Ice Cream!! Make some! Because it's hot outside! (and it's really easy)

 

An ice cream machine is one of those kitchen appliances I thought I'd never buy because I thought I wouldn't use it enough to justify the purchase. Not that they are overly expensive, but it would still be wasted money if I bought it and then only used it once or twice. Well, a few summers ago, I don't know if it was the Houston heat or the savvy Williams-Sonoma marketing, but I gave in and I'm glad I did. I don't use it all year round but I do use it regularly during the sticky and steamy summer months here, which are more than just the calendar months of summer. If you have kids, I think this is something fun you could do during the summer months using different kinds of mix-ins when making vanilla ice cream, like crushed Oreos, caramel, brownie chunks - I'm sure the kiddos will dream up all sorts of stuff to swirl into the ice cream in it's final minutes of churning!

The recipe for the ice cream pictured is a simple non-custard based recipe, which means there are no egg yolks to be whisked and then tempered with the cream mixture. Custard based recipes are very good but sometimes you just don't want to go through all that trouble. This recipe is very simple and super yummy. It's like eating a strawberry milkshake but with lovely chunks of strawberries throughout. 

I've read in several different magazines and books that non-custard based recipes tend to get icy once you freeze the finished product completely - that has not been my experience. The only thing I have found is that once you have the fully frozen product, you'll need to allow five to ten minutes for it to soften a bit for scooping, so just take it out a little ahead of when you want to eat it. (I am including a recipe for Vanilla Ice Cream at the bottom of this post).

**I did not eat the entire bowl of strawberry ice cream pictured...in one sitting...**

Strawberry Ice Cream

from Gourmet Magazine

1 pound strawberries, trimmed of stems and quartered

3/4 cup sugar

3/4 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 cups (16 ounces) heavy cream (or carton will be labeled heavy whipping cream)

**Important note: make sure you have frozen the insert to your ice cream machine for 24 hours.**

Place strawberries in a bowl with the sugar, lemon juice and salt. Mix well and mash strawberries. Let the strawberries sit for 10 minutes, occasionally mashing a little more.

Put half of the mashed strawberries mixture in a blender with the 2 cups of cream. Blend until smooth. Pour the pureed mixture back into the bowl with the remaining strawberries and mix well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill for 3-6 hours. (this batch chilled for 3 hours and it was fine but the chillier the better).

Put the strawberries and cream mixture in the insert of the ice cream machine and churn for 20 minutes, may be a little longer or shorter depending on your machine. Enjoy immediately as a soft-serve style ice cream or put in a freezer safe container to become a little more solid. Ice cream keeps for 1 week.

Beautiful fresh strawberries

Stawberries with sugar, lemon juice and salt

Strawberries, after being mashed/mixed with sugar, lemon juice and salt

Final strawberries and cream mixture, ready to be chilled and then churned

 

Vanilla Ice Cream

3 cups heavy cream

2/3 cups sugar

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

seeds scraped from 1 vanilla bean

Heat the cream, sugar, vanilla, and vanilla seeds in a small saucepan only until the sugar is dissolved. Make sure all the sugar is dissolved so there is no longer in grittiness from the sugar. Strain into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and chill overnight. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream machine for approximately 20 minutes. May be a little shorter or longer depending on your machine and how chilled your cream mixture is. Enjoy as a soft-serve style ice cream immediately, or spoon into a freezer container for more firm ice cream. Once completely frozen, allow to soften before serving.

A day trip and buttermilk fried chicken...

Chevrolet 3100 Circa 1950's

Because of the sweltering heat we’ve been having in Houston that usually keeps us inside during weekends or at best, hopping from one air conditioned building to another while running errands, I thought a day trip to one of the many small towns nearby would force us out of our air-conditioned hibernation. The fact that we had a long weekend for the July 4^th holiday was also a motivator to do something more than merely try to avoid the high temperatures. So we decided to leave mid morning on Saturday and drive an hour and a half to Warrenton, known for it's many antique shops, and then to a few other towns nearby.

Old tractor and farming equipment

The drive is a peaceful one, west on Interstate 10 and then northwest on State Highway 71. The miles of suburban sprawl quickly turn into rolling hills and farms once you make it to 71. Despite how dry and hot it’s been the past few months, the landscape still remains quite green, not yet looking overly parched from the constant scorching. With one farm after another, seeing the many horses and cows trying to stay cool in the shade, it’s hard to believe we are so close to such a huge city.

A turn right off of 71 to get to Warrenton takes you through a tiny place called Fayetteville. I should have snapped more pictures than just the old Gulf signs but the heat of course kept me in the car.  A town square area with two restaurants and several old buildings begging to be renovated for occupancy hearken back to a time when there were probably a few more people than the 268 captured on the sign denoting the current population. We drove around for a few minutes before heading to Warrenton, admiring the beautiful turn of the century bungalows, many of them renovated, that line every street.

Just a short drive on to Warrenton, we were sad to discover the many antique stores and warehouses were closed. As we later discovered, they are open for an antique fair twice a year held in late March to early April and then again in late September to early October. So it was a veritable ghost town when we drove through... Needless to say, we'll plan another visit during one of those months and more importantly, do a little more thorough research for our next road trip. However, we were quickly rewarded for our efforts, as we continued 4 miles up the road to Round Top, where many shops and several restaurants were open for summer business. It was perfect timing for us to get out and stretch our legs a bit, so we parked and set ourselves to discovering this little gem.

Our first stop was for something cold to drink at a tiny place called Royers Round Top Cafe.  I also picked up a jar of their Peach and Peppers Preserves that I put on grilled salmon a few nights later, in a word - divine. At a little before noon, the cafe was completely full with more folks streaming in to get what must be some great food. Apparently, a day trip from Houston to Round Top to visit Royer's is quite a common occurrence. As you can see from the picture below, the inside decor of the cafe' is as interesting as the outside and is covered with all sorts of memorabilia and "cheeky" collections.  Since we weren't quite hungry for lunch and the hearty fare they serve, we made a vow to return (probably in a cooler month when we are revisiting Warrenton) to sample this popular cafe.

Royer's Round Top Cafe

Inside Royer's

We continued on into several of the small unique shops and art galleries, taking our time perusing the merchandise and art work and enjoying the air conditioning. Our hunger tempered a bit by the heat, we stopped at a small pizza shop and shared a small pizza and a little fun with a cool photography app on the iPhone before heading toward home.

Fun iPhone photography app

Heading toward Houston, we decided to make a stop in Brenham since it was on the way, and well, it is the home of Blue Bell Ice Cream. What better way to cap off a Saturday field trip than with a stop for ice cream? We stopped in the old downtown area of Brenham at a restaurant named "Must Be Heaven" and with air conditioning a plenty and Blue Bell ice cream to spare, I could not agree with that name more. 

As I was savoring my scoop of oreo cookie ice cream, I thought about how something as simple as a local road trip can quite effectively remove you from life's distractions. If we'd stayed at home, even with intentions of relaxing, we would have probably ended up doing some sort of project around the house or running errands...all of which are always there to be done and can, for the most part, wait for a later time to be completed. Simply getting in the car with the only goal being to discover a small town gem and enjoy each others' company, was enough to put my spirit at ease and quiet the "to do list" noise.

Well, it's amazing how tiring a little road trip can be...upon arriving home, a cat nap was completely necessary to give me the energy required to make dinner, which I was looking forward to doing. But then buttermilk fried chicken, homemade mashed potatoes and some roasted green beans would probably motivate most cooking-crazed people like myself. The fried chicken is a recipe I've been wanting to try from a cook book I have by Thomas Keller, Ad Hoc at Home, and the chicken has been touted in several reviews I've read to be worth the entire cost of the book (well, the truth here, I bought mine at Costco, so that just might be true...).

I'm not going to detail the entire recipe here but I do want to give a few easy and worthwhile tips for home made fried chicken. First, brining is essential. A brine solution is a mixture of water with salt, sugar and other spices, that the chicken (or pork) soaks in for sometimes as little as one hour or up to 24 hours. Since 20 percent of the moisture of chicken (or pork) is lost in the cooking process (regardless of mode), brining will counter act about 10 percent of that loss, so you get much juicier chicken. Just make sure you rinse the chicken well after brining to remove excess salt. I brined a whole 3 pound chicken, already cut into pieces, for 12 hours.

Second, the breading step is also key. Two parts of this step are important. One is the seasoning of the flour and the other is that you use the flour twice. Depending on what flavors you like, many different spices can be added to flour that will greatly impact flavor. My flour for breading (Mr. Keller's recipe) had garlic and onion powders, cayenne pepper, paprika, black pepper and a little salt (not too much salt since the chicken brine contained a lot of it). So generously season your flour. As I mentioned, use the flour twice. You'll have three dipping stations for your chicken. Three bowls: one each in this order - flour, buttermilk, flour and make sure you've dried off your chicken pieces very well before dipping into the first flour station. And last, make sure you have at least 1/2 inch of oil in which to fry the chicken and that your oil stays around 320 degrees. Oh, two more little tips: a sheet pan with a cooling rack set inside and placed in a 200 degree oven is good for keeping your chicken warm as you continue to fry all the pieces. Let the chicken rest for 10 minutes - all meats are better with some resting to redistribute their juices that have been jostled around in the cooking process.

The chicken pictured below which was our dinner, was some of the best fried chicken I've ever had, if I may say so myself. The crust was ridiculously crispy and had great flavor. The potatoes and green beans were tasty as well. Good. Old fashioned. Comfort food. It was a great day.

Buttermilk Fried Chicken

Homemade Light Wheat Sandwich Bread

This bread was not supposed to be the next recipe I shared but it sort of happened out of necessity. When I stopped for groceries on my way home from work on Wednesday, the new fancy smanshy Whole Foods that is 2.7 miles from my house, did not have the wheat bread I normally buy for Bobby. They had about 10 different varieties of the brand but somehow not the one that I buy. And he doesn’t like a lot of “stuff” in/on his bread like oats, seeds, too many grains, so that pretty much eliminates 95 percent of the breads sold by Whole Foods. Just some simple wheat bread (or light wheat in the case of this homemade bread) and he’s good.

So, I decided that I’d make some homemade sandwich bread – a recipe I’ve already made several times and it is very simple and very good. One of the coolest things about this recipe is there are only 8 ingredients and that’s counting the water AND I can pronounce everyone of them. This is also another great use for a Kitchenaid stand mixer (I should be getting some sort of kick-back from them with as often as I mention that mixer). The dough comes together remarkably simply – most of the time for this recipe is just waiting for it to rise. So if you have 20 minutes this weekend, you can make this bread.

I've included quite a few pictures because I want to show all the steps and what the dough should look like. It's not difficult at all and goes very quickly - except for the waiting for the dough to proof part... but you can be doing other things so this is a great recipe for the multi-tasker, which I of course know nothing about...

*I weigh the ingredients when making bread recipes. I have a Taylor digital scale I think I bought at Tarjay that I use all of the time - so it's well worth having a scale for baking. I've put the weights in parentheses. * 

Light Wheat Sandwich Bread

from The Bread Baker's Apprentice

2 ½ cups (11.25 oz.) bread flour

1 ½ cups (6.75 oz.) whole-wheat flour

1 ½ tablespoons (.75 oz.) granulated sugar or honey (I used sugar this time)

1 ½ teaspoons (.38 oz.) salt

3 tablespoons (1 oz.) powdered milk (I actually used goat milk powder because it’s what I had on hand)

1 ½ teaspoons (.17 oz.) instant yeast

2 tablespoons (1 oz.) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 ¼ cups (10 oz.) water, at room temperature

1. Weigh and/or measure all dry ingredients and place in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix on low speed until ingredients are well combined. Add the butter, water and honey (if you are using instead of sugar) and mix on low until the ingredients form a rough ball and all the bits of flour have come together. If needed, add a few dribbles of additional water to make sure all of the flour has come up off the bottom of the bowl.

2. Switch out the paddle attachment for the dough hook and mix/knead on medium for 6 minutes. The dough should become firm, supple and smooth – slightly tacky but not sticky. Add more flour, a little at time, if needed. Lightly oil a large bowl and transfer the dough to the bowl, rolling it around to coat it with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Allow the bread to rise at room temperature for 1 ½ to 2 hours or until the dough doubles in size. 

3. Remove the dough from the bowl and press it by hand into a rectangle 3/4 inch thick, 6 inches wide, and 8 to 10 inches long. Roll it into a loaf by working from the short side of the dough, rolling up the length of the dough one section at a time, pinching the inside crease with each rotation. Pinch the final seam closed and place the loaf, seam side down, in a lightly oiled 8 ½ x 4 ½ inch bread pan. The ends of the loaf should touch the end of the pan to ensure an even rise. Mist the top with spray oil and loosely cover with plastic wrap.

4. Proof (let rise) at room temperature for approximately 60 to 90 minutes or until the dough crests above the lip of the pan. Mine proofed in 60 minutes...

5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F with the oven rack in the middle shelf.

6. Place the bread pan on a sheet pan and bake for 30 minutes. Rotate the pan 180 degrees and continue baking for 15 to 30 minutes, depending on your oven. The finished loaf should register 190 degrees in the center, be golden brown on the top and sides, and sound hollow when thumped on the top.

7. When the bread is finished baking, remove it immediately from the loaf pan and cool it on a rack for at least 1 hour, preferably 2 hours (that's actually funny - you'll never make it to 2 hours), before slicing and serving.

Dry ingredients

Mixing of all the ingredients

Kneading with dough hook, 6 minutes

Ready for first rise

First rise complete, ready for shaping

Flatten to 3/4 inch thick, 6 inches by 8-10 inches long

Begin rolling and pinching inside seam of dough

Bread dough ready for pan, seam side down

Ready for second rise

Second rise complete, ready for baking

Baked bread - immediately remove from pan to cool.