Recipe: Nectarine Ice Cream

Nectarine Ice Cream

3/4 c. milk
2/3 c. granulated sugar
pinch salt
1 1/2 c. heavy cream
4 nectarines, peeled and diced

Chop the nectarines in a food processor until mostly smooth but still slightly chunky-- a smoother blend will give you smoother ice cream, but chunks of nectarine are pretty pleasant.

Mix the milk and sugar together until the sugar is mostly dissolved into the milk. Add the salt and the cream and stir until well-blended. Add in the processed nectarines and stir until they're incorporated.

Chill the ice cream in the fridge for at least half an hour or up to overnight, then freeze according to ice cream maker instructions.

You could probably add a few more nectarines, which would give it a stronger fruit flavor without affecting the texture that much.

There would be pictures, but we ate it all.

This is a modified recipe (originally for Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream, which I also made tonight) from the Cuisinart Ice Cream recipe book that came with my ice cream maker.

Lemon-Ginger Sorbet

This is posted by request!

Lemon-Ginger Sorbet

2 c. sugar
3 c. water
juice of 7 lemons (or thereabouts-- enough so that it's as tart as you like it)
1 tbsp. honey
1/4 c. candied ginger

Combine the sugar, water, and honey in a pan over medium heat; cook until the sugar is dissolved. Add the lemon juice and the candied ginger. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is just bubbling.

Pour the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer and chill the liquid. Reserve the ginger from the strainer and, once cool enough to handle, dice it.

Once the liquid is cool, follow the directions on your ice cream maker. Add the diced ginger just before it is done freezing. Enjoy!

Makes about 1 quart sorbet.

(No pictures, because it will likely be gone before I get it and my camera in the same place at the same time.)

DDC Week Two: Spaghetti

Week two!


Nothing too adventurous, yet-- both this week's spaghetti and last week's beef stew are things that I cook regularly, just shifted a bit more locally.

This time around, my exceptions were pepper and parmesan cheese, neither of which I could source locally-- I really, really love parmesan cheese. Other than that:

Pasta: Spaghetti from the Santa Cruz Pasta Factory (note: I'm not sure where they get their flour, but their website says that they source ingredients locally whenever they can)

Sauce: My own, made this summer with tomatoes from Happy Boy Farms and my dad's garden. Two new rules for next summer: I am not allowed to talk myself out of buying flats of tomatoes, and I am not allowed to open my canned sauce until after tomatoes are no longer available at the farmer's markets. Because these were my last jars of home-made organic sauces, and it's only December. Technically, I still have a jar of yellow tomato sauce, but I feel like I should save that for something really special. We'll see.

Meat: ground beef from this place in Cayucas-- I don't remember the name, but will look it up next time I use some. Woo!

Salt: Farmhouse Culture

Olive Oil: Bariani, from Sacramento

Pepper: exception

Parmesan: excepetion

Although this is not the most daring, new, and exciting of meals, my housemates seemed to really enjoy it, at least based on the amount of leftovers!

Dinner didn't happen until quite late tonight, because my friend Laurel and I spent most of the day out shopping. I managed to only buy one thing for myself: a new ice cream maker! My old ice cream maker has been surviving, zombie-like, for the last six months or so-- one of my housemates tried to wash it out, and ended up draining about half of the freezing fluid. So while it could almost freeze everything, it fell just short, leading to oddly-textured ice creams and syrupy sorbets. NO LONGER! I have a new ice-cream maker, and it is shiny and red.

Day of Food

Every few weeks, I try to spend a day (or at least six-eight hours) cooking food. Today, the second rainy weekend day of the fall, was a perfect day, seeing as I spend the *first* rainy weekend day of the fall on the couch, knitting.

I had a few things planned-- sausages and ice cream-- but there were a few new things, too!

The first thing I started were the sausages:

Apple-Cinnamon-Nutmeg Sausages

1 1/2 lb. pork loin
2 oz. pork fat
1 tbsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 tbsp. cinnamon
1/2 c. apple, minced
casings

I followed the directions here, essentially, to make these sausages. They're sitting in the fridge right now, waiting to be cooked for dinner tomorrow. We'll see how they turn out!

As the sausages take a few hours all together (between each major step, you have to re-freeze your meat), I made goat cheese in between sausage steps, following the directions here, at Urban Cheesecraft-- for those of you who were living with me this summer, this is where I bought my cheese kit from. I didn't realise that the curds had, in fact, separated from the whey, because they were so tiny! A few hours of straining later, though, I have a really pretty chunk of goat cheese. I plan to split it in half and make half of it honey-and-lavender (we had this at Harley
Farms a few months ago, and it was delicious), and make the other half garlic-and-herb.

Once the sausages and the cheese were done, it was clearly time to make ice cream. Housemate Brianna had wanted earl grey and lavender ice cream, so that's what I made-- following the recipe for vanilla ice cream in Ad Hoc, and substituting looseleaf earl grey and lavender for the vanilla. It, too, is not quite done, but should be deeeeelicious.

Then, it was 9:45, and I made dinner...

...a package of tortellini from Safeway.