Today we have for you:
What to cook this weekend: ice cream
Good morning. My ice cream maker’s in a closet along with my pasta machine, paella pans, a giant bamboo steamer and an immersion circulator. (In this game, you accumulate a lot of tools.) I haul it out periodically for experiments — creamy mango ice cream, Red Zinger ice cream, Guinness ice cream — that generally work, if not brilliantly. I’ve never been an ice cream ace. Scott Loitsch is out to change that for me, and perhaps for you. He’s come up with a superb new recipe for easy homemade vanilla ice cream (above) that makes a great base for building almost any flavor of ice cream you can imagine. (Sichuan peppercorn, please!) It’s eggless, relying instead on cream cheese to provide texture and stability, along with zing and shine. Featured Recipe Easy Homemade Vanilla Ice CreamI might use it for Scott’s take on peanut butter pie ice cream. Or his strawberry cheesecake ice cream. I could crumble some Heath bars into one version or use dried cherries soaked in bourbon for another. For the Sichuan peppercorn situation, I’d toast a bunch, crack them, and then steep them in milk before straining them out and heating with cream, sugar, corn syrup and salt to pour over the cream cheese. Here we go! Ice cream’s a great dessert after a mess of burgers or brats, after a meal of blackened fish with quick grits, after a big barbecued vegetable salad. That straight vanilla one’s perfect scooped over a summer berry buckle or a peach pie. This weekend, we all scream for ice cream. But not only ice cream. I want to keep messing around with Kay Chun’s recipe for egg foo young, experimenting with the gravy to see if I can achieve the perfect dark gloss and flavor of the one I remember from childhood, from the takeout shop at the end of the neighborhood. (Kay’s is so close! I add a whisper of mushroom soy sauce and a little more oyster sauce than she uses.) I also want to grill chicken thighs and corn with lime-basil butter and soy-steamed fish with scallions and pistachio. I’d like to greet Sunday morning with perfect buttermilk pancakes, oven-roasted bacon and a big fruit salad of watermelon and peaches. And kalpudding for Sunday supper? Yes, please, that too. There are thousands and thousands more ideas for what to cook this weekend waiting for you at New York Times Cooking. Do reach out for help if you find yourself caught crosswise by our technology or in trouble with your account. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you. Or if you’d like to complain or congratulate, you can write to me: hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I do read each one I get. Now, it’s a long way from lingonberries or golden syrup, but I enjoyed the dark comedy of Elliot Ackerman’s new novel “Sheepdogs,” which explores the racket of war and the complexities of its aftermath. For Food & Wine, Kim Cross followed the path of wild salmon from their capture in Bristol Bay, Alaska, to the markets of the rest of America. Richard Godwin, for The Guardian, went deep on social media’s most accomplished trickshot artists and how they work. “In the algorithmically segmented world of short-form video,” he writes, these clips of ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things are one of the “closest things we have to a shared culture.” Finally, it’s vacation season and if I can’t take mine in Italy this year, I sure can visit in my imagination, thanks to my colleague Jason Farago’s accounting of his five favorite places for art in Rome. (An excellent Google map accompanies his words.) I’ll see you on Sunday. |
