Visit Number 10,000

That's a direct cut and paste from my sitemeter in the title above. Hooray for me, ten thousand visits have been logged to this site. Nice of the folks over at Wrigley to notice. When can I come sing the 7th inning stretch?

All things considered, I'm not even sure that 10,000 is a lot for the amount of time we've been open for business, but it feels like a big number and we're celebrating and feeling festive about it over here at C&EinC corporate HQ. Bourbon and blackberry ice cream may soon be busted out.

I'd like to take this opportunity to now thank a very special person, the distinct individual who was my 10,000th visitor; to you, person in unknown state, country, and city, someone who apparently did a Google image search on the term "SMOKEHOUSE" and somehow got linked to my site, and whose visit consisted of 1 page view lasting zero seconds, I say....

Thanks. Nice knowin' ya. Come on back, now.

The bloggers know all about the statistics and analytics that are available. I just have what they offer for free. It's crazy stuff. Mr. SMOKEHOUSE's info wasn't there, but about 75% the visits do give me info about the person's state, city, country, and often their ISP and/or the name of the business. I've checked my sitemeter and discovered that my wife or my mom is reading *right at that very moment*. Spooky.

It's kind of voyeuristic. I don't have that many visits (50-70 a day) that I can't recognize some of the individuals who come through fairly often. You get to imagining what that person in Auckland or Bettendorf is like, checking in nearly every day, using their XP or Safari operating systems, and I can't help but fantasize about how after that person from Kraft or Panera reads my site and becomes a big fan, they'll be calling me up to offer me a high-paying job any moment. More likely, though, it's just some staffer loafing on the job.

I can also see how people enter and leave the site, so I get an idea of where my traffic comes from. I can tell when friends check in via my Facebook page, especially if they do it from work, where the ISP and IP address are more likely to tell me the company name. When people log in from home, it's almost always just "comcast" or "cox cable" or something, so it's harder to tell who's who.

I can see how all this info could be really useful to people trying to generate orders or business through their site, but since I'm not doing that, it all just comes across as kind of surreal and nosy. Is it really my business what screen resolution the guy using Road Runner in Temple, Texas is running? Is it worth my time to speculate about whether the person reading me over at the University of Pennsylvania is a professor or a student? And why does that same address from the EPA keep popping up? Are the feds monitoring my carbon footprint?

Oh, and then there's my most loyal customer...the one who comes back time after time, never missing an article, yet not bold enough to write a comment and try and break the plane of the computer screen by engaging in a discussion. Perhaps someday I can meet this person, my most loyal reader and fan. You know who you are.....anyway, thanks for reading from your home out there in Mountain View, California.

Almost Meatless Virtual Potluck--Potato Corn Chowder

I met Tara Mataraza Desmond at the food writing symposium at The Greenbrier in May. Tara's book, which was published by Ten Speed Press in April is called Almost Meatless: Recipes That Are Better for Your Health and the Planet. It looks nice. I haven't read it, but Ten Speed always publishes lush, beautiful books, and Tara seems like she knows what she's talking about.

I also follow her blog, Crumbs on my Keyboard, and when she recently contacted me about taking part in a virtual potluck, where a whole bunch of food bloggers cook and blog a recipe from the book, and then everybody would publish it all on the same day, I said "cool idea. Just send me a recipe involving bacon."

So she did. But it also has silken tofu.

Of course, I left this until the last minute (it's supposed to be cooked, photographed, and blogged by tomorrow), and with all the other stuff I've been up to lately, I was pressed for time. First thing I had to figure out was where to go to buy good bacon (it only calls for two strips, so I figure I need to use the real stuff), the aforementioned tofu, as well as a fancy ingredient like chives. I didn't need to be going store to store to find stuff, so I was thinking that I was going to go to Whole Foods, but I doubted that they'd have real (read; cured) bacon, rather than that nitrate-free celery juice crap, so I headed over to Sunset Foods in Northbrook.

I make it a point to really never go to Whole Foods, because I spend way too much time and money in there, and the place just pisses me off out of general principle. I can't help but feel like I'm teetering on the brink of the fall of the empire when I'm in a WF, do you know what I mean? It's just such a big, overblown spectacle. It disgusts me, and yet I also love it. And then, later, I feel bad about loving it. Food shopping is just not meant to be that nice. I'd make an exception for this sort of thing, but to be honest, I'm relieved I thought of a better option.

Sunset is (or tries to be) just as fancy and upscale as WF, but they also carry everyday items like Diet Coke, Kraft cheeses, and Cheetos. I did indeed find good bacon (Neuske, long overdue review to come), silken tofu, and chives, so Sunset was the right place to go, but I wasn't overly impressed with their offerings. It's a high service place--they have people that put the food on the conveyor belt for you--but I'm much more interested in the food. I'm always game for a few impulse purchases in a new grocery store, but even though I hadn't eaten all day, nothing looked all that good to me, especially for the prices they were charging. I ended up with two pretty full brown paper sacks for around fifty bucks.

Besides the ingredients for the recipe, I picked up the makings for a salad, a loaf of sourdough bread to go along with it, and a few other things.

Almost Meatless' Potato Corn Chowder

Serves 4 to 6

2 slices bacon, cut into 1/4-inch dice

6 ounces silken tofu

5 cups fresh or frozen corn kernels

salt and pepper

1 medium onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice

1 pound Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch dice

4 cups chicken stock (page 131)

1 bay leaf

3 (2-inch) pieces parmesan cheese rind

1 small bunch chives, minced

Cook the bacon in a Dutch oven or large saucepot over medium heat for about 5 to 7 minutes, until the fat renders and the bacon is crisp. Remove the bacon bits from the pot and set aside.

While the bacon is cooking, combine the tofu with 2 cups of the corn and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a food processor and puree until smooth and creamy. Set aside.

Add the onion to the bacon fat left in the pot, and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, until the onion is completely softened but not brown.

Add the potatoes and the remaining 3 cups corn, along with a heavy pinch of salt and a few grinds of pepper, and stir to combine. Add the stock, bay leaf, and cheese rind, bring the liquid to a boil, and then reduce the heat; let the soup simmer for 20 minutes, until the potatoes are very tender. Remove the cheese rind and bay leaf.

Working in batches, puree about half the soup in a blender or food processor. (Or blend partially with a stick blender in the pot.) Return the pureed soup to the pot and stir in the pureed tofu and corn mixture. Simmer for 10 more minutes. Taste for salt and pepper and adjust as needed. Top with chives and reserved bacon bits.

I liked the flavor of soup. It had a lot of good sweet corn flavor. Basically, the jist of this recipe is that you take the silken tofu and puree it with the kernels from 3-4 ears of corn. This tofu "creamed corn" subs in for the cream and milk that would normally go into a chowder and makes the end result healthier.

By now, everyone knows that trick of cutting the kernels off the cob in a bowl, right? It works.

If I did this recipe again, I'd remove half the solids, then puree the soup well and add the chunks of corn and potato back into the soup. I pureed the whole thing a bit too far, I think, and the finished dish didn't have the characteristic chunkiness that you'd expect from a chowder. Doing it this way is easier (I just used my stick blender, rather than the food processor that the recipe calls for), but I think a smoother soup would be worth the effort.


It's hard for me to follow recipes. I found myself virtually unable to avoid adding some diced red bell pepper to the onions as they sauteed gently in the rendered bacon fat, although I did manage to restrict myself to only using Tara's proscribed two slices of bacon. Which wasn't easy. But it actually was enough since there was plenty of smoky bacon flavor throughout the soup.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the others bring to the virtual potluck!

Blackberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream (with recipe!)

I've been working with the ice cream maker attachment for my KitchenAid and having some success. My first take, an attempt at strawberry, went horribly wrong, resembling more of an icy, frozen mousse than ice cream. It tasted fine, but the texture was awful.

More recently, I've been working with blackberries. I made this blackberry ice cream recipe prior to leaving for our recent jaunt to the North Woods, and then I made it again, with the addition of sour cream, yesterday.

After the problems I had due to not properly chilling my mixture the first time, I've been letting it sit at least overnight before spinning, with improved results. Overloading the bowl is another pitfall I quickly learned to avoid.

I've been doing some reading about making ice cream and learning. Many people recommend allowing the mix to sit in the fridge for 24 hours before freezing, and say that this 'curing' of the batter ensures a creamier product. I also hit my mixture with a stick blender right before I churned it, per another website's recommendation.

I learned that the term "overrun" refers to the amount of air that's incorporated into an ice cream while it freezes. The longer the freezing process takes, the more air is whipped into the mix. Italian gelato gets it's luxuriously smooth mouth feel from its lack of overrun, and for me, the denser and smoother an ice cream is, the better, so that's what I'm working toward.

Using the KA attachment on the mixer's lowest speed ensures the quickest freeze time, and therefore the lowest amount of overrun, since the ice cream mixture stays in contact with the freezer bowl longer. Turning up the speed helps in avoiding ice crystals, since the mixture freezes more slowly and uniformly, but this also whips more air into the mixture. Also, as I learned with my batch of strawberry, that never fully froze, the KA's freezer bowl thingy only has so much time before it's not cold enough to perform. This is one huge drawback of the "freezer insert" style of home ice cream makers. You can't just add more ice and salt.



Making fresh fruit ice creams really smooth and creamy is even more challenging, due to the additional factors the fruit brings and how they work against smooth creaminess.

If I'm making a fruit ice cream, I want the flavor to really pack a wallop, so I use a LOT of fruit. I'm using stuff that's in season, and is inexpensive, and that's the point is to enjoy it and really concentrate its flavor as much as possible when it's available.

I also want to use the fruit in its *fresh* form. The first strawberry ice cream recipe I tried involved cooking the fruit down and making a jam, essentially, which was then mixed into the ice cream base. To me, that misses the point of using fresh fruit, which brings all sorts of wonderful flavor notes that disappear when cooked. Cooked berries are nice, but they are a distinctly different taste than fresh ones. It's the fresh flavor that I'm after here, so all the recipes that I'm using involve pureeing and straining out lots of seeds.

But these choices about flavor have a trade-off; the finished product will be less smooth and creamy. Raw fruit freezes to ice crystals, and pureed fruit is always going to lend a more sorbet-like quality to a finished ice cream. That being the case, I need to really try and maximize the techniques I use to ensure what I make is as smooth and creamy as it can be.

Making ice-cream is a very technique-heavy process. Each time I do it I'm surprised by the amount of bowls, strainers, and rubber scrapers that I use. Lots of moving things from one place to another.

Blackberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream

1 C half-and-half
12 oz. sour cream
1 C sugar
1 C heavy cream
4 egg yolks
2 quarts blackberries
1/2 a vanilla bean
pinch salt

1. Mix yolks and half the sugar together in a bowl.
2. In a saucepan, heat half and half, cream, the remaining sugar, scraped vanilla bean, and one pint of the berries. Scald cream, allow to simmer for about five minutes. Remove from heat for a couple minutes. Remove vanilla bean. Puree with stick blender. Strain.
3. Temper warm cream into yolk-sugar mixture, whisking quickly while adding a bit of warm cream, then more, to ensure eggs do not curdle. Return mixture to sauce pan, put on medium heat, and cook slowly, stirring with a rubber spatula until the mixture thickens to coat the back of a spoon.
4. Strain the ice cream mixture into a shallow pan or bowl set in ice*.
5. Puree remaining fresh berries with stick blender. Push through a fine mesh strainer to remove seeds. This should yield about 1 1/2 cups of seedless berry puree.
6. Cool mixture thoroughly. Once cool, add berry puree and sour cream, whisking to fully incorporate everything.
7. Allow to chill overnight in the coldest part of the fridge overnight or for 24 hours.
8. Process according to the ice cream maker's directions.

*lots of advice out there about cooling the mixture down as quick as possible. the bowl set in ice appears to be key. Some say to hold back 25% of the cream and pour it in cold to aid in cooling, but then the proteins in the cold milk won't have been denatured during the scalding process, which is also supposed to aid in producing smaller ice crystals and yielding a creamier product. Ice cream is all about trade-offs.

That's a good recipe, adapted from the one I linked to above. I'll keep working on it, but I've also found a few other recipes that look pretty nice.

Road Trip--Up North, Wisconsin

Due to spotty internet access, a few pics will have to serve as a sneak preview of the posts that will surely bubble up as a result of my recent trip to the North Woods.

Kids, Wisconsin, Summer, fishing, swimming, and eating. Lots of good stuff to write about. Over the next couple weeks I'll document my experience with an old fashioned shore dinner, the North Woods phenomenon known as the supper club, and some real-deal contender burger places.

For now, enjoy!

Very good (but not the world's best) burgers at Fred's in Burlington.

Enjoying the clean sands of Crystal Lake.

Shore dinner

Ice Cream Misadventures

Between the amazing peaches and cherries that have been showing up at Costco, farmers' markets, and even my local Jewel(!), we've been eating a lot of fruit recently, and when I stumbled onto a two-dollar ice cream maker at a garage sale on a particularly balmy lunch-hour, I instantly thought of making a great peaches and cream or cherry with mascarpone*.

But the two-dollar ice cream maker's motor died halfway through the first batch of nectarine I made and I ended up finishing it by spinning the metal drum by hand and holding the dasher. Needless to say the end result was not smooth and creamy. Once it was cured--stored in the freezer overnight--it was hard like a rock and full of ice crystals. Not very pleasant to eat, even if we allowed it to thaw for quite a while before digging in.

I had the taste for this project at this point, though, so I started researching. Everything I looked at for less than around forty bucks seemed cheap and chintzy and I figured that the motor on these cheapies would quickly burn out as well.

So when I came across the ice-cream maker attachment for the KitchenAid stand mixer, I figured, ok, that makes more sense, since it uses my KA's motor. (I have one of the older KA's, which are gems. )

After debating the pros/cons of spending $75 on something that's just an attachment, when all these full-on, freestanding appliances can be had for fifty or less, the next round of produce was upon us and my romantic notions of making some beautifully creamy fresh fruit ice creams motivated me to dip into my gifts/bonuses mad money account, and I doubled up on the shipping by including a copy of the new Wilco cd. Splurge!

I went looking for more nectarines or peaches in the midst of a trip over to Babies 'R Us for more childproofing stuff (Nora is into everything these days), but I found some organic strawberries that just smelled great at Fresh Farms, I spun up a batch of strawberry ice cream.

We were in a rush to eat dinner, get the ice cream made, and get out of the house for Henry's camp carnival, which is a pretty huge event here in bucolic Park Ridge, Illinois (an officially-designated Tree City, USA), so I didn't think to take any pictures.

The main issue was that I didn't allow the mixture to chill thoroughly before using the KA attachment to freeze it. Also, forgot to think about the mixture expanding while freezing, so I totally overloaded the bowl. And THEN added a bunch of chopped strawberries for good measure. Then, while it was spinning, I read the instructions where it said not to overload the bowl. Duh.

So it never quite fully froze. After about 50 minutes, it had a light, frothy, mousse-like consistency, and tasted great (I added a few drops of balsamic vinegar for tang), but it was barely cold and not at all smooth and creamy. Pressed for time, I dumped it into tupperware containers, threw them in the freezer, and headed out for an evening of bouncy slides and rubber chicken toss.

I knew it was going to be bad when I put it away, and it was. Very hard and crunchy, even after it softened and I mashed it around with my spoon a lot. Not good.

I'm holding out on any assessment of the KA ice-cream maker attachment at this juncture, because I just went about the whole thing all wrong. The ice cream mixture should always be well-chilled and allowing it to sit overnight is good for flavor development as well, so rushing the process the way I did was a boneheaded mistake. Overloading the well didn't help and, since I've never done this before, I'm just randomly pulling recipes from the web.

Anyone have a good ice cream base recipe? Maybe one that includes a measure for fruit or fruit puree? The peach one I made with the doomed garage-sale ice cream machine was interesting because it involved making a simple syrup, and then using the hot simple syrup to cook the egg yolks while running in the stand mixer. This technique seems easier to me, plus there's less risk of curdling than the traditional method involving tempering the egg yolks with the hot cream, then returning that mixture to the pot to finish cooking.


I'll try it again a few times over the next couple weeks and we'll see how it goes. As I write this, it occurs to me that I'm following Ruhlman and Leibowitz on Twitter, but it never occurred to me to check Ratio, or Leibowitz's ice cream book. Duh again. Learning process.






*ugh. huge pet peeve, here. The endless inability to pronounce the name of this soft, creamy fresh cheese. Mas-car-, folks, not mar-ska-. And don't get me started on Chee-pohl-tay.