The Yum Yum Factor

We are just all ice cream, all the time around here right now, aren't we? This week alone I have posted recipes for  Mango Coconut Frozen Yogurt , Raspberry and Strawberry egg free ice cream and I haven't even gotten around to talking about the peach ice cream that is currently languishing in my freezer. Thank god I have a 14 year old boy to eat it all. "Vietnamese iced coffee with milk" , also known as  ca phe sua da  or  cà phê sữa đá  It is also called  ca phe nau da    in northern Vietnam but the restaurants that I frequent call it cafe sua da so that is what I am going with. Call it whatever you like but I call it insanely delicious. If you have never had one, go find a Vietnamese restaurant today and get one and come back and finish reading this. It's okay, I'll wait. Calling it iced coffee with milk is incredibly misleading. What it really is is insanely strong, thick coffee with sweetened condensed milk that you mix to...

The ice cream making continues here at home with a batch of raspberry using the eggless recipe from earlier when we made Strawberry Ice Cream . Because I really can't deal with raspberry seeds, we pureed all of the fruit and strained it to make a really smooth, slightly tart ice cream. I wanted to add some little chunks of dark chocolate, but Shack was having none of that. The Kid and I like stuff in our ice cream - chocolate chunks, pieces of brownie, cookie dough or oreos. Shack, our picky toddler, likes his ice cream smooth and the only chunks he can handle are chunks of the fruit. I am not saying that this ice cream is not delicious, because it is, but what does a girl have to do to get a bit of dark chocolate chunks in her ice cream? We are going to have to work something out around here. Eggless Raspberry Ice Cream 1 cup whipping cream 1 cup 18% cream 1/2 cup sugar pinch salt 1 1/2 cup raspberries Mix the berries with 1/4 cup of the sugar and let macera...

Thanks to my prize winnings from Canadian Lentils , this family is now completely immersed in ice cream making. My first batch of Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Ice Cream  was a traditional egg custard based recipe and it was great. Needless, to say, it didn't last very long and it was time to make another batch but me being me, I was procrastinating over flavours for days. Shack decided he had waited long enough and was going to make ice cream the other night and started puttering around in the kitchen. I was trying not to interfere but when he asked me to go to the basement and get the frozen ice cream bowl from the freezer, I knew there was an information breakdown going on in there. I reminded him that you have to temper the eggs and make the custard, put the bowl over ice to cool it down and then refrigerate it for at least 2 hours before you can even think about actually churning it. It was pretty clear that he wasn't planning on using an actual recipe and was just goin...

We have a problem here at Casa Shack. Shack has been making a batch of ice cream a day at this point, always either raspberry or strawberry, experimenting only with the ratio of fat% in his cream/milk. It has been very tasty but I had to finally say ENOUGH! I would like to use my damned ice cream maker myself and I would like to eat something other than raspberry or strawberry ice cream. He graciously allowed me to make frozen yogurt as long as I put the freezer bowl right back into the freezer so HE could make more raspberry ice cream before bed tonight. I have created a monster. I did not intend to make this a coconut yogurt so I will be upfront right off the hop here. As I was dumping the yogurt into the food processor, I was initially horrified by the lumps in the bottom of the container and thought it was two years past it's best by date and was relieved to notice that my 0%MF PC greek yogurt contained shredded coconut so that was not rampant curdling. I HATE the...

I participated in a recipe contest in May sponsored by Canada Lentils called Love Your Lentils  and was pretty thrilled to learn that I came in second place. Congrats to the winner, Davine, with her Canadiana Baked Beans and to all of the bloggers who made it to the top ten.  My prize was a $500 gift certificate to Amazon.ca and man, did I shred that gift certificate like a boss. For days I shopped, put stuff in my basket and then took it all back out and started again. I even had a $500 camera lens in there at one point but my fellow Gastroposter, Libby Roach, encouraged me to get lots of smaller stuff because it would be way more fun to get a big box of treats than one little lens and she was right. When I opened that box I almost peed my pants. I don't know what I love the most yet. I finally got my Zojirushi rice cooker which I have been coveting for decades but am too cheap to actually pay for and threw in a $$ Zojirushi bento lunch contraption for The Kid sin...

I haven't made popsicles for a while and we finally ate our way through all the non boozy popsicles in the freezer so it was time for a new batch. I wasn't in the mood to get all fancy pants, so no layers, no fancy ingredients, just tasty, wholesome breakfast treats. I had some super ripe cantaloupe in the fridge and was going to make a breakfast smoothie with it but since we apparently live at the gates of hell this summer, why not freeze our morning meal for the week instead? Am I right? These were quite good and not too sweet so if you are looking for a really sweet taste, you better add a squirt of honey or maple syrup or something but for a frozen brekky on a stick, you can't beat it. Your kids think they are getting away with something sneaky, you can sleep well at night with the knowledge that your kid ate some fruit with yogurt for breakfast and everybody is happy. Melon Banana Pops (makes 7 small 2oz popsicles) 1/4 of a ripe cantaloupe, cubed 1/2 banan...

 I feel much better now that I have a large stash of PC popsicle molds at last. I found a store that still had a whole shelf full of them so now I am ready for summer. I will have to designate a colour stick as the adult pops so I don't come home to find Little Shack and his buddies running around like maniacs, all hopped up on vodka pops . Today's popsicle had to utilize the yogurt/buttermilk mixture from the first batch because I really love the tanginess but I wanted to get a little fancier with my layers. I bought some PC Blueberry Pomegranate Juice ( I swear to god that I don't work for Loblaws and they don't give me anything for free, I just shop there a lot and I like their stuff. Don't get me started on Joe Fresh).