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    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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Emergency eclairs

Posted on June 4, 2013 by DebbieN

Note: this is not my photo–I have not been to the balcony of Notre Dame lately. I merely share their dismay. [Source: Brittanica Online, with gentle modifications for parody purposes]

You may be wondering what to do if you drop half your éclair over the balcony of the Eiffel Tower, or worse yet, Notre Dame, while pondering your options for the afternoon’s conquest…YSL first, or peut-être Dior?…ooh-la-la-oops!

AAAAAGGGGHHHH!

Screaming will not get your éclair back, though it is a good start. You need to get down to ground level and purchase another tout de suite!

No, this is not really me channeling Miss Piggy at her “Who, Moi?” finest. I don’t have the lavender satin opera-length gloves for it, for one thing. I’ve just been watching too many of the various Muppet movies with my daughter lately.

Plus, and let’s be honest about it, the one time I ever tried on a long blonde wig (for a college skit), I took one look in the mirror and fell down on the costume department floor laughing until my ribs hurt. It was 20 minutes until I could breathe again. Picture Danny deVito (his eyebrows, anyway) peering out from under that wig, hoping to stand in for La Porcette,  and you understand why Frank Oz can never, ever go on vacation.

I have not been to Paris in seven years, and when we were there (for an engineering conference, with our then-kindergartner) we did not actually eat any éclairs. We also did not shop at Pierre Hermé, nor at Hermès, nor anyplace that wasn’t either a museum, an RER or métro stop,  a café or a tchotchke booth along the Seine. Other than for food, if it cost more than 15 bucks (or 11 euros, as for example, the tiny 3-inch-long stuffed unicorn at the Musée du Moyen Age, which we paid for hastily during a shall-we-say-jetlag-inspired meltdown), it was out of the question. I actually spent two full hours–ON VACATION IN PARIS–sitting forlornly in a coin-op laundromat down the alley from our hotel, hoping I had enough change to get all the horrible perfumed detergent back out of our clothes, while my husband and daughter went to the park. Not exactly the Paris experience I’d imagined way back in my high school French class.

So what am I doing imagining that I could climb up OR down the Eiffel Tower in chic heels (instead of the more believable sneakers and backpack with the entire belongings of my family plus bandaids and extra sandwiches…), waving an éclair around with incredible nonchalance and somehow not lose it (which I’ve never actually done; I’m a fervent believer in pastry) or break an ankle (which I have actually done, wearing flats), or both, with loads of people looking on?

Who knows–daydreams like these are the kind of thing mentioning Paris does to one when one blogs about food or fashion. Practically obligatory. It’s fun to imagine a life where such trivial matters can leaven, not to say inflate, my expectations. And, of course, where I’m not the one who has to schlep all the emergency supplies up however many flights of stairs. And back down.

Let’s face it, I’m a natural pessimist and (therefore) fan of both the Muppets and Matt Groening. Tell me true, now, doesn’t the gargoyle on the right look like the original inspiration for that sad shrimpy one-horned character in Life is Hell? He’s even wearing my backpack.

Real life is hard, gritty for more serious reasons than high-heeled éclair mishaps, and it’s filled with nagging of the now-ex-7th-grader. Ahem! These are things we just have to get through because there’s no great alternative (…yet. I’m working on it, believe me.)

Eclairs, on the other hand, are not actually difficult to make. And eating them makes one feel a lot less like life is hell, particularly if one skips the high heels and eats them barefoot.

And on the other other hand, baking anything in Los Angeles, even in winter, may well make one feel that one is actually living in hell, at least while the oven’s on. And right now it’s June.

How to cope? Toaster oven? Microwave?! The eagle squawking in shock above left may not approve of my methods, but he’d find it hard to argue with the results. Especially if you’re in the mood for just a couple of éclairs Right Now, and you have ice cream on hand so you can skip the custard chilling and filling bit and go right to profiterole heaven.

The pastry for éclairs, called pâte à choux, or choux paste (shoe paste! I knew there was a connection to the sudden appearance of high heels in my daydream), takes only a couple of ingredients: flour, water, butter, sugar, eggs. Maybe a pinch of salt too, okay.

Everyone and their uncle (or aunt) who’s ever written a Frenchy kind of cookbook has a recipe for éclairs, but who do you know anymore who’s ever actually made them? Right.

But actually, they’re pretty easy to make. At least as easy as brownies from a mix, and they seem fancier. You boil the butter, sugar and salt with the water, dump in the flour and stir until it looks like stiff mashed potatoes, then take it off the heat and beat in the eggs one at a time and voilà, there you have the dough–shiny yellow stuff to pipe out or dollop out onto a greased and floured baking pan and bake at high temperature for about 30 minutes until they’re really puffed and brown and don’t collapse anymore when you let them cool.

David Lebovitz has the classic recipe on his web site — a cup each of flour and water, 6 T butter, 2 t sugar, 1/2 t salt, and 4 large eggs. Pierre Hermé of exotically-flavored-macaron fame has a richer one with more butter and 6 eggs for the same amount of flour. And I’m sure they’re wonderful. But I can’t help messing around.

First off, I want fewer than 24 éclairs–what do you do with the rest of the dough? (turns out you can pipe it and freeze it, then bake straight from frozen sometime later, or else freeze the baked shells. OK. But still.) So I cut David’s basic proportions in half. Limit the damage to the avoirdupois, I always say. Fewer situps required.

Second, the butter. I know éclairs are the ultimate Unalterable Classic French Recipe but…here starteth the messing around. Like I say, I can’t help it. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, shopping | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Emergency eclairs

Pistachio madness two ways

Posted on August 4, 2012 by DebbieN

(plus a handful of other frozen yogurt ideas)

Homemade pistachio frozen yogurt, very low carb

It’s over 90 degrees most of the day in Pasadena, and I’ve gotten tired of looking at the limited selection of Dreyer’s (Edy’s east of the Rockies), Breyers, Haagen Daz, and Private Selection flavors with my daughter. It’s starting to get tedious, and they’ve dropped many of the classics for the cheapest possible quality candy-plus-ersatz-vanilla (note: their real vanillas are better). The forgotten classics were better-tasting, less dependent on goo and sweetened brown wax parading as chocolate or (if salted) peanut butter.

No supermarket ice cream brand in the non-superpremium range today offers rum raisin or pistachio worth considering anymore. It’s easy enough to doctor your own version with storebought vanilla ice cream and the aforementioned rum and raisins, but pistachio?

Pistachio used to be a standard ice cream flavor, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just getting old? Naah. Even in the ’70s when I was a kid, most of the “pistachio” ice cream around was already fake. I want the real thing, not the artificially green, mostly-vanilla-with-a-tinge-of-synthetic-almond kind.

And I want it low-fat for me and my husband and low-carb for my daughter (and us too, why not?) And I want it to taste delicious despite all that. Tall order? Actually, it’s easier than you’d think.

David Lebovitz has a Sicilian pistachio paste-based gelato in The Perfect Scoop, and he blogged about it a couple of years ago as well. He made it sound delicious, but also expensive and hard to find the ingredients for. Not that I’m against a trip to Sicily, except in July when it’s about as searing as LA (been there, done that, got the sunburn and the Fellini moments combined with heat exhaustion).

About the same time, a local gelateria owner in my area took much the same position on the utter superiority of Sicilian pistachios versus California ones for an interview in the LA Times. Which is lovely if you have a good source of Sicilian pistachios or pistachio paste at a decent price, but what if you don’t?

Most of the home-brew pistachio ice cream recipes I’ve seen in magazines, blogs and cookbooks call for adding significant amounts of heavy cream. Or else they involve large amounts of sugar. Or both. Yes, those recipes will give ice cream-like results, but they’re completely offtrack for what I need.

In my universe, good taste on a hot day shouldn’t mean losing your svelte, your cool or your wallet.

The nuts themselves are okay–pistachios, like most nuts and seeds, are very low carb and though high in calories from total fat, most of that is unsaturated. If I can keep the rest of the ingredients low fat and low carb and the stuff still tastes good, I’ll have it. Right?

So okay. I’ve been playing around with California pistachios and–not gelato, that requires making an egg-based custard and blending it with flavorings. Done it once or twice, and it worked, but it’s more work than I want to do most days. Or it used to be. Nowadays I’ve got the microwave moxie to make custard without so much work, but it’s still not what I want today. I want easy.

Frozen yogurt made with real yogurt is too tart to work with anything much but fruit unless you mix in some milk–and then it’s icier and freezes harder.

However, this summer I’ve been playing around with fat-free Greek yogurt as the base for a couple of different ices in small quantities. Greek yogurt varies a bit in nutritional stats from brand to brand, and it’s expensive, which is why I took so long to try it out. But the cheapest all-real (no gelatin) stuff–Trader Joe’s O% fat plain version–while still twice as expensive as the regular plain nonfat yogurt ($5 vs. $2.50 a quart), has considerably less carb, maybe only 7 grams of carb per cup as opposed to 17 for regular. And it has about twice the protein–22 grams per cup. It’s a lot thicker and less acidic, so I’m assuming they drained out a lot of the carb in the whey. And it makes really easy frozen yogurts that taste like something and aren’t overwhelmingly tart.

Just mix in your flavoring of choice (preferably not too watery) with some sugar, and you can still-freeze it within an hour or two. If you think the tang needs to be tamed further, a little milk mixed in works okay and it stays thick enough to freeze fairly gracefully.

The texture is never going to be like ice cream, not entirely. It still mixes up pretty hard and a little icy if you still-freeze it, but once you’ve got it thawed out to the point where you can dig out a serving, it tastes good and changes to a creamy texture as you eat it, something like khulfi. Higher-fat yogurt would break the iciness up a bit but would defeat my purpose of lowering the saturated fat to something I can handle.

And the heavy fats and sugars mask any delicate flavorings. Think Italian gelato (the real kind you get on the street in Florence, not the overpriced stuff you get in pints in the supermarket here) and you know that a lighter base allows you things like rose or ricotta or apricot or kiwi, or hazelnut, or four different highly refined grades of chocolate. If you want to taste anything delicate in your ice cream, you have to get the fats and sugars down enough not to overwhelm it.

Not that I’m entirely subtle. My favorite icier-textured frogurt for when it’s broiling out is mint–Greek yogurt, a couple of drops of mint extract, if that’s strong enough without tasting like postage stamps, and a tablespoon or so of sugar. Divvy it up into 2-4 paper cups or popsicle makers (small is okay for this), freeze. On a searingly hot day it’s pretty good, intensely flavored and refreshing, and its popsicle-style texture is fine with me.

For something like coffee frogurt, I really do want a creamier texture if I can get it. I finally figured I should just brew a little bit of triple-strength coffee so I can mix just a few spoonfuls into a cup of Greek yogurt, maybe with a few spoonfuls of milk, and still get strong enough flavor.

A spoonful or two of alcohol-based flavorings like rum, amaretto, even just vanilla extract can soften the hard-freeze effect, since the alcohol freezing point is lower than that for water.

Or you can add something protein or starch to the mix–egg custards and cornstarch are the usual route for gelati and standard commercial ice cream, but silken tofu and nonfat powdered dry milk also work to break up the ice crystals. Greek yogurt is providing most of the protein here and little water, and the carb is a lot less than for the powdered dry milk.

The last thing on my list, and it sounds either weird or completely obvious, is to add a fat–but I want something unsaturated. Oil? Yuck (though I have seen some olive oil ice creams flavored with basil or the like). But what about nut butters? Those, don’t laugh too hard, work pretty well and give the frozen yogurt a richness that feels like ice cream, only without big saturated fats or modifiers or xanthan gum or corn syrup solids or whatever. Plus they’re interesting flavors.

Halvah: I started with my trusty jar of tehina–sesame paste. It’s got almost all its fat in polyunsaturated form. A tablespoon in a cup of Greek yogurt, plus a tablespoon of sugar, stir, freeze, dig out a chunk–not so hard! And the flavor–kind of like frozen halvah. Very rich, though. Maybe I could get away with less tehina or more yogurt?

Chocolate halvah: I tried a chocolate version–also not bad–by adding two tablespoons of cocoa powder and an additional spoonful of sugar to the tehina/yogurt mix. Pretty good, but the tehina taste was definitely still there alongside the chocolate. Like chocolate marble halvah. You have to be a fan.

Peanut butter? Probably more Americans would like it than the tehina version. Go easy on the peanut butter; a good-tasting mix I once made with half a cup got way, way way too rich very quickly once it was frozen. Stick with a tablespoon or so per cup of yogurt. I’d use natural peanuts-only peanut butter, preferably the crunchy one, for the purest taste, limit the sugar and add a pinch of salt.

But really. I started out wanting pistachio, and that’s where I’m still going with this. Because I ended up with two, count ’em TWO, really good, really different variations on pistachio, and both of them were really easy, really low in saturated fat, and REALLY low-carb. And actively delicious, which is definitely the point.

California pistachios may not be the Sicilian ideal, but they taste pretty good for what they are.  TJ’s sells 8 oz of roasted unsalted ones for about 5 bucks. Not exactly cheap. Still, the shelling’s been done, and for a pint of finished frogurt, you only need an ounce of pistachios. Will that be enough to taste like something? Oh, yes. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pistachio madness two ways

Ice cream, enhanced

Posted on August 29, 2011 by DebbieN

Sometimes your kid sees a new flavor of Dreyer’s ice cream at the store and decides she has to try it because “It’s Black Raspberry, Mom!” and it’s on sale. But mostly because it’s a trendy light purple (“Orchid or thistle?” I asked, calling on my distant memories of the Binney & Smith guide to the universe.  “Lavender” she retorted. I caved to her superior fashion sense.) It was made with real raspberries–that’s a plus, I suppose. And it came in a “half-the-fat” version, and it was enough on sale that I could get a safety flavor as well.

It’s been over 100 degrees here in Pasadena this week, so ice cream is practically a medical supply.

When we got it home though, it tasted sweet and kind of dull. The fruit flavor was there but not particularly strong, and the overall effect–particularly the smell, for some reason–reminded me suddenly of those horrible “berry-flavored” motion sickness lozenges my mother used to foist on us just before long car trips. Bonamine? I’m still shuddering forty years later.

My daughter, blissfully free of Bonamine-induced associations, still thought it had merit, though, so we kept the lavender-tinted ice cream and I wondered whether anyone else would eat it without having to be threatened. What was wrong with it and could it possibly be fixed?

I’ve been potschkying around with store bought ice cream pretty much ever since I was old enough to buy it for myself–adding extra cocoa powder and some mint or almond extract to chocolate, leftover coffee and cinnamon to vanilla, and on and on. Not many people do this, or do this enough, I’ve discovered. You have to wonder why not, because most non-super premium ice cream in America is a little, or a lot, bland.

In fact, the only flavor I never messed with was Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, which was perfect and sublime and needed no help ever, other than a spoon. My husband and I were such devotees that when we had a chance to spend a late-summer week in Vermont and New Hampshire one year (way back when, in our 20s), we made sure to stop in at the factory in Stowe for a tour. CHBC was such a supreme flavor that I only gave it up when Ben and Jerry both retired and a new CEO took over. Somehow, the next pint I bought tasted a little off–weak on coffee flavor or something, hmmm…I looked at the ingredients and sure enough, they’d changed the formula and flavorings. It had also been monoglycerided down, even though the fat count was still in the stratosphere. I’m sure my ice cream snobbery saved me from a decade of extra arterial damage, but I’ve been sullen and resentful ever since (or at least that’s the explanation this week).

So anyway–back to the prosaic purple ice cream. It needed something–tartness–to liven it up, and probably would have been better as a frozen yogurt. Come to think of it, would yogurt work? Naah. Messy. Plus refreezing time. Lemon? Maybe, maybe not–it might end up seeming too sweet. Then I found a lime in the fridge–from who knows how many weeks ago; it had already lost its green, but it was still fine inside. Sometimes where lemon’s pure acidity underscores the sweetness and makes it more apparent, lime’s aromatic edge undercuts it and makes the flavor seem fresher. Works for ginger ale, works for blueberry jam…

A squeeze, a stir–from lavender to…raspberry pink (what else?) and I have to say, a BIG improvement in flavor. Much more like actual black raspberry. That’s all it took? Why couldn’t they have done that at the ice cream factory? But they didn’t.

I have another reason for punching up my storebought ice creams, and it’s not just boredom or fidgetiness (though those are obviously tops).

A long-ago-and-far-away gelato-eating expedition in Florence (it didn’t start out that way, but it’s the fulltime occupation in the summer–even more of a medical necessity when you’re wandering outside all day as a tourist) taught me the difference between Italian and American standards for ice creams: Americans expect big portions and don’t really pay attention to the flavor. Bland and sweet is acceptable. Italians are happy enough with small 1/3 cup portions as long as the flavors are wild and adventurous and vivid. If you can taste it well with one of those tiny gelato spoons, a gram at a time, it’ll last you.

Makes you wonder whether the lack of flavor punch in American ice cream (and maybe our other food as well) is the reason we typically eat biggish portions at a sitting, or seek out seconds. If it doesn’t taste like much, you eat it without paying attention, and end up not feeling like you’ve really eaten it. Interesting and vivid flavor seems like a good idea for health and portion control as well as pleasure–if you’re going to have ice cream, after all, you may as well taste it. Otherwise you could just suck on ice cubes.

So–a few suggestions for upping the flavor of store bought ice creams.

Go for plain flavors as your base

Try to find ones that are relatively low in carb and fat for a half-cup serving. Low here means about 15 grams of carb per half-cup, and maybe 2-3 grams of saturated fat.

Not only don’t the dressed-up flavors with loads of mix-ins need (or take well to) further tinkering at home, they’re not always as high in quality. Dreyer’s (Edy’s on the east coast), seems to try to keep the nutrition stats consistent across the line–ice creams with lots of mix-ins and/or caramel-type ribbon swirl are a bit higher in carb, up to maybe 22 grams per serving.

To keep things consistently low, though, the components or the ice cream itself have to compensate–so Reese’s Cup-style peanut butter and chocolate chip swirl has iffy peanut butter and iffier quality chocolate chips (well, so do the real Reese’s ™–don’t know whether authenticity is such a good thing in this case), plus the ice cream’s a bit icy, maybe even a little stale-tasting on occasion. You’d get more intense flavor from vanilla bean ice cream with a few squares of good dark chocolate chopped in and some peanuts or a bit of peanuts-only peanut butter.

Make flavors you can’t buy

Sometimes these are ones you grew up with, like Rum Raisin–I think only Haagen Daz still makes this. People got kind of prissy about feeding ice cream with rum flavoring in it to kids, I guess. Or raisins got too expensive.  So did pistachios, except in super premium ice creams.

No one makes ginger, or lemon-ginger, even though I’m pretty sure those were two of Bon Appétit‘s and Gourmet‘s big summer standbys for at least a decade (and I know because I once bought a decade’s worth of each magazine from my friends-of-the-library auxiliary at about a dime an issue. The seasons change, the same 10 recipes repeat…)

And no one makes Sabra (chocolate orange), or fig, or liquorice, or marzipan, or rose. Or pear. Or chocolate hazelnut with sour cherries.  Or even just plain bittersweet chocolate. There are home recipes for all of Continue reading →

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Buttermilk ices

Posted on June 24, 2009 by DebbieN

Buttermilk is one of those underappreciated dairy foods, as is the even less well-loved nonfat powdered dry milk. Both are somewhat unappetizing taken straight. A glass of buttermilk, though it has its fans, can taste like liquid cottage cheese, and reconstituted NFPD never quite sheds its dank, sticky chalkiness, especially if you’re attempting to use it in the morning coffee (a desperate we’re-all-out-of-actual-milk substitute that has driven me to Starbucks more than once).

Cookbooks tend to ignore buttermilk and NFPD or else sweep them into baking recipes where they won’t matter much, won’t be recognizable, and certainly won’t dominate the taste. Given how much protein and calcium they contain and how inexpensive they are, that’s kind of a shame.

But treat them right and you get something light, versatile and delicious for dessert. Buttermilk’s actually a little easier to believe in an ice cream-like dessert than NFPD is. Foodie magazines feature lots of lemon buttermilk ice creams this time of year, but they include such odd and unnecessarily rich ingredients as cream cheese to simulate a superpremium ice cream’s texture. Not only is it extremely calorie-dense, it’s really, really expensive. Kind of defeats the purpose of using lowfat buttermilk in the first place.

My version of a lemon buttermilk ice uses NFPD instead of fat to create the microcrystalline structure that keeps it from turning into a huge popsicle. It won’t melt quite the same as ice cream, but it’s packed with flavor and a small portion feels like “enough”, especially with fresh fruit on the side.

NFPD’s stale chalkiness and crumbly texture are not so hard to fix, but I haven’t seen anyone presenting a method for it so I’m doing it here. There are two tricks, both of which can probably help for other NFPD recipes, even savory ones.

First is the taste–in this case, the lemon juice and rind seem to counter it quite successfully, and the juice also seems to help NFPD dissolve more smoothly. Orange juice seems to work also, so maybe it’s the tangy acidity that counteracts the stale milk taste. As long as you’re not heating it up, you don’t run the risk of curdling either.

Second is the clumpiness. There are a couple of Indian recipes where it’s actually a possible advantage–gulab jamun and burfi both seem to take advantage of NFPD’s doughiness when mixed with a scant amount of liquid. But for desserts where you want it to dissolve smoothly, just whiz the dry NFPD by itself in a food processor, or just with sugar, to get it to a fine dust before blending in any liquids.

Lemon Buttermilk Ice (makes about 8  1/3- to 1/2-cup servings)

  • 3.2 oz (91 g) packet nonfat powdered dry milk (or the amount specified on the package for a quart of reconstituted milk)
  • 1/2 c sugar
  • 2 c. lowfat buttermilk–drained a bit if it’s starting to separate
  • juice and grated peel of a lemon
  • 1/2 t. vanilla or to taste

Grind the NFPD and sugar together in a food processor until they form a very fine powder. Pour in the buttermilk and pulse to get the powder off the bottom of the food processor. Add the lemon juice and peel and the vanilla and blend again. Either pour into an ice cream maker for churning or into a freezer container with a sealable lid and freeze an hour or so. Scrape the frozen crystals off the sides, stir them into the still-liquid part of the buttermilk ice, cover again and refreeze. Do this once or twice more. Serve with fruit.

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