Culinary Concoctions by Peabody

Well this weeks TWD pick was by my food blogging friend Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity. I think Dolores makes more of my baked goods for her office mates than any other reader of mine. She chose Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream. Which would be great minus the whole I am allergic to blueberries thing.
So I looked at the recipe. I decided I would do my own this week. Another inspired recipe like I was doing there for awhile. A Vanilla Bean Marionberry Caramel Swirl Ice Cream to be exact. It’s a vanilla bean base(still using some sour cream like the original recipe) with crushed marionberries added and then ribbons of caramel folded it. It was darn tasty. I ate it for breakfast. Afternoon treat. And some after dinner.
There really isn’t much to say about this ice cream other then damn it was good. End of story.

Vanilla Bean Marionberry Caramel Swirl Ice Cream

Vanilla Bean Base

2 ½ cups heavy whipping cream
½ cup organic sour cream(I use Nancy’s)
1 cup granulated sugar
pinch of salt
2 vanilla beans, split and beans scraped out, reserve pods

Place 1 cup cream into a medium saucepan.
Add the vanilla beans and pods. Bring to a boil.
Remove from heat and let vanilla beans steep for about 30 minutes.
Place back on medium heat and add sugar and salt. Whisk until sugar has dissolved.
Add sour cream and whisk until incorporated. Add remaining cream and heat for another 2 minutes over medium heat.
Pour mixture into bowl and let chill mixture for at least 3 hours.
Transfer mixture to the frozen ice cream maker bowl using a strainer to discard the vanilla pod.
Churn ice cream according to your ice cream makers manufacturer’s instructions.

Marionberry and Caramel Swirl

1 cup marionberries(or blackberries), crushed with a fork
½ cup caramel sauce(I use Fran’s), warmed so that it is fluid

After the ice cream has churned. Remove from ice cream maker bowl and place in a large bowl. Stir in marionberries so that they are fully incorporated and the majority of the ice cream has turned a purple color. Using a spatula, gently fold in the caramel.
Pour into a freezer container and freeze until hard, about 2 hours.

This week’s TWD pick is Cherry Rhubarb Cobbler(chosen by Amanda of Like Sprinkles on a Cupcake). Rhubarb has come and gone(at least the good looking stuff) around these parts so I went with all cherries. Especially since cherries are cheap around these parts. And cheap right about now sounds good. I really seems this week when I was at Costco that I really noticed a price hike. My cream that was $4.79 a half gallon(yes, that is right I go through, not one, but two ½ gallons a month…easily) is now $6.49. That is quite a jump in a month.
Oh my.
In fact the only things that still seem to be relatively cheap of course is snack food. So when you start seeing me get creative with Pop Tarts on here you know my grocery budget is shot.
In my last post about being child free(btw…who knew there were so many of you non-breeders out there, I don’t feel so alone) some one left a comment about a movie called Idiocracy. They wondered if I had seen it. I have. It’s one of my husband and I’s favorite movies for the sheer fact that we can totally see it happening. The plot is described as this(or you can read a much longer recap here):

Joe Bauers, an Army librarian, is judged to be absolutely average in every regard, has no relatives, has no future, so he’s chosen to be one of the two test subjects in a top-secret hibernation program. He and hooker Rita were to awaken in one year, but things go wrong and they wake up instead in 2505. By this time, stupid people have out bred intelligent people; the world is (barely) run by morons–and Joe and Rita are the smartest people in America.

They wake up in a world that is beyond lazy. No one drinks water they drink the equivalent to Gatorade(which won a government contract through lots of lobbying). It is in everything from drinking fountains to what the water crops with(crops that wont grow). Garbage is everywhere. Toilets are built into their chairs so they don’t have to get up. The language has been dumbed down so much that they all talk like Brittany Spears when she is loaded. Speaking of Spears, the whole way this came about was that the less intelligent were the ones breeding and the more intelligent individuals either waited until it was too late or didn’t have children at all. Thus, causing the population to slowly but surely dumb itself down.
Now before you leave me hate mail, I am not saying that if you have kids you are dumb. Sooo not where I was going with this. I think you know the difference between the type of person I am talking about, they are the people who end up on Jerry Springer and say “I just went to the bathroom one day and out popped a baby, I didn’t even know I was pregnant.” These are the people popping out 5 or 6 kids that make me nervous. Top that with snack food being the only thing that is cheap these days and we wont be that far off from the movie’s portrait of the world come 2505.
Back to the food and speaking of cheap, I got me some free chocolate awhile back at a Seattle Food Bloggers meet up. Quite the variety, with one really interesting one being a Coconut Curry Milk Chocolate. Hmmm. I thought long and hard about how to use it. I thought either custard or ice cream. Ice cream won out. I decided to pair it with the cherry cobbler so that I could give you a recipe this week. Since it was a chocolate ice cream, I went ahead and made the cobbler topping chocolate as well. I simply added 2 heaping TBSP of unsweetened cocoa powder to the mix as well as another ¼ cup of sugar. The curry is pretty subtle for those of you who are wondering. And thoughit is a little out there, the flavors did work well with the cherry cobbler, probably not with a cherry rhubarb cobbler though.

 The chocolate I used comes from Theo Chocolates here in Seattle.

Coconut Curry Chocolate Ice Cream

6 ounces Coconut Curry Chocolate(or just plain milk or semi sweet chocolate…not unsweetened)
1 cup sugar
½  cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
1 ½  cups heavy cream
1 cup milk
3 large egg yolks

Chop chocolate. In a heavy saucepan whisk together sugar and cocoa powder until combined and whisk in cream and milk. Bring mixture just to a boil, stirring occasionally. In a bowl beat yolks until smooth. Add hot cream mixture to yolks in a slow stream, whisking, and pour into pan. Cook custard over moderately low heat, stirring constantly, until a thermometer registers 170° F. Remove pan from heat and add chopped chocolate, whisking until melted. Pour custard through a sieve into a clean bowl and cool. Chill custard, its surface covered with plastic wrap, at least 3 hours, or until cold, and up to 1 day.
Transfer custard to bowl of a standing electric mixer and beat just until thick and fluffy. Freeze custard in an ice-cream maker. Transfer ice cream to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden. Ice cream may be made 1 week ahead.

Adapted from Gourmet Magazine August 1997

I am super bad when it comes to things like being tagged or being nominated for blog awards. I lack follow through. Which is odd, because elsewhere in my life I am pretty good with the follow through. I’ve been nominated for the Excellent Award several times over. It’s not that I don’t greatly appreciate it(because I do!), it’s that I hate having to single out people. I think this goes back to my teaching days where you are taught not to have favorites. For, as lame as this sounds, I think that anyone who takes the time to write a food blog is pretty darn excellent. Now granted some are more polished than others. Some bloggers(cough, cough) spend a little more time than what they probably should on theirs…guilty as charged. But we all started somewhere. We all created a very friendly and supportive food blog world. And that too me is excellent.
It’s far too warm around these parts. The oven is seeing very little action…Summer vacation if you will. So out came the ice cream maker. Raspberries are on sale everywhere lately so I went for those. I also went for honey thanks to the Food Network. Now, normally I am not a fan of the non-cooking shows on the FN, but I got sucked into one the other day called  How’d That Get On My Plate? The subject was honey. I sat there watching how honey was made and harvested and the many different ways that it was used. One was cream soda. I do not know how I have gone this long without knowing that cream soda is flavored with honey. So that got me thinking about making a ice cream float with it. Which got me thinking that the ice cream I would use for it should have honey in it as well. The honey is from Anna’s Honey, right here in Washington State. The cream soda is Thomas Kemper(another Pacific Northwest product). The float turned out way more yummy than I could have hoped. You could even say it was excellent.

Raspberry Honey Ice Cream

1 quart raspberries
1/3 cup raspberry honey(or any honey will do)
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup half and half
1 tsp lemon juice
1- 1 ½ cups sugar(depending on how sweet your berries are)
3 egg yolks
¼ tsp salt

Directions:
Add the yolks,sugar and honey to a medium-size bowl. Whisk together and then set aside.
Using a double boiler over medium-low heat, add the half and half, cream, raspberries and salt. Regularly whisk the mixture, heating until the temperature reaches approximately 145F. The mixture should begin to turn purple.
Once the cream mixture has reached the desired temperature, slowly add about half of the mixture to the eggs and sugar while whisking vigorously. This will prevent the eggs from curdling. Once the eggs and cream have been thoroughly integrated, pour back the egg mix into the remaining cream.
Whisk constantly and slowly as the mix rises in temperature. Once the temperature has reached 165-170F — or when the mix evenly coats the back of a spoon — remove from heat and add the lime juice and vanilla. Whisk them in completely and run through a sieve to remove any raspberries seeds. Move to a new container to cool. The mix can be placed in the freezer for 2 to 3 hours or, preferably, into the refrigerator overnight.
Churn according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. After churning, place in freezer to firm up. I recommend placing a seal of plastic wrap tight against the ice cream after making it to prevent a skin from forming on the ice cream’s surface. Serve once firm enough.

Source: Adapted from My Husband Cooks

Raspberry Honey Ice Cream Floats

Three scoops Raspberry Honey Ice Cream(more or less depending on the size of your glass)
1 cup cream soda(I used Thomas Kemper)
1 TBSP raspberry honey(or any honey will do)

Take glass. Place one scoop of ice cream at the bottom of glass. Pour in honey. Add next two scoops. Pour soda over ice cream and enjoy.