The dregs of Christmas

Was in the grocery store on Tuesday--yes, the 27th of December--to do the usual shopping and pick over the reduced price seasonal items that didn't find a happy home before Christmas.  I didn't find much of interest, except this:

Note the expiration date on the jug.  Fully twenty days ago.

Yeah, I don't think so.

I don't care how yummy an idea pumpkin egg nog is, unless I know it's been in the freezer for most of that time, I'm not buying a dairy product that's almost three weeks old unless it's billing itself as cheese.  Okay, or yogurt or sour cream.

I've had stuff last in the fridge well past the expiration date--and, I know, it's a "do not sell after" date as much as anything--but ain't no way I'm going to attempt going through that much nog that late in the game.

I was kind of surprised there wasn't a "last minute manager's special, one dollar off!" sticker on the thing, but maybe they were afraid it would just draw attention.

Maybe there was already enough brandy in the nog to stave off lactobacillus and I missed my chance, but then, why wouldn't they have moved the date out?

Modified unnamed drink recipe

Yes, I still have nothing to call this drink.  My brother in law came up with a salutatory modification at Christmas.  Start, as before, with a 2:1:1 mix of ginger ale, chocolate vodka, and Chambourd.

Then, toss in a shot of sours.

Shake and serve on the rocks.

The sour addition brightens up the flavor respectably.  Depending on how thoroughly it's mixed and how exact your ratios are, the chocolate may become a subtone or the sour may just enhance the fruitiness of the raspberry liqueur.  It's all good.

I don't have a name for this drink, but a coworker came up with it while traveling for business.   I'm guessing a bit at the proportions so if anyone tries this and has a better idea, please let me know.

Pour into a tumbler with ice:

4 oz. chocolate vodka
4 oz. Chambourd

Top off with ginger ale.  I recommend Vernor's, just on principle.

The amount of alcohol might be off.  It was about a 50/50 mix but my original impression was of a slightly taller glass, and she held her fingers 3-4" apart and said "about this much alcohol" total.  Could be four ounces total, could be somewhere in between.

Actually, let me amend what I said above.  If anyone who has a good sense for the balance of ingredients in a cocktail, with or without tasting one, please let me know.   Maybe someday I'll tell you about the dangers of empirical reverse engineering of cocktails, but for now just trust me and don't try too hard to find the flaws unless you've got a knack for it.

Crispy Prosciutto Cups

Got the basis of this recipe from Kelsey Nixon's show on the Cooking Channel.  It looked fascinating and easier than some of the other things I've been planning on trying, so...next on the list it got to be.

You can look up the original recipe (and you should) at the link above.  I'll just present the modified version I tried.

1 lb Italian sausage
12 oz package of diced celery and white onion
1 cup of pomegranate arils
4 large eggs, beaten
6 pieces prosciutto
10 oz package of dry stuffing/bread cubes
1 t fennel
1 t dried thyme
2 c juice from a turducken (cooked, of course--how else would you get any water out?  Don't tell me.)

I didn't particularly plan it out.  I saw that fennel sausage was the first thing listed in Kelsey Nixon's recipe and couldn't find any so I thought I was being clever when I opted for Italian sausage and added fennel instead of fennel sausage and various other spices, and was feeling smugly clever until I just now noticed that Italian sausage was also called out in the original recipe.  Well, there was plenty of meat as is; it may have been more like a meatball than stuffing, in my book, if I'd doubled the amount of sausage.

I can't believe I just said "there was plenty of meat as is."

Since I was low on prosciutto I ended up just doing one slice per muffin tin cup and filling a small breadpan with the rest of the stuffing, but it was fine since I still needed something to go with that turducken.


It turned out pretty well, too, although I made the mistake of trying to eat it while watching "Eraserhead" and I just had to stop.  But we're getting ahead of ourselves; I was barely able to get the prosciutto out of the package without tearing it apart, so I ended up breaking each slice in half and trying to work with two rough square of ham tissue, which was a bit easier.  I had foreseen the possibility of this working better, but I sadly failed to honor this prophecy in my own mind.

The arils were just serendipity.  I hadn't read much past the ingredient list when I was shopping so I was half inclined to get fresh cranberries if I could find any, thinking about how the balance against Granny Smith apples would change if I did, when I just saw the package of fresh arils.  Also, they were on sale, and I didn't remember the apples until I was leaving the parking lot  Meh; world didn't end without them.

I admit, I've been going the slightly processed/prepackaged route here and there, but when I'm trying to discern something new, I try to weigh convenience allowing me to focus on the novel aspects of a dish against the superior quality of ingredients prepared freshly and properly by me in the kitchen.  In this case the sacrifice seemed negligible; in other cases, it's usually because I can't even find the best stuff fresh.


On with the cooking!  As I would presume, you turned your oven on to 325°F back when I was talking about David Lynch's ouvre killing my appetite.  If not, there's plenty of time while the sausage is browning over medium to medium-high heat in a skillet.

When the meat was browned, I added the celery/onion mixture and a little under half the arils.  When they started to cook down, I started adding the spices and half the juice (I had just pulled the turducken out of my slow cooker and the bag it was in still had all its juices).  I think I over did the juice a bit, and feared it might not have had as rich a flavor of legitimate chicken stock, so I let it reduce by approximately half before transferring it to a large bowl with the dry stuffing.  Meanwhile, I used the rest of the poultry juice--ugh, it sounds awful phrased this way, doesn't it?--to deglaze the skillet and allow the sausage-bread mixture to cool before adding the eggs and the remainder of the arils.

Oh, I threw in a little red-black pepper mix just before taking the sausage off heat, too, because I couldn't find a jar of black pepper.  Worked fine.

All that being done, I scooped as much of the mixture into the prosciutto-lined muffin tin as I dared and packed the rest into a 7"x3" breadpan.  Into the oven for 20 minutes, then check for doneness.

It looks pretty much like this when it comes out, only the meat is visibly crispy and everything else is slightly darker on top.  I remembered to take a "before" picture but not an "after" one, sorry.

It's not a stuffing recipe like what I normally use, but it was quite good.  The pomegranate's sweet tartness worked with the savory meat just as well as I could have hoped.  It was just a bit crumbly around the edges, but nothing that shouldn't be resolvable by a plate.  Maybe that second pack of sausage would have turned it into a less frangible fluffy meatball like you get in some restaurants, but whatever.

Some variations to consider for the future:  bacon instead of prosciutto, and mini-muffin tins, which would have been more accommodating to my half slices of prosciutto.

UPDATE--The photos should be visible in the published posting of this recipe now, not just in the draft preview that only I can see.  What would have been the good of that?  I was in the room with them at the time; it's not like I need to prove that to anybody.

Pumpkin fluff dip (revised)

I forgot something in the original posting of this recipe. The corrected version is as follows.

1 12 ounce can of pumpkin puree or whatever that stuff is
1 8   ounce tub of whipped cream type stuff
1 box of instant vanilla pudding (typically 1 or 2 packets)

Mix these together with pumpkin pie spices, either the premixed variety to taste or:

1 t cinnamon
1/2 t ginger
1/4 t cloves
1/2 t nutmeg

Once evenly mixed, serve with vanilla wafers or ginger snaps.  Windmill cookies might be pretty good, too, come to think of it.

All quantities are approximate.  Some cans of pumpkin are 15 ounces, which shouldn't make much of a difference; and some pumpkin pie recipes call for no nutmeg or no ginger, so increase or omit any of the spices if you don't want to scandalize the palate.

Pretentious mac 'n' cheese

Some cookbooks will warn you to stick with eutectic cheeses when making macaroni and cheese if you want it all to come out all smooth and creamy.  I can't blame them.

However, it's not strictly necessary.

I got my first hint from, ironically, the first cookbook I found that actually warned me not to use hard cheeses like sharp cheddar (presumably cheddar-flavored cheese melt product would only have shown up on their classiness radar) or asiago, which would tend to be gritty, or really delicate and non-uniform cheeses like bleu, which would tend to be runny and awful.

Well, turns out the key to the solution is in the problem itself.

The recipe I had been looking at did, actually, call for a little bit of cheddar, but only in quantities small enough to provide flavor without compromising the texture, and mixed with something well-behaved on the stove like mozzarella or provolone.  Not bad advice.

There are probably some béchamel based recipes you could get away with adapting, too, but one thing at a time.

All I really had to do was take their advice without heeding their warnings.  First, in the spirit of good pretentious dishes, I brought together a couple relatively highbrow cheeses:  shredded hard cheese (I think my first attempt was with a medley of Parmesan, asiago, and romano) with no anti-caking ingredients and Roquefort, in approximately equal proportions.  I used one pack of Roquefort, which is 3-4 ounces, so figure maybe half of one of those smaller jars of whichever hard cheese you prefer, or grate yourself a pile about the same size.

I put those in the food processor so the mixture could homogenize a bit while I worked on the other stuff.  My thinking was that the mixing would be much more thorough than I could achieve by hand, and would be facilitated by the extremely high initial surface area of the hard cheese.  Although the mixture did warm up some, it wasn't enough to cause the fats to melt and separate.  I've had that happen with poorly planned homemade cheese dips before, and I hoped to tame the tendency by first blending two cheeses with complimentary defects.

I wanted a dish that would stay creamy, though, so into a saucepan over medium heat I put about 3-4 ounces of mozzarella (so we have about a 1:1:1 ratio of hard, delicate, and eutectic cheeses), a tablespoon or so of butter, and the better part of half a cup of milk.  Maybe a bit more; if I recall correctly, I'd poured out a whole cup and ended up drinking some when I was satisfied with the consistency.  Well, whatever you want to do; the creamy macaroni and cheeses I see on TV always look great but mine usually come out looking like a casserole so I probably underdo it.  Anyway, I was afraid that if I didn't include something that was intended to melt smoothly, the pretentious part of the dish would disintegrate upon cooking or, worse yet, separate on the plate once it started to cool.  A fondue or queso-style cheese should also perform this function well.

Okay, so:  Got the creamy part of the sauce melted, got the pasta cooked (half a box of shells); put those two together, and as soon as it all starts looking consistent, add the hard-bleu cheese blend.  If I were only using well-melting cheeses I probably would have turned off the burner and relied on residual heat from the pasta to finish the melting and avoid burning the bottom of the pan, but I wasn't sure it would be quite enough so I left the heat on low a little while longer and stirred vigorously.

It was just enough, or the mixture was more forgiving than I hoped.  It was somehow sharp and smooth at the same time, pleasant but intense enough to demand a palate-cleansing drink to go along with it, with a possibly disturbing blue-flecked appearance.  But hey, all that mold's cooked, so who cares?

Irish ice cream

This receipe was my second foray into "no minors without their parent or guardian" ice cream.  My first was Alton Brown's egg nog ice cream, actually a frozen custard (incidentally, his avocado ice cream is good too, reminding me for some reason of the green tea ice cream at some Japanese restaurants).

After my foray into Irish toast, I knew there was untapped potential in liquor as a cooking ingredient, and when I got in the mood for ice cream one day with not quite enough milk to go around (not a situation I like to be in, except that this kind of thing keeps happening when I am), this recipe all but manifested itself whole and complete in a single glance.

But first, the ingredients:

4 egg yolks
1/3 c sugar
1 pint Irish cream liqueur
1 c heavy cream
optional:  1-2 T small chocolate chips or chopped dark chocolate

Mix the yolks and sugar until smooth and the yolks become a slightly brighter yellow.

Over high heat in a small saucepan, mix the cream and half the liqueur.  When it just starts to boil, remove from heat and temper it into the eggs.  I had done my egg yolks in a food processor so I just left them in there during this step and turned it back on while I added the hot cream, slowly enough not to cook the yolks or the plastic components of my processor.

Return everything to the saucepan and cook, stirring frequently, just until it reaches 160˚F.  Remove from heat and add the rest of the liqueur.  My saucepan tends to retain heat, so to facilitate cooling and prevent overheating, I sometimes have a second, prechilled pot or metal bowl on hand, or a shallow ice water bath to partway submerge the pot in.

When you're satisfied you're not going to cook everything in your fridge from the residual heat, move the mixture to the fridge and let it cool to 40˚F.  Lower would actually be better; maybe you should put it in the freezer a little while, instead.  Because of the relatively high amount of alcohol, the freezing point is going to be pretty low.

I use one of those ice cream makers that has the freezable liquid core instead of one that uses ice, so I just leave my cores in the freezer all the time and keep the temperature turned all the way down.  It's enough to almost completely freeze the flavored vodka I keep on hand for another recipe I'll post later, so for most ice creams it sets pretty quickly (especially the avocado one).

When the mixture is cold, add it to your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's instructions.  If you decided to add the chocolate, wait until the mixture has started to firm up; if it's too runny, it'll all get pushed to the sides and the bottom, and if it's too close to solid, it will just stay near the top and not mix.

Serve in modest quantities.  Keep in mind that it's over half liqueur (way over half if you replace the heavy cream with more Irish cream--why not?) so you'll basically be consuming a bowl full of 20-30 proof liquor one heaping spoonful at a time.  It adds up.