For Tony

For all those wonderful videos of dancing, here's something for vous. It's 9 minutes long, but in my opinion worth it.

Oh - you'll want the sound on.

High-LAR-ious

So Charles says to Iain, "Get your mom to wash your neck ruffles, son. They're filthy."

And I FALL OUT. I'm just giggling uncontrollably, repeating: "Neck ruffles!! Neck Ruffles!!"

Charles caught the bug and started tittering, snickering, snorting, and guffawing.

Iain looked at both of us like we were nuts.

News and Notes

1. I think everyone, at some point in her life, should come home to this: "Your son made a huge poo and I nearly threw up."

2. We have a friend who is a great favorite of Charles. I understood why more completely tonight when she opened up her purse and revealed that she had a mini-bottle of Jack Daniels and some dark chocolate in there. What a woman.

3. Iain has two exciting new activities.

A. During his bath, he likes to come to the edge of the bath, reach out his arm, and let Juno lick the water off of his hand. He watches this with his complete attention, smiling.

B. While I was putting on his pajamas (read: plain onesie and socks), I grabbed his hand to put it through the sleeve. As soon as it was in the chute, he pushed the whole arm through, just like that. Apparently, Charles has been teaching him to do that. Wonderful.

4. I finally solved a mystery that's been bugging me for almost exactly 4 months. Background: when my mother came to visit (Iain was a week old), she played a game where she pulled out his arms and said, "How big is Iain? Sooooo Big!" Three weeks later, my mother-in-law did the same thing. Now, that's just weird.

But today, we received a gift in the mail. Sent by my friend Gabe, it was a book of baby sign language (Little Callie does this, so we've seen its utility already) and a copy of Pat the Bunny. Iain was fussy, so I ripped that puppy open and immediately read it to him. He patted the bunny. He played Peek-a-Boo. he looked at himself in the mirror. And, on page 5 or so, he opened up the book within the book to find the page that says, "How big is bunny? Soooo Big!"

Phew.

For Grannypants

I hope it all goes well. Let's talk on the phone later. Have your people call my people.

I'm Not Trying to be Critical, But....

I think you're supposed to suck your own thumb. I need my thumb for making ice cream.

Black Plum, for Miriam

This morning, I churned and froze the Dark Chocolate Ice Cream from last night's fiasco. To be fair, it looked pretty good when I whisked it this morning, and it seemed to churn relatively smoothly, so it might not be a total disaster. We'll see when my Official Taster returns from running errands.

I've just finished the next batch. It's Black Plum Ice Cream, the vote of Miriam (she voted 3 times, which is allowed on the They-Did-It-In-New-York-In-1870-So-Why-Not-Now? rule). It looks great, though it's a shocking pink color. I got the recipe at Sweet Fine Day.

My alteration is that I didn't have any Creme de Cassis, because we don't usually keep berry flavored liqueur in the house. Instead, I used Grand Marnier, and we'll see how it turns out. Unlike last night's recipe, this one is admirably simple. Mr. Sweet Fine Day is a pastry chef, so it makes sense that his recipes aren't full of foolish twaddle.

You:

Cut up a pound of black plums (skins on, weight is before cutting up but black plums have teensy pits so it's almost the same), heat with 1/2 cup of the likker for 10 minutes (med. heat. The idea is to poach them in the likker so they're soft). Turn off the heat, move off the burner, now do this:

Heat 1 cup of heavy cream. Whisk 2 egg yolks with 1/2 cup of sugar until it's lovely (lighter, smooth-ish, etc.), then temper (add hot cream in a stream while whisking so you slowly bring up the temp of the eggs), then mix in the rest of the cream. The recipe does not call for further cooking of the custard, and when I tested it against the back of a spoon I saw that Mr. Sweet Fine Day was right. It was already coating the back (run your finger down the back of the wooden spoon - a nice clear line emerges, eh voila!).

Get out your blender. Put in the plum stuff, put in the cream stuff, blend it well. Cool it in a bowl, then chill it, then churn it in your machine, then freeze it hard.

Currently, we're at the "cool" stage, moving toward the "chill" stage. So we should have plum ice cream tonight.

Next flavors: Honey and Green Tea (not together).

While we're on the subject of ice cream, let me just say that I think I will end up buying David Lebovitz's book (The Perfect Scoop). I've tried about 5 of his recipes so far (all from online sources, including his blog) and they all worked like a charm. And they were easy. And they made sense. So I feel like I owe him $16.47, plus it seems to me that this is proof of his mastery of ice cream/sorbet.

A Rant (Homage)

I really enjoy Use Real Butter, a food blog by Jen Yu. She lives in Colorado, is beating the crap out of cancer, and has a beautiful dog. Her photographs are to die for, as are her kitchen skills.

Last month, she joined a group called the Daring Bakers in making a hazelnut genoise. Sounds great, right? Except the recipe kind of sucked. She said so, in no uncertain terms. It was hilarious. So in her honor, and in the same vein:

Why the Sharffengerger Dark Chocolate Ice Cream Recipe Is No Good:

1. It calls for 3.5 ounces of 62% bittersweet chocolate. That's one bar plus half an ounce. Nice.

2. The recipe says to whisk 4 egg yolks with 3/4 of a cup of sugar, then add 1/4cup plus 3 tablespoons of cocoa. Fine.

This is going to be the base of a custard. That means that after I mix them all up I'll need to add hot milk slowly to "temper" the custard. If I fail, I get scrambled eggs. The best way to avoid failure is to whisk constantly while streaming in a bit of hot milk.

Now, think about those proportions, dry to wet. They don't work. Sugar plus egg yolks works fine, you get just the sort of paste you'd want for tempering. Add the cocoa, though, and you get a totally unmanageable, thick goo that solidifies inside your balloon whisk so you cannot even stir, much less whisk.

Goodbye, keep it moving. Goodbye, proper tempering. Hello! Little flecks of scrambled eggs in the strainer. I couldn't even get it out with my spatula, or off the spatula once I ground some off the whisk.

3. The recipe calls for making a quick dark caramel. The quantities are: 2 tablespoons of sugar to 2 teaspoons of water.

You heat that on high and when it's dark brown you drizzle it into the warm chocolate custard mixture. I'm not sure what this is supposed to accomplish. At dark caramel, what you've got is basically hard-ball stage candy. It hits a cooler liquid and it...solidifies! Obviously.

So you're whisking in strings of hard candy. The recipe says "may need to strain." Uh, yeah. And you'll strain that caramel right out, genius. It will also stick to your spoon/spatula. It will also make such a tiny amount of caramel that you can't really get it out of your smallest pan, so it will be stuck to the sides requiring much soaking and one whole scrubby pad for cleaning.

The base looks not-so-good. It's cooling. Then I'll chill it. Then I'll churn it. Then I'll freeze it hard. Then, finally, after doing an entire double sink worth of dishes thanks to the enormous mess this travesty has created, I'll taste it.

Charles said, "Why not wait to rant until you taste it?" Becuase it's chocolate ice cream. Not an exotic flavor or even an unusual ingredient. I can buy it anytime I want. So how good will it have to be to justify all the effort and frustration? It had better be ambrosia.