Food, cooking, eating, and me

A reprise of sorts. That coconut sorbet recipe has been incredibly popular, and I thought I’d take it to the next level. So I made it with chocolate. It is totally yummy, if not as creamy as regular ice cream. If you’re interested, the proportions I used were: 1 can of coconut milk, 5/8 cups of sugar, 1/2 cup water, and 1/2 cup quality dark chocolate, chopped. I melted the ingredients together and let them cool in the refrigerator, then made it up by the old “remove-stir-repeat” method, owing to the fact that I don’t have an ice cream maker.

It wasn’t as smooth as I would like, undoubtedly due to the fact that I was too tired to stay up and finish it. I’m going to try again before I post the complete recipe. I’m thinking a little more dilution might help. And then I’ll put up a photo, too, instead of just eating it all.

I made a crustless pecan pie for the holiday. The inspiration was in the right place, but it was very hard to dish up and eat. The pecans on top were truly addictive, though.

So today I thought it would be a good time to try a variation on caramel and pecans. I toasted 2 cups of pecans in the oven at 325° in a nonstick pan and melted together 1/2 cup light brown sugar, 1/2 cup dark corn syrup, 3 tablespoons butter, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. When the pecans were toasted I mixed in the syrup and popped them back in the oven, stirring every 5 minutes until the pecans stuck securely to the plastic spatula I was using. I scraped them onto a silicone sheet and stirred to break them up while they were still warm.

When cold they were quite candied, with a buttery/caramelly taste – and just a touch of molasses. Looking at them last night, I said to myself, “They’re not photogenic, being brown on brown.” But by the light of day, they looked very different, so I snapped a pic and made one of those “up close and personal food porn” links for you. It’s ok to drool over the full-sized photo linked to the bottom pic. Yep, they’re yummy.

Brownies, brownies, brownies. No apologies, I make them super-chocolatey, adapting a recipe from the James Beard cookbook, American Cookery.

The flour I use is the same as for most of the things I bake—3 parts white rice flour to 1 part sweet rice flour. Aside from that, I use the maximum amount of chocolate in the recipe and reduce the sugar to make the effect more intense than sweet.

I am sensitive to xanthan gum, so I don’t use it, and I find that most sweet baked goods don’t need it.

So…

• 1 stick butter (or 7/8 cup coconut oil, if you can’t handle the dairy of butter
• 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
• 1-1/2 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3/4 cup white rice flour
• 1/4 cup sweet rice flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Optional:

• 1 cup walnut meats, broken
• 3/4 cup dry fruit, soaked in 2 ounces of liquid (water, brandy, or juice) until the liquid is absorbed (OK to hurry by heating this, covered, in the microwave.)
• chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease a nonstick or silicone square 9″ x 9″ or rectangular pan.

Melt together butter and chocolate, stirring until smooth. Add sugar. Stir until smooth. Add eggs and vanilla. Stir until blended thoroughly. Add flour and salt, then nuts and/or dried fruit, if using. Scrape into the prepared pan and bake about 45 minutes, or until the center is no longer liquid.

Remove from pan when almost cold and cut into squares. How many pieces you can cut depends on how many of the optional ingredients you added.

This is so easy it hardly merits an entire post, but it is the best!

I was thinking about making a coconut ice cream (thickened with egg yolks), but I never motivated myself to start. Finally it occurred to me that I could make a sorbet using a can of coconut milk and sugar. Actually, I had this feeling that that would be too fatty to have the proper texture, so here’s what I did:

I put a measuring cup with 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup sugar in the microwave, and heated it for a minute, taking it out to stir it and continuing to heat until the sugar dissolved. It didn’t taste sweet enough to me at this point, so I added another ounce of sugar. I then added this to the contents of a can of coconut milk and stirred until completely mixed. I put it in the refrigerator until it was cold, stirring several times. Finally I put the bowl in the freezer and stirred it every 1/2 hour at first, less time as it started to freeze, smashing up lumps and scraping the edge off the bowl. Finally, when it was mostly frozen with hardly any liquid in it, I put it through the food processor to break up any lumps and crystals. Then I packed it in a container to store in the freezer.

You can, of course, make this in your ice cream maker, if you have one, which I don’t. It’s a little rich, but it has that mouth feel that tells me if I had diluted the coconut any less it might have been a bit greasy. I’m making this again!