I'm done with February! So, so, done! My stir craziness has started to drive friends away. It's Saturday night and all I wanted to do was stay in and hibernate. But when February gives you ice, I guess you make ice cream...or at least that's what I did.
I've been on a Ronnybrook Farm kick lately. It started with the yogurt, first non-fat, then full fat, then I tried the cream, now I'm hooked on the butter. In between my weekly visits to the Greenmarket I've been dreaming up more and more creative things to cook with the scant resources we're left with in February. (On a side note, I did recently go on a field trip to a Whole Foods and found it boggling that you can in fact buy lemon grass and beautifully ripe red peppers in the middle of the winter in Manhattan. Many people are doing this. The line for the register on a Friday night snaked around the interior of the store. We joined the line. We even bought lemon grass. And then we went home and made a terrific red curry with hake and eggplant and plenty of garlic, ginger, and spice. I love learning to cook Thai food from my friend Rowena just as much as I love the challenge of trying to make something interesting out of what's been kept in the root cellar for the last five months. How many ways can you cook a potato? Everyone seems to be asking this week. We must be getting ready for spring.) This time of year there are Bosc pears at the Greenmarket, and plenty of them. I've cut them up and cooked them with oatmeal, I've eaten them with yogurt, I've poached them in port, I've baked them in tarts. It's like playing a song you can't get enough of-- it fades out and just as soon as it does, you're craving that first chord again. When my yogurt and my pear supply runs out, I go running back to Union Square to stock up on my staples. And then I lug the bounty home and on the train I think of what to make. In my weeks of hibernation there has been much eating of ice cream going on. Favorite flavors include (but are not limited) to: dulce de leche, rum raisin, butter pecan, and of course, coffee. But now that I've got a solid source of heavy cream from a local farm, why not make my own? Then Yonathan loaned me his nifty Cuisine Art ice cream machine and I was left with no more excuses.
First I made a purée of pears adding just a little sugar, a cup of pear juice (admittedly not local, but bought from the lovely and very local shop, D'Vine, a Syrian grocery around the corner), and a quarter cup of water. Then I separated the eggs, saving six yolks for the crème anglaise. Since I didn't have a vanilla bean I ground up some of the cardamom pods I brought back from Morocco and added them to the mix. This is the first time I've made crème anglaise, and I have to say, it went off without a hitch! You heat the cream without bringing it to a boil, pour a little into the yolks (whisking the yolks all the while), then pour your mixture back into the remaining cream. If your heat isn't too high and you continue to stir, you will get a lovely, thick sauce. In the end, the pear purée was added to the crème, and then into the fridge my batter went to chill for a mere four hours.
By midnight the ice cream maker was churning away, transforming my first triumph of the evening into the second: real deal, no two ways about it, nothing fat free in sight, ice cream.
The other day, in a particularly February funk, I decided it was time to take out the last of the raspberries and blackberries I'd frozen in July. The tart and slightly twiggy taste of a raspberry melting in my mouth softened me: I could remember what July feels like-- eventually we'll be there again. For now there are three containers of pear-cardamom bliss in my freezer. I think I'll eat a little bit tomorrow, but when it's too hot to sleep this summer I'll be able to dip into the reserves and recall a chill so fierce outside that it seemed best just to stay in on Saturday night and make ice cream.
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