Mel's Daily Grub / January 3

8:30 AM -- Breakfast -- An orange that I brought from home with the last packet of hummus at work, plus four stale crackers.  No bad, for a completely unplanned meal.

Lunch never happened.  I had no food plan and didn't want to order another Jimmy John's sandwich. 

7:00 PM -- Dinner -- Personal naan pizza with the last of the jarred alfredo sauce from a few nights ago, five Tobasco-tossed shrimp, and mozzarella cheese.  Tasted outrageous, but I was starving by then and not very picky.

Mel's Daily Grub / January 2

Breakfast -- 8:30 AM at my desk at work -- Fruitcake.  No bread or English muffins at the house.  No time for an egg.  Bad planning.  I ended up grabbing the small tin of fruitcake and bringing it to work to eat with my coffee.  I like fruitcake, but not for breakfast, I guess.  Too sweet.  Intensely spiced--ginger and clove and cinnamon.  Lots of nuts.  Candied fruit.    

Lunch -- 1:00 PM at my desk -- Beach Club (turkey, provolone, veggies, avocado) sandwich from Jimmy John's on whole wheat bread.  And packed with so much lettuce, I had trouble getting it into my mouth!  Ended up deconstructing it, setting the sweet soft commercial bread and overly mayonnaised lettuce aside and just eating the meat, cheese, tomato, cucumber, and avocado spread.

Dinner -- 8:00  PM -- Rerun of Paprikash and Collards.  Enjoyed it.  I had made the paprikash with a mix of hot paprika and smoked paprika, which was great, and the addition of leeks and mushrooms was surprisingly perfect.

I need to create an actual recipe of this version of paprikash, and scale it down to feed just one or two people.  As it is, I've eaten it three times and have at least three, probably four, more servings left.  If it it weren't so deliciously unusual, I'd be tired of it by now.  

Mel's Daily Grub / January 1

New Year's Day 2019

9:00 AM Breakfast -- Blueberry Pound Cake with whipped cream.  I put too many blueberries in the batter, so of course it falls apart when you try to take it out of the pan.  Sad baking failure, but it tastes fine.  There's just too much of it.  It made about 12 servings, and this is only my second serving.

1:30 PM Lunch -- Toasted brie sandwich on Panera's sourdough bread.

9:30 PM Dinner -- Reheated Chicken-Leek-Mushroom Paprikash and spaetzle noodles and Southern-style Collard Greens.

My original plan for New Year's dinner included Hoppin' John, Cornbread, and Cajun spiced Shrimp Scampi, but for whatever reason, I couldn't get inspired to cook.  I made the Collard Greens but didn't make anything else, and in the late of the day, I just warmed up leftovers from a few days earlier.

It was a good meal nonetheless.

Mel's Daily Grub / Introduction

Part of an Edible Arrangement sent to the office in December 2018.

Since Thanksgiving 2018, I've been taking daily photos of the food I eat. Every day. I've been doing this for two reasons: 1) Documenting what I eat seems to keep me from grabbing fast food every chance I get, and 2) taking pictures makes me think about documenting my struggles as a single person trying to eat an interesting and basically healthy diet.

For decades, I cooked fresh food for my family, but now that I'm into my second decade of living alone, with fewer people to cook for and more and more difficulty finding quality ingredients in my food-desert neck of the woods, I've just about given up. Packaging is also a headache, with many things pre-packed for a family of four.  And then there's the problem of appetite.  Unless it's easy and interesting, I've noticed, I have trouble putting down the book or turning off the video stream to walk into the kitchen and rustle up some grub.  I have gone whole days without more than a cup of coffee and a few crackers.  Other days, I will eat nothing but chips and dip for all three meals.  That's not good.

I can't keep mismanaging my diet.  Or ... I guess I could, but I shouldn't.  My health depends on regular meals.  But even more important than that, my mental health suffers when I fail to feed myself and when I feed myself junk.  

So, for 2019, I'm challenging myself to take a photo of every meal I consume.  Sometimes I will write about it, but mostly I won't.  Just photos and food names and times of consumption.  Maybe a few excuses/explanations when I feel like it.  My hope is that the discipline of keeping tabs on what I eat will move me toward a better system for planning, shopping, and cooking for one.  

Adapt & Overcome, A Culinary Adventure

American society seems to admire originality, variety, and all things unique and individual.  But we surround ourselves with unrelenting sameness, especially when it comes to food.  Here in the Mahoning Valley, in the northeastern corner of Ohio, grocery stores are in a rut.  While the decorations change with every Hallmark holiday, the produce, poultry, seafood, and meats are UN-apologetically the same old, same old all year round.  

I find it depressing.  So depressing, in fact, that I basically gave up grocery shopping and cooking for myself about three years ago.  When you find yourself ordering boxed and canned meals from Amazon, you know you've really given up, and that's where I was just a few months ago, hobbling together a diet from convenience foods, Chinese carryout, and pre-sliced cheese. 

I recently joined the Lake-to-River food co-op, however, with a determination to get back into the fight for fresh food, real food, preferably locally-grown.  And that's where I found, on their website, a most extraordinary thing, a type of meat I've never seen or eaten:  beef cheeks!  So, naturally, I ordered some.

What Are Beef Cheeks?

Beef cheeks are thick, dense facial muscles.  They are a VERY tough meat, with lots of sinew and almost no fat.  Some sources on the Internet will tell you that beef cheeks are "tender," but they are talking about the meat's texture AFTER a long, slow, wet cooking.

As with all meats that are tough--tongue, hocks, brisket-- beef cheeks, I knew, would benefit from a method of cooking called braising.  


Braising is when you slow boil something in liquid for an extended period of time.  You can do it in the oven, on the stovetop, or in a slow cooker.  Armed with this information, I started thinking about what flavors I wanted.

Adapting A Recipe

The first beef cheek recipes to turn up on my Google search reminded me that tough meats used to be the dinner fare of the lower classes worldwide, showing up as stews or as stewed-then-grilled tidbits. 

I was tempted, for a few days, to use the beef cheeks to make a taco filling. I made beef tongue tacos a few years ago, and they were stunningly tasty (and lean!).  But in the end, I decided to turn to my memories of a Chinese beef brisket stew from '70s. 

I must have tracked down and read several dozen Chinese beef stew recipes before I settled on one to use as a basic model.  The one I chose is called "Cantonese Style Braised Beef Stew 炆牛腩 "  at one of my favorite Chinese recipe websites, Yi Reservation:   

Using Yi's recipe as a base, I made some alterations:  

• Replaced the 2 lbs. of beef brisket with 1 lb. of beef cheeks
• Replaced the Hou Chou sauce with Hoisin Sauce plus 4 cloves of garlic (in additional to the hoisin and garlic already in the recipe)
• Omitted the rock sugar because, hey, all that hoisin is bound to make things plenty sweet.
• Instead of "cooking wine," added a splash of dry white wine.
• Omitted "spice" (5-spice powder)
• Instead of 1 bay leaf, I used 4 bays leaves because other Chinese beef stew recipes I read that day used anywhere from 3 to 6 bay leaves, which I thought sounded interesting.

I also went to the grocery store to get vegetables for the stew.  Originally, I was thinking that greens would be good, or maybe baby carrots and green beans.  But when I was walking through the produce section, an amazing sight beheld my eyes:  daikon radishes!!  I ended up choosing one large daikon radish and a small bag of fresh green beans.

Mel's Recipe for Cantonese-style Beef Cheek Stew

After the adjustments, this is what my list of ingredients looked like: 

• 2 or 3 T cooking oil
• 1 lb. beef cheeks, cut into small pieces
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 7 clove garlic, minced
• 3 slices ginger, skin on 
• 1 T oyster sauce
• 2 T hoisin sauce
• 1/4 cup chardonney 
• 1 T low-sodium soy sauce
• 1 T dark soy sauce
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 T dried orange peel
• 1 star anise
• 4 bay leaves
• 1 large daikon radish, washed and cut into bite-sized chunks
• 8 oz. fresh greens beans, trimmed and cut in half
• chopped scallions for garnish

Beef cheek meat is TOUGH!  I had a hellava time cutting it up.  At first, I didn't have enough control with my regular, super-sharp butcher knife to get through the sinew; the knife kept slipping off.  I had to use two implements of destruction:  my short, Santoku-style knife and a pair of poultry sheers.  As I was cutting, I realized that this dense meat is probably going to be extremely delicious because of all the tendons, and it would take hours to become tender, but it would be well worth the effort and the wait.

The white is sinew, not fat.  This is some of the leanest meat I've ever seen!

Cutting beef cheeks into bite-sized chunks takes a lot of physical effort.

Method

In a dutch oven, saute the onion in the oil until it is translucent, then add the cut-up meat and saute until lightly cooked on all sides.  


Add the garlic and ginger and stir-fry for another few minutes. 

Add the liquids, then aromatics (orange peel, star anise, and bay leaves), bring to a boil, lower the heat to very low, put on the lid, and allow it to cook for two or three hours, until the meat is tender. 


Check on the stew periodically to make sure the liquid doesn't boil away.  If necessary, add water.

Add the daikon radish pieces and green beans and continue slow cooking for another hour.  


Remove and discard the bay leaves and the chunks of ginger root.

Success!

I served the stew over steamed basmati rice.

The diakon radish is an awesome vegetable.  It's a sturdy root, like a carrot or turnip or potato, but with an extremely mild radish flavor.  It went well with the sauce and meat, as did the green beans. The meat was downright sumptuous, very 'meaty' in flavor, tender, but with no obvious animal fat, so it wasn't 'heavy' tasting.  And the sauce was amazeballs.  

I had my doubts that a combination of 4 or 5 bottled sauces plus an overload of bay leaves and some orange peel was magic, but . . . 


Hey!  It is!

White Bean Soup w/ Lamb Andouille & Dandelion Greens

In an effort to get back into the habit of cooking for myself, I joined the Lake-to-River Food Coop in Youngstown, Ohio in March.  My thought was that maybe if I could add some adventure to the shopping portion of cooking, maybe I could lure my inner chef back out into the kitchen.

For my first online order, I let whimsy be the guide.  I bought a half peck of apples, some smoked cheddar cheese, local eggs, a loaf of bakery bread, salsa, kim chee, and a pound of andouille sausage made of lamb.  I had to wait four days to collect my order from the storefront on the north side of town, so I had time to imagine all the meals I might make with something as exotic as lamb sausage.  In the end, I settled on a fairly simple peasant dish and cold weather favorite with a Southern twist:  White Bean Soup with Lamb Andouille.

 

I went to my regular grocery for an onion, some celery (ended up with a whole head of celery, most of which will probably go to waste), a bell pepper, and some collard greens. The greens turned out to be, like the celery, a problem of quantity, because the only collards on sale were in monstrous pre-packaged bags bigger than three human heads combined. Collard greens do cook down, but not that much!  Scanning the produce shelves, I spotted dandelion greens in a manageable bundle, so I grabbed those as a substitute.

When I got the andouille sausage home on Thursday, I was shocked.  It was raw meat, ground and spiced.  It was not smoked sausage, like the andouille I'm used to.  I took a small piece of it, flattened it, and baked it for about twenty minutes so that I could taste it for spices and to see how much fat there was.

 

It turned out to be rather lean for a sausage.  It was a medium spiciness, nicely garlic-y, but it had way too much salt in it.  Because of the taste test, and because I would be using canned beans, I decided not to add any salt at all to pot until after the soup was done.  And I’m glad I did, because no additional salt was needed.

To make this soup, brown together in a large frying pan:

1 lb. lamb andouille sausage
1 diced onion
1 diced green bell pepper
2 stalks of celery, diced
5 cloves of minced garlic

When the vegetables are soft and the meat is brown, put the mixture into a slow cooker and add:

1 big pinch of dried thyme leaves
2 cans (15.8 oz each) navy beans, rinsed
1 can diced tomatoes (14.5 oz)
1 bunch of dandelion greens, chopped, including stems

Add enough water to make a "soup" consistency.

Set the slow cooker to low and forget it for three to four hours.

I enjoyed cooking, the aroma therapy, and even the taste of it for the first few days.  Over four days, I ate the soup for five meals.

Late in the week, I had another bowl, but there was still lots of soup left, so I ended up freezing it.  But, to be honest, I am not looking forward to eating it again . . . my taste buds are done with lamb andouille for the foreseeable future.

As for the rest of my Lake-to-River purchases:

The loaf of bread turned out to be huge.  I mean: HUGE!  It was very white and very soft and fluffy, not at all crusty or chewy like what I was expecting from a “European” style bread.  It was also sweet--so sweet, in fact, that I took to eating it a slice at a time, toasted, with butter, for an occasional dessert.  Even so, after a week and a half, when the loaf started to mold, I had barely eaten half the loaf.

The smoked cheddar is lovely.  I am still working on it.  I will likely be reordering it in the future.

The salsa is HOT!  I love it.  Still working on it.

The kim chee is not very hot, but it is very tangy, satisfying my love for sour and pickled things.  I eat it as a side with rice.  This is another item I will likely order again in the future.

Half a peck, by the way, is 17 apples.  If I’d known that, I probably wouldn’t have bought them.  I tried very, very hard and managed to eat 15 of them. They were tasty, though they became a torment by the second week: Oh, goddess! I’d better eat another apple before they all rot!  I kept thinking.  I even chopped an apple up for my dog, Roma, which promptly she spit out on the floor and walked away from.  She’s not a fan of fruit.  Most dogs aren’t, though I have owned several dogs who liked apples.

Overall, I’d say the apples were very good, but, as with the bread and the celery and the pot of white bean soup, I felt bullied by the quantity.  I am just not an apple-a-day, or anything every day, kind of gal.

Yes, I am aware that I could have made a pie out of the excess apples, but then I would have had a whole pie to contend with!  Pie every day for a week OR defrosted slices of pie whenever I want until freezer burn forces me to toss them in the trash anyway.  I've come to hate frozen food with a passion, even my own frozen food.

Large quantities is my main issue right now as a solo shopper and diner.  What I need is to be able to buy food in sane quantities so that I can eat fresh without wasting food.  In Holland, I could easily purchase ingredients for one person at a time, because they don't (or didn’t) package everything based on a family of four or six, like they do here in America.

In Holland, when I lived there in the '90s, you could even buy half a loaf of bread at the bakery.  Why can’t we do that here?

Have Knife, Will Babble to Relaunch Next Month

Hot sauce covers a multitude of frozen-meal and fast-food sins.  I keep a stash of these bad boys in my desk at work at all times!

My food situation has worsened since I last posted on this site five years ago.  More local grocery stores have closed.  Specialty groceries have gone out of business.  The lack of variety in fresh produce and the dearth of Asian and other ethnic food ingredients in the Mahoning Valley continues to make cooking fresh, international cuisine a challenge.  While we do have ways to buy directly from farmers, I have found that CSAs and many meat-buying programs require a lump sum of cash in order to participate.  I've done it a few times, but coming up with $300 or $600 in a single lump is, frankly, an issue.  Add to that the problem of being a single eater in a food system centered on packaging in bulk, and you have all my excuses gathered in one paragraph for giving up the challenge.

Most of my meals now are pre-packaged, commercial, and frozen, as are most of my lunches.  But  I'm miserable.  Buffalo wings have their limits. As does pizza and overcooked pasta with universal  red sauce.  Besides, I NEED fresh vegetables, even if I am forced to buy enough for a dozen servings at a time!

So . . . Next month, I will relaunch this site with a slightly different mission.  I will, once again, stage my own private resistance to the corporate food complex.  I will talk about living in one of America's biggest food deserts and work on solutions.  I will research new fresh food sources that are closer to home. And I will try new strategies to avoid waste.  I'll also review cookbooks, research topics in food history, and . . . 

Hey!  I might even cook!

Raspberry Dream Cups

A few weekends ago, when the weather was hot and sticky, I kept thinking of ice cream trucks with their Popsicles, Dreamsicles and Eskimo Pies. This recipe is a twist on nostalgia. Instead of the classic combination of orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream, I made a raspberry sherbet to pair with a very simple Philly-style (eggless) vanilla ice cream.

Raspberry Sherbet

• 4 cups of fresh raspberries or 2 bags (total of 24 oz.) frozen raspberries, defrosted
• 2 cups whole milk
• 3/4 cup sugar

Put the ingredients in a blender and blend. Alternative, put everything in a deep bowl and use a hand blender to puree the berries and mix the ingredients. (At this stage, the concoction makes a wonderful beverage! Try a sip! ... Yum!)

Strain the mixture through a sieve to remove the seeds. I stained my mixture twice through a fine sieve, removed half a ton of seeds, and still ended up with some seeds in the sherbet. If you really really need to get rid of all the seeds, I would suggest using cheesecloth.

Freeze the mixture in your ice cream maker. When it reaches the soft-serve stage, pack it into another container and put it in the freezer while you make the vanilla ice cream.

Simple Vanilla Ice Cream

• 1 cup whole milk
• 3/4 cup sugar
• pinch of salt

Heat the milk, sugar and salt together in a medium sauce pan over low heat.  When the sugar has dissolved, turn off the heat and pour the hot liquid into a mixing bowl. Add:

• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon real vanilla extract

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator for several hours. Then freeze in your ice cream maker.  At soft serve stage, put it in your freezer for at least one hour.

Raspberry Dream Cups

Using 8oz. plastic storage containers for your "cups," pack half of each cup with raspberry sherbet and the other half with vanilla ice cream. Place the cups in the freezer for at least 4 hours before serving.

The recipes above yielded enough sherbet and ice cream for 12 dream cups (plus extra servings of sherbet).

Zucchini Bacon Tart

I've been cooking up summer veggies for the last two weeks, but it will take me a while to get all the recipes and images on the blog. I'll start today with zucchini, since we're all swimming in it.

This particular recipe is for all my baco-vegetarian friends out there.

What do you do with an over-abundance of zucchini, too few eggs in the fridge, and a lonely leftover piece of frozen puff pastry dough?

Here's what you'll need . . .

• 1 sheet puff pastry dough, defrosted
• 4 slices of meaty bacon
• 2 medium zucchinis, grated
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• cracked black pepper, to taste (whatever that means)
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
• 4 eggs
• 1/4 cup milk

Here's what to do . . .

Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly grease a quiche pan or pie plate.

Unfold the puff pastry sheet and place it in the bottom of the quiche pan or pie plate. Yes, it is possible to put a square peg in a round hole. Just fold the corners down:

Cut the raw bacon strips into small pieces. Start frying the bacon in a cold pan over low heat, rendering out as much of the fat as possible. Cook until the pieces are very crisp.

When the bacon is done, turn off the heat and transfer the pieces to a paper towel. Remove most of the bacon fat from the frying pan, but don't clean it out yet.

Add the shredded zucchini and stir fry over medium low heat. Use the moisture in the zucchini to deglaze the pan; scrape the tiny bits of bacon from the bottom of the pan into the zucchini. Add the thyme and black pepper and continue to stir fry.

When the zucchini is dry and starts to stick to the pan, turn off the heat.

Allow the zucchini to cool down somewhat, then spread it over the puff pastry dough. Spread the shredded cheese over the zucchini. Spread the cooked bacon pieces over the cheese.

In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk. Pour the mixture evenly over the bacon. There will barely be enough liquid to cover and you may even need to use your (clean) fingers to press down on the contents of the pan to make sure the egg mixture coats everything.

Bake at 375 degrees until the top is browned. For me, this took about 40 minutes.

This dish turned out great. I ate the first piece hot with some cherry tomatoes for lunch. The rest, I packaged into sandwich bags for quick breakfast fare last week. It's like a quiche, but not so egg-y. It's also like a pizza, but more bacon-y. And the crust comes out delightfully flake-y.

Deep Dark Chocolate Frozen Yogurt

Finding out that my new ice cream maker came with a second freezer bowl was a surprise. I decided to make a second frozen concoction (the first was Basil Ice Cream) but to try to make it from ingredients already in my kitchen.

Note that whole milk yogurt does not alway say 'whole milk' on the container. Check the label. If it says "milk" without a percentage of fat (0%, 1% and 2% are most common), it is whole milk.

By happenstance, I had a quart of plain whole milk yogurt in the fridge, originally intended for an Indian curry that I never made because of the heat wave. I didn't have enough frozen fruit on hand to make a fruited frozen yogurt (my favorite), but in the back of the fridge was a partially empty bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips left over from last December's holiday baking.

After consulting A Perfect Scoop, which does not have a recipe for chocolate frozen yogurt, I decided to hack together a recipe of my own, based on two other recipes in the book—Vanilla Frozen Yogurt and Chocolate Sorbet. Here's what I came up with:


1 quart plain whole milk yogurt
1/2 cup Dutch cocoa powder
1 cup sugar
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate pieces
1 tsp real vanilla extract
pinch of salt

Warm half of the yogurt over a double boiler. Stir in the cocoa powder and sugar and continue stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Next, add the chocolate pieces and stir until they are melted and incorporated into the yogurt-cocoa-sugar yogurt.

Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the remaining plain yogurt, the vanilla extract, and salt. Stir well.

Move the chocolate yogurt to a large bowl and cover well with plastic wrap. Place in the refrigerator for several hours, or until the mixture is good and cold.

Once the yogurt has been cooled well in the refrigerator, it will be the consistency of chocolate pudding. Freeze it in your ice cream maker. Once the frozen yogurt reaches soft serve stage, pack it into freezer containers and freeze for another hour or longer in the back of your freezer.

Putting the chocolate yogurt into the ice cream maker.

Delish!

Basil Ice Cream

Although I bought David Lebovitz's book, The Perfect Scoop, three years ago, it wasn't until this summer that I noticed his recipe for Basil Ice Cream. All I needed was a source of fresh basil, and I knew my friend Valentine's homegrown supply would be ready in August.

The most time-consuming part this recipe was the harvesting and trimming of the basil. My friend was very generous, so I ended up with enough for ice cream, some pesto for myself, and a cup or so of loose leaves for my housemates.

Removing the basil leaves from the stalks.

Once the basil leaves were ready, it was time to get cooking.

Ingredient List for 
David Lebovitz's Basil Ice Cream

• 1 cup packed basil leaves
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup whole milk
• pinch of salt
• 5 egg yolks
• zest of 1 lemon. preferably unsprayed

I started out following the recipe by placing 1 cup of the cream, the sugar, and the basil leaves in my food processor. Within a few minutes, however, I knew there was a problem. It wasn't the fault of the recipe, but the fault of my bargain basement, dollar store, lame-ass food processor. Instead of grinding and chopping up the basil leaves, all it did was bruise the leaves and whip the cream to stiff peaks.

Bruised basil leaves in whipped cream. Not good.

I stood there a moment, trying to figure out how to salvage the mess. Basically, I had derailed the recipe at step one. If I tried to process the mixture any more, I was afraid I'd turn the whipped cream into butter. Picking the basil leaves out of the whipped cream and chopping the, by hand was impractical at this point, not to mention messy.

Making a leap of faith, I decided to move all of the whipped cream stuff to a bowl and continue with the recipe as best I could. Later, at the end of the mixing, I would use the hand wand mixer to--hopefully--grind up those leaves. If it didn't work, people would just have to chew their ice cream.

After I scraped the bowl of the food processor clean, I decided to ditch the lame-ass food processor. I dumped the entire machine and all of its attachments into the garbage. This was the last time I (or anyone else) was going to be fooled into thinking it was a real a food processor. It was not. A mortar and pestle would do a better job.

The next step was to make a light custard out of the remaining cream, milk and eggs. In a heavy-bottomed pan, I heated a cup of cream and a cup of milk over low heat.

In a separate bowl, I whipped the egg yolks with a whisk. When the cream and milk mixture was hot but not boiling, I turned off the heat and drizzled about a quarter cup of the hot liquid into the eggs and whisked them well. Then I added another quarter cup of hot liquid and whisked again.

Once the eggs were tempered, I poured all of the egg mixture back into the pan, whisking as I did, then turned the heat to low. Whisking constantly, I watched to make sure the mixture did not boil. The mixture was done when it thickened into a light custard, lightly coating the back of a metal spoon.

The next step is to pour the custard through a sieve to remove any bit of cooked egg white or other chunky debris left behind by the cooking of the custard. I did this over the basil and whipped cream concoction.

Next, I added the salt and the zest of the lemon and got out the hand wand.

The hand mixer did a beautiful job grinding the basil leaves into the liquid. Within a few minutes, I was covering the bowl with plastic wrap and putting it into the refrigerator to chill down for half a day.

Later in the evening, I got out my new ice cream maker and turned the basil custard into basil ice cream. At the dense soft serve stage, I moved the ice cream into a plastic container and popped it into the deep freeze overnight.

Basil ice cream is a surprise. It doesn't taste like pesto. Imagine mint ice cream, but without the intense palate punch that mint delivers. Basil ice cream is sweet, green-tasting and earthy, with the barest edge of mint.

How can I describe it?

Imagine a summer day. Full sunshine. Blue sky. A cooling breeze. Imagine that you could put a spoonful of the perfect summer day in your mouth.