or not they can make a good chicken, I figure if I can master vanilla, I've got a leg up on other flavors. 

Recipe adapted from Epicurious. 

INGREDIENTS

1.5 cups heavy cream

1.5 cup half-and-half

2/3 cup sugar

2 tablespoons dried edible lavender

2 eggs

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

DIRECTIONS

Bring cream, half-and-half, and lavender just to a boil in a heavy saucepan over moderate heat, stirring occasionally. Remove pan from heat and steep covered for 30 minutes. 

Pour mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and discard the lavender. Return mixture to cleaned saucepan and heat over moderate heat until hot. 

Whisk together eggs, salt and vanilla in a large bowl, then whisk in 1 cup hot cream mixture in a slow stream. 

Pour into remaining hot cream mixture in saucepan and cook over moderately low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon until thick enough to coat back of spoon, about 5 minutes. DO NOT LET IT BOIL!

Pour custard through sieve into a clean bowl to catch any eggy bits. 

Allow the custard to cool completely, stirring occasionally. Chill, covered, until cold, at least 3 hours. 

Freeze custard in ice cream maker. Transfer ice cream to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden.

NOTES: Fresh from the ice cream maker, the lavender was potent and flowery. Almost too much so. After hardening in the freezer overnight, the flavor mellowed to something like a sweet cream with lavender on the back end, a faintly medicinal warming after each swallow.

i might have to eat oklahoma

That's what I said to Garrett, my Oakie office-mate yesterday afternoon. I was having sugar pangs in a big way and the only things left in my holiday stocking were a few packets of Emergen-C and a block of chocolate in the shape of the Sooner State. I brainstormed alternatives for what felt like half an hour, though it may have been a much, much shorter time. In the end I decided to be selective, nibbling the panhandle instead of the heartier central state, both because it had broken off months ago and because nobody famous is from there.

True story.

excuse the iphoneography

no knead bread

This post is late. I made no kneed bread for the first time over a month ago for our fourth annual Post-Thanksgiving dinner party. It's not traditional Post-Thanksgiving fare -- concocted from whatever is left after the grandiose meals our families prepare, usually hodgepodged and decidedly unattractive. But someone at our last party asked if I had baked my own bread for the pot roast sandwiches (recipe coming soon, I promise) and I took it as a challenge because I am hyper-sensitive. The bread is beautiful, perfectly tanned with a handsome seam, and delicious. Listening to the crackle of crust fresh from the oven is the single most pleasureful experience of my modest baking career.

I sometimes imagine that if I were more a confident person I'd have a higher-paying job for which I'd travel the world, visiting the homes of expatriate writers, carrying vintage handbags. A glamorous life indeed. But would I bake my own bread? Probably not. So alls well that ends well.  



Recipe from Mother Earth News.

 

INGREDIENTS

1/4 tsp dry active yeast

1 1/2 cups warm water

3 cups all-purpose flower

1 1/2 tsp salt

Cornmeal or wheat bran for dusting

DIRECTIONS

In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in water. Add the salt and flour, stirring until blended. The dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest at least 8 hours, preferably 12 to 18, at warm room temperature.

The dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it. Sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let it rest for about 15 minutes.

Using just enough flour to keep the dough from sticking to the work surface or to your fingers, gently shape it into a ball. Generously coat a clean dish towel with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal. Put the seam side of the dough down on the towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another towel and let rise for about 1 to 2 hours. When it’s ready, the dough will have doubled in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

At least 20 minutes before the dough is ready, heat oven to 475 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart dutch oven in the oven as it heats. When the dough is ready, carefully remove the pot from the oven and lift off the lid. Slide your hand under the towel and turn the dough over into the pot, seam side up. The dough will lose its shape a bit in the process, but that’s OK. Give the pan a firm shake or two to help distribute the dough evenly, but don’t worry if it’s not perfect; it will straighten out as it bakes.

Cover and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake another 15 to 20 minutes, until the loaf is beautifully browned. Remove the bread from the Dutch oven and let it cool on a rack for at least 1 hour before slicing.