April has been busy.
April is also Dan’s birth month, hence the increase in chocolate based desserts previously. It continued with a bought of massive silliness in the form of an ice cream sandwich.
The silliness doesn’t stop with the sandwich concept (yes those are chocolate digestives), the ice cream itself definitely counts as ridiculous. Instead our usual homemade custard based stir frozen this used a tub of Bird’s premade, cream cheese and icing sugar, and was so gelatinous when finished it didn’t need stir freezing at all.
Dan made short work of it. It barely lasted a week.
Compare that with the Pistachio Gelato that lingered for a couple of months and we have a clear winner.
Dan also got a recipe book for his birthday called “Perfect”, which is a spin off the Guardian’s “How to Make” column. It has lots of promise and also makes lots of promises.
It includes a recipe for perfect ragu. Amongst all the names she mentions the blessed Delia doesn’t turns up once. Delia has been providing this family with her ragu recipe for decades. Her absence is almost an insult.
Plus the recipe uses white wine not red!
Outraged, we had to try it.
It is really bloody good. Not sure it beat the blessed Delia, but we’ll have to do some sort of taste test for that.
Our main complaint was that the recipe only served four. Which for four plus hours of cooking seems a little mean.
One of the main reasons we haven’t blogged that much, other than lack of time, if we have been falling back on old favourites a lot, and I’m not convinced a long list of links to previous posts makes good reading.
Case in point, we returned to Pork and Pistachio Terrine. Always lovely with Rye bread and home made pickle.
Childish Chocolate Ice Cream Recipe
300g Plain Chocolate
500g tub of ready-made vanilla custard
400g cream cheese
100g icing sugar
100ml milk
Melt 200g of the chocolate into the custard. Whisk the icing sugar and cream cheese together, then whisk in the chocolate custard until combined. Gradually whisk in the milk and chill for 15 minutes.
Lay out some grease proof paper. Melt the remaining chocolate and drizzle it over the paper with a fork. Let it cool, then break it all up into little shards. Stir into the chocolate custard mix to make a slender chocolate chip affair.
Tip it all into a freezer proof container and freeze. Done.
thegreedyguineapig 