Gingersnap Ice Cream

Churned it, froze it, and tasted it today. Oh! So good! Like eating gingerbread dough off the beaters...er...uh...when you were a kid. Right? A kid? It's pretty rich so you only need a small scoop for a LOT of satisfaction!

Gingersnap Ice Cream
Adapted from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters.
Makes 1 quart

Separate 5 eggs. Whisk the yolks just enough to break them up. Pour into a heavy-bottomed pot:

• 1 1/2 cups half-and-half
• 2/3 cup sugar
• a pinch of salt

Warm the half-and-half mixture over medium heat until steaming, but do not allow to boil. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Whisk in:

• 1/4 cup molasses
  
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground pepper

Whisk a little of the hot half-and-half mixture into the egg yolks to temper them, then whisk the warmed yolks back into the hot half-and-half. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat and stir in:

• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream

Cover the custard and chill thoroughly.

Freeze the chilled custard in an ice-cream machine according to the manufacturer's instructions. Transfer the frozen ice cream into a clean dry container, cover, and store in the freezer for several hours to firm up before serving.

Ice cream for Christmas

Here is one benefit of living in a place where the weather is so warm that it doesn't really seem like Christmas: you can continue eating ice cream all winter long. Not that snow, rain, sleet, or below zero temps ever kept me from ice cream before. But now it feels right to be eating it. And making it.

Okay, maybe the ice-cream-friendliness of this season is not a benefit, at least not if I want to return to America within ten pounds of what I weighed when I left.

But, seriously, it's ice cream. And as you may know, I like to make my own. What you probably don't know is that the cream here is super double thick and rich. That's how Callie would say it. "Super double."

Plus, it's really too hot here to run the oven much. And I only have one cookie sheet. And I didn't bring my beloved Silpat liners with me and it turns out that parchment paper is hard to come by here. I don't really know how to bake without Silpats or parchment paper. Honestly, I'm not much of a baker with Silpats and parchment paper, but I really suck without them.

I did bake for a cookie exchange last week. I took two dozen gingersnaps and two dozen biscotti. The biscotti were fabulous -- light and crispy. The gingersnaps were not so snappy. Oh, they were snappy shortly after I pulled them out of the oven, thankyouverymuch. But after a few hours in the humidity they developed the texture of a wet noodle. Bleh. And yet I'm still craving gingersnaps. Maybe that's my body's way of telling me it's Christmas time. If not for the Christmas music playing constantly in our house, you'd probably never know we celebrate Christmas here. Sad. Very sad.

So in response to the gingersnap craving, I made up a gingersnap ice cream recipe today and put together the custard base a while ago. Ohhhh...if the ice cream is half as good as the base, it will put that craving to bed for sure. I'm hoping to churn the gingersnap ice cream tomorrow and then later in the week I'm going to whip up two batches of peppermint ice cream as the wintery accompanyment to our Christmas Eve dinner of bbq ribs, cole slaw, and potato salad. How's that for a mid-winter feast? Sounds more like the Fourth of July, doesn't it? Hopefully I can find some ribs this week. If not, I'll have to come up with something else. Pulled pork? Burgers? Mahi-Mahi?

So, yes, this year I'm associating Christmas with homemade ice cream. We just finished off a batch of coconut ice cream (made with pureed coconut meat from three coconuts I watched a guy hack open with a machete). I made up that recipe, too, and it came out pretty tasty. It followed a batch of mint chip ice cream which wasn't bad, either.

It seems as if ice cream season has arrived here in Mexico. I'm making the most of it.

Toxic sludge.

I thought I knew something about the food industry in America. I mean, check out the "food politics" category on this blog. I've written a lot about it in the past. But I didn't know this. Or if I read it somewhere, I conveniently let it slip my mind because it's so wrong in so many ways and for so many reasons.

I'm talking about toxic sludge, or Biosolids, as the PR folks would spin it.

It's the nasty stuff that comes from our toilets, our hospitals, our factory floors, our storm drains...it all makes its way to the sewage treatment plant and then, apparently, half of it ends up as fertilizer on conventional American farms and in free compost piles in cities throughout America. Even in clean-n-green San Francisco. Can you believe it?

Admittedly, I am no expert on sewage. Everything I know about sewage I learned from Finding Nemo..."All drains lead to the ocean!" I thought that was disgusting and wrong, but this seems just as bad, if not worse.

Read more here, in the Huffington Post article published last month.

Happy birthday to me!

My thoughtful husband invested in a sweet new lens for me -- a 50mm f/1.4 lens. I love it, love it, love it.

Here are a few shots from the new lens.