I spent today in the kitchen. This was partly in celebration of having a working cooker again, and also a cunning plan to make constructive use of the day given the forecasts of heavy showers. In fact we did not get a month's worth of rain in an hour, or anything like it. There was one downpour solid enough to send me upstairs to shut the bedroom windows, which left a fairly large puddle in the drive, and last night I heard one rumble of thunder that was not extremely close or incredibly loud, and that was it for severe weather in our corner of north east Essex. Which suits me fine, since I have no desire to be flooded or for the house to be struck by lightning.
The central focus of the day's kitchen fest was a new ice cream recipe, maple syrup and pecan flavour. It is a custard based recipe from Robin and Caroline Weir's vast and generally reliable book. The instructions said that the custard had to be baked in the oven, split among half a dozen individual ramekins in a water bath, which sounded like a faff compared to simmering it over hot water, but as that was what the book said I thought I'd better do it, at least first time round. I was slightly nervous about the cooking temperature, since even the bottom of the Aga runs hotter than the temperature given in the recipe, and the Aga with its new fan is running more fiercely than it has for a couple of years. The custards emerged with rather alarmingly frothy tops, but on investigation had thankfully not formed skins. I should imagine that ice cream with fragments of broken up custard skin in it would be foul.
It was also the first time for ages I'd made ice cream with chopped bits stirred into it at the end, and there was a minor panic as I tried to get the lumps of pecan distributed through the body of the ice cream before the whole thing melted. My preliminary conclusion, having licked the remains out of the freezer bowl, albeit without the benefit of the chopped pecan, is that I don't think I like it as much as plain vanilla or Dulche du leche. The fault lies not in the maple syrup flavour, but the sheer richness of the custard, made entirely with cream. I'll reserve judgement until I've eaten a proper scoop (don't think I could manage a whole bowlful) but I suspect I might as well save all that trouble with the ramekins, and just stick to drizzling maple syrup on ordinary vanilla, maybe with a chopped nut thrown on top if I'm feeling fancy.
Custard based ice cream leaves you with spare egg whites. I wish there were more recipes for using up egg whites, but looking through my books and clippings file, I am bound to admit that they seem to exist in cookery mainly as a means of aerating vast quantities of sugar. I made some meringues, which were fine. They keep for ages, and we're both partial to Eton Mess in the strawberry season. A tray of florentines taken from Gretel Beer's book of Austrian cookery are still in the Aga, and a bowl with the last two egg whites is still in the fridge. I've never done florentines before, and as I struggled to grate the rapidly melting chocolate I began to think that they had better offer a significant advantage over macaroons, otherwise I'm not doing them again.
I made pitta bread for lunch as well, using a Dan Lepard recipe I must have got out of the Guardian. They require very little work (mind you, nor does conventional bread), but a fair amount of hanging around between multiple mini-kneadings and provings, which makes them good to do on days when you're planning to be in the kitchen anyway. They keep pretty well, and are a quantum nicer than bought ones, which suddenly seem very dry in comparison. I find flat breads intriguing, the way they occupy the middle ground where pancakes give way to oven baked bread. Actually I like breads generally. I'm not even sure why I'm messing around with the chocolate florentines, except that I had the egg whites, when I'd probably enjoy a piece of buttered toast just as much.
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