Tag Archives: soft serve

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Posted by Bean Pie and Baking in Good Eats, Recipes I dig, Stories About My Life, Uncategorized and tagged with , , , , , , ,

Adding the hot grilled peach to the freshly minted soft serve blew the aesthetic, but since I like to slurp my ice cream anyway, I didn’t mind.

In my post “The Ice Cream Man Might Drive Me Crazy” I told you how much I’d love to make ice cream but just can’t cotton to having many quarts of ice cream in my freezer into perpetuity. Not only do I not have the freezer space (I still have cookies and rolls from last semester’s baking class and this semester’s baking class just started), it’s not good for you.

So full of excuses! Rationalizations! A true ice cream maker would buy a second freezer and churn away into the night like a mad creamery scientist, right? Well.

Enter Fortune. I killed my oddly expensive Little Green carpet cleaner by letting my oh-so-natural vinegar-and-water solution (so superior to commercially scented products! so chemical free! so groovy!) sit in the tank. I had been vaguely wondering why my closet smelled like vinegar every time I went in there for something…it was because the vinegar — surprise! — had eaten away at all the rubber seals and gaskets and the bottom had basically fallen out of the contraption without my noticing. Don’t be surprised — this kind of thing is actually a routine occurrence for me. But, I’m trying to explain why I happened to alter my regular routine and found myself in a Super Goodwill looking for somebody else’s  discarded handheld carpet spot cleaner — the whole other-people’s-trash-is-my-treasure sort of thing. Naturally, I didn’t find one, but I did find a bitchin’ piece of vintage Tupperware (no, not the deviled egg keeper — La Fortune’s not THAT sweet) and this: the Hamilton Beach 1/2 pint ice cream maker. $3. Yippee! Imagine my delight. It’s on.

This one isn’t mine — mine is blue, is missing one bowl and the manual — but this is the Half Pint Ice Cream Maker in its Platonic form.

And, can I tell you that right after that, no less than four ice cream recipes came my way via other food blogs? Coupled with the other half dozen ice cream recipes roosting in my inbox right now, I figured it was time. Just in time for autumn, when people tend to want ice cream the most, yes.

First, I decided to make vanilla. Start at the beginning, right? Keep it simple?  But then I decided to grill some peaches to go with it…and doesn’t honey go well with peaches? And don’t I just happen to have a recipe for Honey Ice Cream culled from the food blog The Way The Cookie Crumbles? Well, yes. So it was Honey Ice Cream — with some vanilla bean paste thrown in for good measure because I CAN’T JUST LEAVE IT ALONE —  scaled down from y= 1 quart to y= 6 oz.

Prepping the little guy: cold ice cream base, frozen bowl. See how tiny he is?!

My Lil’ Mini is  ready to go.

Next, I decided on Lemon Buttermilk Sorbet. I came across this recipe in the comments section of a website when I was searching for advice on my new Lil’ Mini. Since I was sans instruction manual, I was boning up on soft-serve strategies using the glorious inter-web. If you find yourself in possession of a Hamilton Beach Half Pint Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker and want some advice, click here.  The recipe for Lemon Buttermilk Sorbet turns out to be from Epicurious.com (68 reviewers gave it an average of 4 forks). I had lemons and buttermilk on hand (doesn’t everyone?), so this recipe proved to be a snap. Plus, I felt very virtuous since there wasn’t any cream in it. And, I love lemons.

Buttermilk Sorbet

When I was feeling less virtuous, I decided to try Cooking Light’s version, which is, ironically, not as “light” as the recipe from Epicurious.com since it combines buttermilk with whole milk and half-and-half. Cream sure does make for the delicious, doesn’t it?

Buttermilk Sorbet, but with cream and milk. Does that mean it’s not sorbet?

For my next trick, I chose something a little more exotic: Coconut Red Bean Ice Cream. I found this recipe on a blog called Butter is Beautiful. If you read my post “Cuckoo For Coconut!”  you’ll remember I’m in a coconut phase, so you can see how coconut ice cream would intrigue me. This recipe also happens to be vegan, but shhhhh! or nobody will try it.

The making of the Coconut Red bean Ice Cream. I made the red bean paste, on the right, a day or two ahead. It’s no sweat.

This recipe involves coconut milk mixed together with red bean paste, which you can buy at an Asian market. Or, if you are already making red beans and rice since you have to use up the smoked pork you still have from your ham-buying frenzy earlier in the summer (see “The Aisle of Ham“), you can just set a portion of red beans aside after soaking and cook it off separately from the savory dish. Red bean paste is very easy to make.  You can see its appearance in the photo above.  Try it, except don’t put the red bean paste in the saucepan — that was a mistake — it actually gets stirred in after the concoction comes off the heat. It smelled extremely good in the making.

Coconut Red Bean Ice Cream. It was exceptionally creamy and delightful.

This ice cream may have been my favorite of the three only because it is a bit exotic. The coconut milk gives it a unique creaminess, and the red bean paste, while sweet, has an almost savory aspect to it. It’s a nice contrast. Plus, I liked the texture.

Overall, I’m very pleased with my newest uni-tasker. I believe the Goodwill did me right. It’s nice to be able to run up some ice cream in a jiff, and since I actually prefer soft-serve to hardened ice cream, I’m happy as a clam. Its half pint status suits my lifestyle and I can see myself using it enough to cover its $3 price tag. I’ll wager I will use it a lot more often than the mini pie maker I bought in a moment of holiday shopping weakness last December…although there’s still time to redeem myself on that one since pie season is a’comin’…But, before that, there are ice cream recipes galore to explore. Why, not three days ago another tasty recipe dropped into my inbox. It’s Ezra Pound Cake’s Maple Gelato, and goodness knows I enjoy a maple ice cream…

Of The Shore, Which Is A Weird Place

Posted by Bean Pie and Baking in East Coast Food Finds, Good Eats, Stories About My Life, Uncategorized and tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

As you know if you have ever talked to me for more than five minutes, I am almost fanatically in love with Northern California. I love Berkeley like other people love their sports teams, but without the numbered jerseys. Even so,  there are many things I genuinely like about the East Coast. One of the things I have always admired is the annual pilgrimage to the beach. Or, what they call going “down the shore.” Going to the shore IS the summer vacation. You rent a house for a week and decamp to Jersey, or Delaware, or Maryland, or even as far north as Rhode Island (hey, Little Compton!). It’s fascinating.

It’s an intimidating process: the people, the traffic, the cost, the hassle. Everybody from all points west is trying to get to the main shore points, due east, on the same few handful of roads at about the same time of day on a Friday afternoon. But, once you make it, I have to admit it’s pretty awesome. You put on your suit, stuff your big canvas bag with towels and magazines and cold water that will quickly become warm and gritty with sand, and head out for the day. You roast in the sun, go brave the water, then roast in the sun, then go in the water, then go “walk the boards,” get a slice of pizza or some soft-serve, and go back to your towel which is now covered in kicked up sand from other people tromping by, and lay back down for another turn. That’s a day at the beach. A night at the beach is a whole other ball of wax which I actually don’t know much about. As a voyeur, I’m generally almost always a day-tripper.

City of Rehoboth Beach plaque with boardwalk, then ocean in background.

Fortunately, I went down mid-week in late June — the calm before the storm. The gloves come off right around the Fourth of July, so I made sure I squeezed in a quick visit before the real mayhem of summer. Rehoboth Beach is about 100 miles from where I live in Maryland, so it’s a bit of a haul for a day-trip, but I happen to enjoy that drive. I usually find some odd, interesting scenery, even if it’s just to marvel that in a road lined with signs broadcasting roadside BBQ chicken,  they have always, mysteriously, either happened just before I rolled through, or are about to happen right AFTER I roll back out. Hmmm. The ever-elusive BBQ chicken stand.

This time, since it’s been three years since I made the drive, I went (unintentionally but predictably) off the beaten path and found this truism:

Then I found this lovely little bit:

And then this funny little bit:

Which I thought was either a tongue-in-cheek or an ironic/sardonic comment on the state of farming today, until I saw read the rest of the sign:

…which I then just found confusing and a bit ominous. The Eastern Shore has a long history of chicken farming, and Perdue Chicken plays a huge part in that history, for better or worse. And it’s mostly worse, from what I hear anecdotally. I’d like to look into this more in a later post, perhaps on another day-trip.

The tractor store I passed a few miles later was a very busy place which shows how big a part farming still plays in the economy of the Eastern Shore.

I only wish I could have taken a photograph of what I saw in my rear view mirror driving behind me as I passed this store — it was some sort of tractor, but up high off the ground with enough space underneath it through which a small car could pass! It looked like I was being pursued by some kind of tractor spider. This machine probably has a real name of which I, being urban — or, if not urban, at least not rural — know nothing about. That’s part of what I like about going to the shore: it’s weird to me. There’s always some funky store or funny road sign or strange man with a metal detector and head gear on to stimulate the imagination. You just never know what you’ll come across on these day trips.

Once you wander your way through these scenic photographic tangents and broach the Coastal Highway itself, you just need to find a good parking spot, so bring a roll of quarters — YES, QUARTERS, I kid you not, no credit card slots — for the parking meters — the TWO-HOUR parking meters, by the way, so don’t stray too far from your parking spot searching for the perfect quadrant of sandy heaven since you will be feeding the meter every 120 minutes.

For the uninitiated, the learning curve on the beach itself can be steep. The Atlantic waters are actually warm enough in summer that you can swim in them so, naturally, I thought the ocean was my friend. This is not necessarily so. I’ve gotten sucked underwater hard enough to lose my sunglasses on two separate occasions in water not much deeper than my knees (and that was 0 for 2, by the way: I did it the first time, then did the exact same thing the very next time). Lesson: don’t wear sunglasses into the ocean. Also, “undertow” is a real thing. Hmm.

But, if you can manage to keep yourself in one piece, you get rewarded by the sun beating down on you and the sound of the waves crashing into the sand, and the gentle call of shore birds circling above (or, un-gently,  very, very close if some yahoo near you decides to feed them a piece of bread and suddenly you are surrounded by, no joke, three dozen gulls ready to peck your eyes out for a soggy piece of hoagie roll. DON’T FEED THE GULLS. You’ll start a bird war and they are really not as cute when they are all up in your face.).

And, sometimes you get lucky. You see things like a school of dolphins arcing by. Or, around happy hour, you’ll see extremely fit people lap-swimming — yes, lap-swimming! – freestyle through the ocean four times further out than anyone you were bobbing around blowing bubbles and doing dead-man’s floats with. Watching their smooth, efficient, horizontal strokes slice through one of the most powerful bodies of water on earth is really amazing, along with the respectful realization that it’s people like that who save people like me when we do foolish things like swim out too far or some other such nonsense.

Rehoboth Beach, DE

That is the recompense for your drive: a sunny day, gulls wheeling overhead, and the fun, happy feeling that comes from people relaxing. And soft serve. You could argue for salt water taffy, pizza slices, caramel corn, fudge –there are lots of things that come to mind when you think of beach boardwalk food, but for me, it’s soft serve. And in Rehoboth, it’s Kohr Brothers.

Kohr Bros., Rehoboth Beach, DE.

It was a rather (understatement) hot day, so my strawberry rainbow sprinkle cone incarnated quickly from this:

Pre-rainbow sprinkle bath

…to this…

Not even out of the hands of the soft-serve server and it’s beginning to slide…

…to this!

This cone/cup hybrid is a concession to the midday heat…

Ooh la la! Now, that’s hot. No matter, it was dee-licious.

In any case, more on food later (see my upcoming post “Of Shore Food, Which Is Great Fun”).

So, if you live within a few hours of the shore and you need to get away and clear your head, consider Rehoboth Beach for charm, or Ocean City if you want to get real about walking the boards, with all the rides and arcade bells and whistles that go along with that. You’ll meld into the crowds and watch generations of cultural legacy unfold around you as you become part of the undulating wave of another summer day at the beach.

And, if you do it, do it right: get a low-slung beach chair that you can wear as a backpack, bring a boatload of quarters for the parking meters, leave your sunglasses on your beach towel, and enjoy.

Sunset along Rt. 404 home from Rehoboth Beach, DE.