Chinese New Year: "Sexy" Pork Dumplings

This morning we were getting ready for school and I asked Lucy if she would like to wear her "rainbow shoes" and she looked at them, and as if she was not saying something completely preposterous, said, "Yes, those...They're sexy."

Um, okay...what? Hey, you're not even five years old. You don't even know sexy. Hey, people who are 20 don't know sexy. Sexy is a lifetime, baby. Sexy is really red Victoria Secrets lingerie that makes you look like a really big maraschino cherry, four inch heels that give you corns, bikini waxes that do nothing but make you have scratch yourself at inappropriate times, and thongs that rub the inside of your ass cheeks until a rash forms. Puh-leese. You, my child, do not know sexy.

It seems that Lucy's new BFF in school, a lovely, yet inappropriately sophisticated child, has taught my daughter about "the sexy". Lucy now uses it to describe various clothing items. Those pants are not sexy. I want a sexy shirt. Your hair is sexy, Mama...okay, that one is fine.

Truth is,The BFF and Lucy really love each and call each other sister and hug each other whenever the opportunity allows. When I leave the ice skating rink after watching the kids skate and Lucy is sad, it is the BFF who wraps her arms around Lucy and comforts her as I walk away. That's the lovely side of the friendship. The BFF also likes to kiss the boys and be "sexy". Lord help me.


The BFF has also created opportunities that we have used to help Lucy, like when the girl has on two separate occasions vowed to withhold her friendship if Lucy didn't do what she wanted. The first time, Lucy caved, unhappily. So, we talked her through it. The next time, she held her ground and found out the BFF would still be her friend even if she held her ground. Wow. That was a great lesson for her to have learned in pre-k.

Took me nearly 40 years. That's my girl.


So, we have no desire to do anything but encourage Lucy to decide who she wants to be friends with, who she loves, as long as she looks out for herself. So this is a good friendship. Except for the sexy thing. That needs to end, like yesterday, before Lucy starts asking for crotchless panties and inquiring about bootie calls.

It's all starting. The way she talks to me about her day. How she tells me about the argument she had with this girl and what she did and how she feels. God, how do I have a teenager already? She goes to school and her life is an episode of Days of Our Lives. She is such a big girl.

And friendships are complicated.

xo YM

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But she is not too big for dumplings! Chinese New Year is coming up after all and Lucy and the BFF both love pork dumplings. We made these in Lucy's class with pork, shrimp and tofu fillings and we'll make vegetarian ones in Edie's class this week because her school is very politically correct about their food choices. I hate that, of course, but what are ya gonna do?

I only give you the pork filling here because, well, pork rocks and everything else pales in comparison. Don't buy the dough. It's easy to make and the kids will enjoy making it with you. It is very forgiving, so extra kneading won't bother it a bit.


"Sexy" Pork Dumplings
Adapted from recipes from Epicurious and Use Real Butter

Ingredients

Dough
2 cups all-purpose flour (you'll also need more for dusting your board)
Tap water

Pork Filling
1 (2-inch) piece peeled fresh ginger
1/2 cup light soy sauce
1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced
3/4 lb ground pork (from shoulder; not lean)

Dipping Sauce
2 parts soy sauce
1 part vinegar (red wine or black)
A few drops of sesame oil
Minced ginger (optional)
Minced scallion green (optional)

Preparation

Make the Pork Filling

Halve ginger, then finely chop 1 half and cut remaining half into very thin matchsticks (less than 1/8 inch thick).Combine 5 tablespoons soy sauce with ginger matchsticks in a small bowl.Reserve 2 tablespoons scallions for garnish, then finely chop remainder and put in a bowl along with pork, finely chopped ginger, and remaining 3 tablespoons soy sauce. Gently knead with your hands in bowl until just combined. Chill, covered, 10 minutes.

Make The Dough

The dough is easy. You can make it ahead or after you make the filling. It is two cups of flour to a half cup of water. Put flour in a bowl, add water slowly and mix everything together until it starts to ball together into a sticky clump. (This happens more quickly if you pulse it a few times in a food processor, but I went old school)


Transfer the mound onto a board or counter dusted with flour. Knead the dough, as if you were making pizza dough or bread, until it becomes firm and silky to the touch.

Then, you can set it aside in the refrigerator wrapped in cellophane or freeze the dough. I've done both and the dough is perfect. If you feel the dough is hardening quickly, you can put a damp dishtowel over whatever portions of dough you haven't starting working with yet.


But if you want to fill the dough immediately, slice the dough into four separate pieces and roll each slice into a dough into a cylinder, like a long knock wurst (1 1/4 inches). Then, slice discs off the cylinder.

Each disk will be a dumpling. Press the disk down with the palm of your hand so that it flattens into a fat little circle. This will make it easier to roll out with a rolling pin.

Next, take your rolling pin. Think of the disk as a clock, 12 at the top, 6 at the bottom. Start in the middle of the disk roll out to the edge to 12. Turn your rolling pin. Go back to the middle and roll out to 3. Turn, go back to the middle and roll out to 6, keep going until you have a think circle. The more circular it is, the easier time you'll have filling it.


As you can see, some of ours are perfect circles, others are just mushed together. Once you have the disks you are going to fill them with your pork filling.



Fill & Fold the Dumplings

There are a couple standard ways to fold the dumplings. My favorite way is a little less fussy than the conventional and little hands can do it quite easily. It also looks just like it came out of a Chinese restaurant, which is satisfying for the kids.

I could explain how I do it, but take a look at this YouTube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NdskgjZMgM It shows everything you need. You'll notice these people who are having a dumpling-making party (great party concept) really know how to roll out dough and fold dumplings. They are rolling out the dumplings the Chinese way. The clock method I gave you is apparently a French way. I especially like the chillin' music that accompanies. It makes me want to sleep. But in a good way.

Cook the Dumplings

Gently drop all dumplings into a 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling water, stir a little to prevent them sticking to the bottom, and cook 6 minutes. (Dumplings will float to top while cooking.) Transfer dumplings with a slotted spoon to a serving dish and sprinkle with reserved scallions and a little chopped cilantro. Serve with dipping sauce.

Make Ginger Dipping Sauce

Combine all ingredients in a bowl. You can make this ahead or on the fly as your dumplings are cooking. It's all pretty easy.

Continue Reading...

Artichokes on Toast with Ricotta, Garlic & Parmesan

Just to recap from my last post, we did boycott Thanksgiving and had a very low key holiday this year. My plan for complacency and family togetherness worked. Bwah ha ha..I am an evil genius.

We played old maids and go fish, baked a rather imperfect cinnamon-laden pie, sewed doll clothes, filled and put out all the bird feeders, which the birds and squirrels nearly finished in like two days. Birds are pigs.

We did some embroidery and started work on the girls playroom. I played with my new camera and irritated everyone with my picture taking until they refused to smile and put sheets of paper over their faces and now I have a hundred pictures with frowns, googly faces and serious poses.


We also babysat "Peek" and "Boo", Edie's class pets...



That's right, they're hermit crabs. And I spent half the five days, leaning into their terrarium wondering why they weren't moving and imagining having to tell Edie's teachers that I killed the class pets. I spent so much time poking them and bathing them trying to get them to move around that I'm pretty sure they are relieved as hell to be back at school.

Crabs are stressful, man. That's all I'm sayin'.


Now, I'm ready for Christmas. Sometimes Thanksgiving wipes me out. Not this year. I'm pumped.

I am making all the ornaments for the New Paltz Christmas tree. We are baking Christmas cookies this weekend and making the rounds to all the neighbors in the country to introduce ourselves with takeout boxes filled with homemade goodies. And I have a great gift idea for the kids in Lucy's class, teachers, my cooking class, which I will share after I shoot them. Okay, after I actually make them.

David will take the kids to the woods to get our tree for the country house. He will have a saw. God love him, he is so freakin' butch.

And there will be holiday-themed cooking with the kids in Lucy's class. There is the tree in Rockefeller Center. Our tree in the NYC apartment and the little mini-tree with pink lights and pink balls in their room. There is much decorating to do. And somewhere we must have a sleigh ride, with horses and jangling bells. And snow. Thick, puffy, billowing, cottony layers of it. I insist.


I feel light, and ready and excited. Santa is coming. We all still believe. And it feels magical.

xo YM
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And I have a delicious winter snack or light supper for you to kick us off...for those nights you want something filling without all that fussing and sitting at the straight back chairs in the dining room...

I was puttering through Michaels looking at their 100 kinds of Christmas Cookie Sprinkles and wondering whether David would care that I was going to blow $100 on sprinkles and cookie cutters, when I spied a Martha Stewart Cookbook - no recall on the exact title - but I happened past this recipe as I was flipping pages and thought it would be a perfect casual supper with a salad or paired with an assortment of cheeses or charcuterie.

As I suspected we ate it and the cheese and a sizeable chunk of duck liver pate with a bottle of wine, standing around the kitchen, leaning on the counters and telling stories about our day. It was quite nice. I adapted this a lot from Martha's original recipe - forgive me Martha - but I believe both are along the same vein.


Artichokes on Toast with Ricotta, Garlic & Parmesan

Ingredients

2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced thin
8 slices rustic bread, about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick
2 olive oil for drizzling
One 12-ounce jar marinated artichoke hearts, drained but moist and chopped
1 cup fresh ricotta cheese
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
Shaved Parmesan cheese
Parsley, for granish

Directions

Thinly slice 1 garlic clove, and set aside. Rub the other over the bread slices and then, slice that thinly as well.

Brush both sides of bread with olive oil. Toast slices in a skillet over medium-high heat until golden and crisp on both sides. Or you can toast these in the oven or on a grill. Transfer to a serving platter, and set aside.

Heat a tablespoon olive oil or so in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add garlic and artichoke hearts. Saute until golden, 3 to 4 minutes. Set aside.

Spread ricotta onto toast. Season with salt and pepper. Spoon artichoke mixture onto ricotta. Season again with salt and pepper. Shave fresh parmesan over the top of each. Drizzle with olive oil. Finish in the broiler for about a minute or two. Garnish with chopped parsley.

Continue Reading...

The Hurricane Party. And Bean Dip

Apparently we had a hurricane here in NYC this weekend.

This hurricane wasn't like Katrina in New Orleans or anything. This one was a lot of rain and some wind and a lot of really excited weather men, using the word "hurricane" over and over because it is waaaaaaay more dramatic than the word, oh I don't know, "rain".

Weathermen, I believe, must have the most boring job on the planet. They spend most of their days telling us the weather will be "partly cloudy, partly sunny, with a chance of rain". This is our weather in a nutshell. It is always "partly sunny, partly cloudy, with a chance of rain". The weather man is a bore in a TV-ready suit.

But give these weather people some rain and a little 20 mile an hour wind and they are talking "disaster preparation". All of a sudden, their two minutes slot at the end of the news, with their little cardboard, smiley-face suns dotting the big map, becomes a top-of-the-hour, 20 minute meteorological dissertation on how to ride out a hurricane.

They were so excited they nearly wet themselves.

So, we did what any self-respecting family would do if a hurricane was baring down on us and we knew the weather men were full of shit: We had a hurricane party. Which is a fancy way of saying we ate bean dip, drank beer (us not the kids) did a huge art project and then ate Dibs for dessert (Don't tell me you never heard of Dibs - if you've never had a Dib, you are completely missing out). Calling it a hurricane party made it feel more like an event and Lucy was so excited to see the hurricane up close that she decided to dance in it.

I wish I had photos of Lucy soaking wet and dancing in circles, waving her arms and kicking up her heels in the warm downpour, but I don't because it was all so spontaneous. I was transfixed, really. Stuck in one place, blown away by how she can turn anything into joy. Everything is an adventure. Amazing.


This is what I love about having kids. I never would have thought to run around in the hurricane in my underpants, laughing madly, enjoying this thing that seems like a fun day killer. But it was Lucy who saw it for what it was: pure delight.

Take that, weather people.

And let me just tell you, no one laughs like Lucy. It is the stuff of magical elves. The sound is like an untamed gurgle from some bubbly, wild spring deep inside her. She laughs with her whole body. It is pure joy and has been ever since she was a baby. It is my absolute favorite sound in the whole world. If you ask her what Mommy's favorite sounds are, she'll tell you: "Lucy laughing and Lucy singing". I guess I tell her a lot.

I have nothing else to offer you, so here's the very simple recipe for bean dip that we had at our Hurricane Party. I may have posted this before, I can't remember, but it's worth another go around. It's that easy and that addictive.

xo YM
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The Yummy Mummy's Hurricane Party Bean Dip

Prep time: 7 minutes, faster if you have the tomato, cilantro and onion pre-chopped

1 can of black beans (small white beans work as well, but black is better)
1 medium tomato
1 handful of chopped fresh cilantro
1 small onion, finely diced
Juice of half a lemon
(a little Jalapeno is optional, but go for it if you like a little heat)
1 generous dollop of sour cream

Salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a bowl, except sour cream. Get everything mixed together well. Make a small well in the middle of the bean mixture. Add a generous dollop of sour cream. Garnish with a little chopped tomato and a sprig of cilantro. Serve with tortilla chips. Continue Reading...

Be Damned the Political Conventions: Let There Be Tapas

I'll be happy when these political conventions are over.

David has started to repeat things from the speeches. It's annoying. Recently, he's been dropping Obama-isms into everyday conversation.

Several times a day now as I am justifying some parenting technique that I think, even though it isn't working right now, will pay off somewhere down the line or explaining why I should wear a certain style of clothing or why Lucy should do tap instead of Tai Kwon Do or whatever thing I feel needs my thorough analysis and explanation and David will stop, look at me with the kind of smug look that parents give their kids when they know they have won the argument before the words come out of their mouths, the smugness that comes with knowing they will deliver a conversation-stopper that will halt the kid dead in his tracks with no allowable room for whining or pleading.

Like this one, which I never use, but is one that I regard highly and keep for just the right time - "But you said your tummy was super-full and you couldn't possibly eat another pea...I'm sure there isn't room in there for ICE CREAM, right?"

Aaaaaah! Score.

How does a toddler come back from that? The kid is stuck - He must eat the peas to get the ice cream or he can refuse the peas and lose out on the ice cream. This is when parents absolutely SUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Anyway, this is what David has been doing to me, stealing bits of memorable phrases from the speeches and lobbing them into any conversation that comes up.

This one is his favorite:

"I know you care, sweetheart but you just don't get it," he says as a response to just about everything.

And really, there is no retort. Except maybe rolling my eyes and pretending that my husband was accidentally lobotomized in a tragic combine accident. (Okay, that's not funny. Farm equipment is dangerous.)

And thanks to you, Obama speechwriters. You've made me feel like John McCain in my own home.

Okay, I promised tapas last week and have lazed about the Hamptons this weekend as if I had no other mandates or jobs to get done. So, I give you my favorite, worthwhile tapas from the dinner I had last week.

Enjoy with a little beer or Spanish rose!

xo YM

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These dishes are all adapted from Food and Wine Magazine but you should re-jigger to taste. This "food magazine" didn't even include salt and pepper in the recipes. Not that I'm bitter or anything. The food ideas are good, but I did a lot of re-seasoning at the stove. I tried to include my re-seasoning here, but you should expect to do the same.

Chorizo, Chick Pea & Spinach Salad
Serves 6

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
8 small chorizo sausages, sliced
2 garlic cloves
1 onion, chopped
1 can of drained chick peas
2 good-sized handfuls of baby spinach
1 tsp sweet paprika
1 tbsp parsley
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat olive oil in a large frying pan, preferably cast iron, over medium heat. Add onions and garlic and saute until clear, about 5 minutes. Add chorizo and saute until beginning to turn golden brown, about 5 minutes. Add chick peas, season with salt and pepper. Let simmer for a few minutes. Add chorizo back in. Add spinach, just until before it wilts, about a minute. Sprinkle with paprika. Dust with parsley. Bring to table in the pan.


Sardines Escabeche
serves 6

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
12 fresh sardine fillets (not from a can)
2 sliced garlic cloves
1 tbsp fresh rosemary
2 fresh bay leaves
6 whole cloves
1 tbsp fresh thyme
1/4 sherry vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste.

Heat olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat and cook sardines for about 4-5 minutes. Remove from pan and place on a plate. Add remaining ingredients to pan and cook for 5 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Pour over the sardines and serve warm or cool.

Note: I do not like sardines and this dish tasted so tangy and un-sardine like that I will definately do it again. The sherry vinegar and herbs really give the fish a huge hit of acid which just sets it apart from run of the mill fish preparations. In fact, after making these tapas, I am a sherry vinegar convert. It's worth buying the big bottle.


Lamb Cutlets with Fig and Tomato Salsa
Serves 6

12 trimmed lamb cutlets
12 cherry tomatoes
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 sliced garlic cloves
1 sliced onion
3 fresh bay leaves
6 halved ripe figs
1 tbsp sherry vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

To make the salsa: Blanch tomatoes briefly in a sauce pan of boiling water and transfer to a bowl of ice water. Peel off skins. Heat olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat and saute garlic, onion and bay leaves until softened or about 5 minutes. Add tomatoes, figs and sherry vinegar and cook for another 5-7 minutes.

meanwhile, cook lamb cutlets over high heat in a cast iron pan or grill pan to get a nice sear for about 5 -7 minutes for medium rare. Transfer to plates and smother with salsa.

Note: This dish is gorgeous - the summery green of the figs and the eye-popping brilliant tomato reds make this dish impressive to bring to the table. You can also prep all the ingredients before, blanch and peel tomatoes, chop garlic and slice onions, etc and have them all ready to go in your "mis en place" and then, the dish can be whipped up in under ten minutes.


Stuffed Cherry Tomatoes with Tuna, Parsley, Garlic, Capers & Tarragon
Serves 6

12 ripe cherry tomatoes (the very little ones are unruly suckers, go bigger if you can find them)
1 can of tuna, drained
1 tbsp flat leaf parsley, chopped
1 tbsp tarragon, chopped
2 tbsp capers
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp sherry vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste.

Blanch tomatoes for 5 seconds in a sauce pan of boiling water. Transfer tomatoes to a bowl of ice water. Peel skin off tomatoes carefully.

Slice off tops and carefully hollow out the insides with a small spoon or melon baller. You can easily mash them, so be gentle. Set on a tray.

Mix together tuna, parsley, tarragon, capers, garlic and onion in a bowl. Ad in olive oil, sherry vinegar.Be generous with salt and pepper. Stuff the hollowed out tomatoes with the tuna mixture and serve on plates.

Note: This dish can be completely prepped ahead. Make the tuna mixture and keep in fridge. Prep the tomatoes and stow in fridge. Put the tuna in the tomatoes 15 minutes before dinner. I included this dish because it is one dish you can make ahead and you won't have to fire it before it gets to the table, which will help if you are making various tapas dishes.


This pate-like dish is easy to make and comes straight from my friend at Art of the Pig. I'm a bit queasy about the handling of chicken liver. Or having it near my person. Or in my house. Or my neighborhood. Or that it simply exists. But this guy makes making meat more manageable. (I think that should be the tag line on his blog.)

If you like the chopped liver, you'll like this. At Art of the Pig, they call it, "Liver Flavored Butter". And it is. But I won't be offended if you just buy pate at the store...

Chicken Liver Parfait

2 lbs chicken livers
1 1/2 lb butter
1/4 Cognac
1 tablespoon oil

Soak chicken livers in ice water for two hours.

Place in 5 cup terrine (glass bread pan will do) with oil, Cognac, two pinches of salt and one of pepper.

Marinate for two hours.

Place terrine in a warm water bath in preheated 300 degree F oven. About 40 minutes, livers should be firm but still pink inside. Let cool and drain them.

Puree the livers and whisk in warm, room temperature butter, adjust seasoning. Wash terrine out. Place liver/butter mix back in terrine.

Chill for 24 hours. Serve with toast. Continue Reading...

The Dinner Party: Malted Milk Ice Cream

I can honestly tell you that I had screamin' good fun at our dinner party Tuesday night. Our guests were just lovely, talkative, warm-hearted, accomplished, fascinating souls who were good sports and good eaters. It was a pleasure to cook for such a fun crew.

But I love the cartoon above because it shows how anxiety-provoking these affairs can be for guests and hosts. It's funny to think about all these hidden thoughts and feelings going on as we socialize and eat together. Anyway, I did learn a few things from this experience and of course, I want to share:

1. Doing 10 to 12 "small plates" is still making 10 to 12 dishes no matter how itsy bitsy the plate is. Duh. You think a girl as crafty as me would've figured this out ahead of time.

But no, it was a shocker a day into the cooking. Moral of the story: a banquet of tapas is still a ten course meal anyway you cut it. I'm so happy I did it and it really helped me stretch my cooking, but it could have been a complete train wreck.

Like when I was whipping the butter into the cognac-soaked chicken livers with a whisk and the whisk went flying across the kitchen and liver stuck to the wall for like three seconds before falling to the ground behind the trash can (Guess I should look for that..) and a huge piece of liver flung out of the bowl and slapped me across the eyes and then, kind of stuck to my nose and dripped slowly down my face and I nearly hurled into the bowl of softened pate.

"The Chicken Liver Parfait" (what a crazy name. Isn't "parfait" an ice cream dish?) from NTSC at Art of the Pig, a man truly in love with offal, actually tasted great and I'm going to give you the recipe, which was pretty easy even for me, but I had a lot of liver mishaps along that way that made me do that ugly dry heave thing where your mouth keeps opening and shutting like a sea bass, but no sound comes out.

Yeah, like that.

2. I am now prepared to be on "The Next Food Network Star" (not that I want to be or anything since being in front of a camera is my idea of bathing in cognac-soaked chicken livers) but only because my cooking life is such a freak show. And frankly, this makes for exciting TV.

I realized this as I was driving all over Manhattan with my friend, chef, resident saint and fellow blogger Kian over at Red Cook in my husband's pick up truck going from fish market to butcher shop trying to buy two things I thought I would find easily: fresh sardines and pork belly.

At about 10 O'clock am the day of the dinner party when I hadn't cooked a thing all day and I thought I would have to kill and replace two dishes - - the Sardines Escabeche and the Red Cooked Pork Belly. And I actually thought, "Oh the producers must have gone around and bought up all the sardines and pork belly to make this challenge harder...Until I remembered I wasn't actually on TV.

3. If you have ingenious and curious small kids who can do things like set their own hair on fire using nothing but two chopsticks and a hunk of pink Playdoh or ones whose innocent, impressionable heads might explode if faced with the prospect of watching 15 straight hours of Diego, you will need help to get this menu on the table.

I had a team. Because it takes a village to raise a dinner party.

I had a paid babysitter, a house cleaner, my incredible, amazing friend and neighbor Rachel who stopped working on her doctoral dissertation for two days so she could host dance parties and princess dress up games to keep my kids from missing their mother.

And I had, God bless him, Kian over at Red Cook who, when it became clear I was not going to find fresh sardines or pork belly, stopped working and went to Chinatown for me and bought both of those ingredients, delivered them to my door and also gutted the sardines when I looked at him like, "Um, yeah, what the hell am I going to do with these? I need fillets!"

I am a bitch. But feel comforted knowing I have the most awesome, patient friends on the planet.

4. Not to hurl a stereotype at you, but if you're having a dinner party, invite a lot of gay men. They will just love you up for all the work you did in the kitchen. It was like I was Gloria Gaynor (and I was thin. And not black. And not old) and the boys had hoisted me up on their shoulders and carried me around the dance floor, as the glitter ball illuminated my glistening face and I dove into my third resounding chorus of "I Will Survive". Not to work a stereotype too hard or anything.

I do love cooking for a room full of appreciative eaters. And they were appreciative and loud about it. Who wouldn't love that? Thanks guys for being so amazingly kind and supportive.

5. Note to self: "Food & Wine Magazine" is not a legitimate cooking magazine. It is a glossy, pretty promotional vehicle for American Express that masquerades as a cooking magazine and so even though they may have some good ideas for meals (like some of the tapas I made the other night) the seasoning and ingredients were so far off that I had to re-assess all the flavor profiles and re-season and re-jigger mid- cooking after I realized my dinner was going to be comprised of some good-looking dishes that tasted like communion wafer.

Lesson learned. Moral of the story: Read your "Food & Wine" in bed where it can't hurt anyone with it's blandness. Keep it out of the kitchen.


So, I'm going to give you the recipes for the tapas I think are worth repeating in my next post, but first I start with something so utterly delectable and amazing that David has actually banned the use of the ice cream machine in our house. Malted Milk Ice Cream with Crushed Malted Milk Ball Crust.

This morning, David actually said, "I'm throwing the ice cream maker in the trash so you can't make anymore of this stuff." He is soooooo off his "diet/lifestyle".

I got this recipe from Michael Ruhlman's blog who got it from David Lebovitz. It is ridiculously good and I think is one of the best flavors of ice cream I have eaten. Ever. It's also pretty easy to do if you have an ice cream maker and a great finish for folks who can't/don't/won't bake. Like me.

Make it. I dare you not to eat the whole freakin' thing.

xxoo YM
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Malted Milk Ice Cream

Makes about 1 1/2 quarts (1 1/2 liters)

Ingredients

1 cup (250 ml) half-and-half
3/4 cup (150 g) sugar
2 cups (500 ml) heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 cup (90 g) malt powder (see note below)
6 large egg yolks
2 cups (350 g) malted milk balls, coarsely chopped

Note: Malted milk powder can be found in the ice cream aisle of your supermarket. But sometimes it’s stocked alongside chocolate drink mixes like Ovaltine, which isn’t the same thing. But this is exactly where I found it. Most common brands of malt powder are Carnation and Horlicks.

Warm the half-and-half with the sugar in a medium saucepan. In a large bowl, whisk together the heavy cream, vanilla, and malt powder. Set a mesh strainer on top.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg yolks. Slowly pour the warm mixture into the egg yolks, whisking constantly, then scrape the warmed egg yolks back into the saucepan.

Stir the mixture constantly over medium heat with a wooden or heatproof plastic spatula, scraping the bottom as you stir, until the mixture thickens and coats the spatula. Pour the custard through the strainer and whisk it into the malted milk mixture. Stir until cool over an ice bath.

Chill mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator, then freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. As you remove the ice cream from the machine, fold in the chopped malted milk balls. Be generous with the balls, they float to the top and make this decadent crunchy topping. Continue Reading...

The Dinner Party

I've been busy, kids.

Tonight, we're having a dinner party with interesting, fun people I know and some people I don't know who I suspect are interesting and fun. It should be a hoot.

I'm doing a banquet of tapas. Ten or so different small plates, which I thought would be easier in some ways - more relaxed, super casual, more fun for the kids, more like us, etc - but it's still like ten freakin' separate dishes to prep. Plus dessert.

Someone do an intervention. Please. Save me from my own stupidity.

Anyway, I farmed the children out to neighbors, friends, babysitters, anybody who would have them and is not on the registered sex offender list. I'm a good parent. I did this because this tapas thing is not a meal you can get done with kids underfoot.

Trust me, you'll get nothing cooked and the kids will end up hating you or throwing chick pea flour around the kitchen and singing, "Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow". Or worse, they'll end up sitting in front of the TV watching 20 hours of Dora, which is their idea of winning the lottery and for you, something akin to gouging your eyes out with a pickle fork.

Yeah, that would suck.

There have been a few kitchen mishaps. Because, well, it's me. I had a small incident with pureed chicken liver that was so inexplicably gross that I had to toss a perfectly good whisk in the trash because liver parts got all entangled in the wire and I couldn't get them out. They kept clinging on. All drippy and livery. I wanted to hurl.

And David totally went off his "diet/lifestyle" because he found malted milk balls in the freezer. He blames me for leading him astray. We will discuss this thoroughly in therapy.

Just joking. We're not in therapy. Unless you count all the booze. And then, we are in a lot of therapy.

Oh! And did I tell you I've never made any of the dishes I am serving before now? Well, one dish I've done before, the oxtails. The rest are experimental. First timers. I am a virgin again. Kinda.

Anyway, here's what I'm serving tonight. Wish me luck. Or at least wish that I don't make a complete ass of myself.

xo YM


PS: I'll post recipes, evaluations and all inane and humiliating stories about myself and my cooking after the dinner party!

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The Yummy Mummy's Completely Experimental, Pop-Your-Cherry Tapas Banquet for Six

- Sardines Escabeche

- Jamon Croquettes

- Lamb Chops with Figs & Tomato Salsa

- Calf Oxtails Braised in Wine

- Prawn Fritters

- Chicken Liver Pate (or parfait..I'll explain after I taste it)

- Pulpo a la Gallega

- Stuffed Tomatoes with Tuna, Garlic & Parsley

- Chorizo, Chickpea & Spinach Salad

- Red Cooked Pork Belly

- And for dessert, homemade Malted Milk Ball Ice Cream Continue Reading...