toasted oak ice cream with smoked sea salt & lapsang souchong caramel swirl

Last autumn seemed the most vibrant & animate one I'd ever seen, maybe the only one I'd ever really seen since I was a child. It was my first sober autumn in my adult life and so terribly, wonderfully orange, blue, and Rachmaninoff. It used to be a melancholy time for me, a comfortable, familiar melancholy in which a refrain from Vashti Bunyan forever repeated itself in my head. Fires are now burning and life has no reason. Winter loomed. 

But last autumn was the first in a very different life. He and I were falling with the leaves only harder. Shadows were violet and light was gold. I could see, speak, form memories. He built me fires, brewed maté, and gifted me awfully romantic things like plastic skeletons and ring pops. I roasted pumpkin seeds in myriad flavors, and we dressed up as Marlon Brando & Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris for Halloween, he in an overcoat & me in fur, flowers pinned to my hat. Our synapses were swimming in oxytocin, and his hand on my knee was electric. We spent the last of the warm afternoons on a blanket in the park, setting out to read our respective books but making out like teenagers instead to both the disgust and fascination of passing tweens. We watched all of Peter Greenaway's films in bed, ate popcorn and peanut M&M's. And that's the story of how I decided not to move to New Orleans last December as I had planned. I stayed in Tennessee, and we made a home. 

This ice cream is my homage to mild, smoky Indian Summer days, a time of year as ephemeral and lovely as spring, a time where fall & summer produce cross paths on their ways in and out of the market. I'm used to love that blazes, fades to embers, and then turns cold. Ash. Like so many autumn pyres. But this time it's been different. We celebrate our one year anniversary on All Saints day, about a month from now. No, a year is not a long time in the grand scheme, but to feel as happy, happier even, as I did a year ago, that...that is something. Something violently golden, an endless swoon of leaves.

Even more now than in the throes of that exploratory infatuation, as kaleidoscopic as it was, I'm so deeply satisfied I can hardly form the words to express my gratitude. We have put down roots right into each other's ventricles. I'm a touch of the crazy and no easy creature to navigate. To find someone capable of traversing the lay of my land...well, that's a rare, intrepid man. One I had almost come to believe didn't exist. He's a regular unicorn. This is a spectral time of year, romantic and eerie and crisp. I love it. It's ours. This ice cream tastes like it. 

The smoky confection was inspired by a dessert course at The Catbird Seat in Nashville, TN. Our meal there was one of those where each course is a revelation, an education. Truth be told I have little interest in eating out unless the meal will tell me something I don't already know. As such, I'd rather save for months and spend it all on an experience such as The Catbird Seat rather than frittering it on underwhelming meals. Give me street food, soul food, or one of the best restaurants in the country. Otherwise, I'll cook for myself, thank you. I'm not much for the food that falls in between. They're deserving of their reputation, and if you find yourself with the opportunity to eat there, do. It didn't hurt to know that a personal hero, Grant Achatz, had eaten a seat over from me not but a few nights prior. I like to think his aura was still reverberating around, getting genius ectoplasm on my foie. 

Toasted Oak Ice Cream with Fumee de Sel & Lapsang Souchong Caramel Swirl

yields about 1 quart

I enjoy the wit of this combination, how it mimics this liminal season with the intermingling of fall fires and the cool cream of summer. I'd already taken to infusing my salted butter caramel with smoky lapsang souchong tea, so it seemed natural to introduce ribbons of it to the oak ice cream. I wanted to amplify the smoke so I used fumee de sel, a chardonnay oak smoked sea salt, in both the caramel and ice cream base. In addition to the smoked salt I added Tahitian vanilla beans to the base to compliment the vanilla notes in the toasted oak chips. The first time I only steeped the chips about 10-15 minutes. It was definitively oaky, but I wanted it more pronounced. So, the next attempt I let it sit for 30 minutes, which I found preferable. Feel free to experiment and find your oaky sweet spot. And I make a custard based ice cream, because it's my preference, though just a bit more work (negligible in my opinion but these things are relative). If you want, for whatever reason, to skip the eggs and just heat the milk/cream/sugar, infuse it with the oak, then chill and churn, you can do that. It will just be a less rich, creamy end result. But still good. Either way, put it on a slice of pie. A slice of the pie that I will be sharing with you soon. 

Ingredients

2 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup medium toast oak chips (I ordered mine here.)
seeds from one vanilla bean pod
1/4 tsp (about two pinches) smoked sea salt
5 egg yolks

1/4 of this lapsang souchong caramel recipe (I make a half recipe & just use what I want of it)

Cooking Directions

Heat milk, cream, sugar, and vanilla in a medium sauce pan over medium-high heat until almost boiling. Remove from heat and immediately add oak chips. Cover and steep 10-30 minutes, depending on how strong you want the flavor to be. I let it go 30 minutes. 

Double line a sieve with cheese cloth and set over a heat proof bowl. Strain ice cream carefully, making sure no bits of wood chips get into your base. Whisk in vanilla beans and salt after strained. Return mixture to medium heat.

Whisk egg yolks in a bowl. When the milk is hot again (around 150° F) slowly pour a quarter cup of it at a time into the egg yolks, whisking constantly. Continue doing this up to about a cup until the egg yolks are warm and tempered. Whisk this egg mixture back into the milk on the heat, adding it slowly and stirring constantly. 

Stirring constantly cook the custard over medium heat until it reaches at 170° F and thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. 

Remove custard from heat and strain into a heat proof bowl. Chill thoroughly, a minimum of three hours, preferably over night. Churn in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturers instructions. I usually churn mine in my Cuisinart 15-20 minutes until it looks like the consistency of mashed potatoes. 

To create the caramel swirl spoon a thin layer of ice cream and drizzle caramel on it, layer more ice cream, drizzle more caramel, and so forth until filled. Make sure your caramel is room temperature for ease of drizzling. I zap mine for about 10 seconds in the microwave if it's a little stiff for me. 

Cover with plastic wrap pressed to the surface and chill to let it set. Serve. Preferably with pie. Good with toasted walnuts too. Or poached pears. Or both. 

new york city, pt I

Last time I was in New York I was barely 21 with a neon heart. I spent my days recovering from numbed out nights spent stumbling 'round Brooklyn and Manhattan looking for the party, a party, a dim travelling circus with an 8-bit calliope I could weave a medieval twist to. I don't remember the meals so much save a murky taco topped with Christmas lights, drunk pizza, and a faceless hangover brunch in Park Slope. Back then I wore pixie boots, a fringe cut, and my boyfriend’s guitar picks as earrings. I didn’t bother to remember names, couldn’t remember much at all... maybe asphalt laced ice crystals and gray leather pleats, the name of a favorite Olivia Tremor Control song and the entirety of Yeats’ “Second Coming”. The cost of a PBR & a pack of Camels. I could remember that. I fancied myself living in my own personal velvet underground, but I was, even then, becoming acquainted with the fear, that thinning of the self, that very certain bone-deep anxiety attendant to days spent in monochromatic deceit and nights in cheerful destruction. So I danced and drank harder and held hands with strange men. New York seemed good for the business of forgetting. That was nine years ago. This time was different.

This time I was there on altogether different business. I was in the business of long lunches, treasure hunting, being new in love, smoked fish, banisters, bundt cakes, iced coffee, photographs, making pasta, and candlelit suppers. I experienced the city in waking life instead of somnambulating through the tunnels. It was wholly other place, nothing at all like I didn’t remember it. It was new. 


As our plane descended, neither of us bothered to be too blasé to crane our necks towards the window and watch that skyline rise into view, hand in familiar hand. Manhattan went from tinker toy to towering as we landed, and the mild mortal terror that I feel (despite copious amounts of air travel since I was a small child) until the air craft has safely landed and slowed to a reasonable amble down the runway was mitigated by effervescent anticipation. I had so much planned: restaurants I’d dreamed of for years, the Sunday Supper's workshop & dinner, market stalls filled with produce and precious junk alike, record shops, and so many caffeinated afternoons spent amiably walking the trash confetti streets. Not one bar was on the agenda, not one rock & roll disco, not one hapless evening spent blind in one eye and missing the last train. How novel it was, really. 

We settled into an 18^th century townhouse in the heart of Williamsburg, a home base that turned out to be mere steps from Bakeri--try their lavender shortbread, Blue Bottle Coffee--try all their shortbread & iced coffee, and Diner/Marlow & Sons--try everything. Finding the neighborhood bodega stocked full of bourgie staples like kombucha, coconut water, and almond milk, we reckoned it was time to move after all.

Exhausted after travelling all day, we ended with a happy albeit largely silent supper at Diner. We shared a chilled peach soup with basil & toasted almonds, arctic char crudo with plums & sea salt, fried sardines, and a piece of blackened bluefish with coriander yogurt atop a smoked paprika spiced warm olive & potato salad. That soup. I will decode that soup. I will reunite with that soup. It was damn fine soup. I could have eaten there every night amidst the tile and mirrors and clatter of conversation. 

That first meal is tied for my favorite with our lunch at Prune which was, interestingly, also 
highlighted by a cold soup, this time a white gazpacho with green grapes & olive oil. It was so smooth and bright, with the perfect amount of peppery olive oil. I was wide eyed and nodding stupidly the entire time I ate it. A cold soup really pronounces its flavors. They’re always so cogent, cold soups. He had a zucchini ribbon salad that I greedily wished I could pilfer, and we shared a cured fish platter in the afternoon sun. For dessert I (and I alone) ate a whole poached peach in almond cream with the perfect crunch of candied almonds. I'm glad he doesn't like stone fruits. That's just fine. 

This trip was a proper pilgrimage during which we ate too many amazing meals to recount in detail here, but here's the short story: 

ma peche (lobster buns! marshmallow cream foie!) 
Marlow & Sons (oysters, duck liver paté, chilled eggplant soup...oh my) 
Momofuku Noodle Bar (Pork belly: buns and noodles. Hot sauce.) 
Bakeri (an early drizzly morning or orange brioche, lavender shortbread, and espresso with pain au chocolate & zucchini blueberry cake to go)
Maison Premiere (oyster heaven with a New Orleans vibe that tugs my heart strings & the most refined small plates)
Salties (a grand sandwich perched on a tiny stool)
The Big Gay Ice Cream Shop (salty pimp, y'all)
Momofuku Milkbar (I tried everything on my wish list from crack pie to cereal milk ice cream to every single cookie)
Blue Bottle Coffee (we had, oh I don’t know, fifty billion New Orleans iced coffees in the span of six days)
Carmine’s pizza delivery (Ordered on a night I wasn’t feeling well, I’m convinced those slices of greasy pizza the size of my face cured me.)

All of that said, our enthusiasm for the city is, in the end, of the “nice to visit” variety. We still prefer the wide-open spaces, languid pace, and dear friends of Tennessee. I missed my markets, my hushed front porch, and my bed. But I’m much more content in this small town existence with the knowledge that we can always take a long weekend to visit the city. It’s small world these days, after all. So the next time I need to be in the land of kombucha on every corner, culinary wizards & goodly witches, and million dollar Marlboros, a land where I'm awakened each morning by a haunting voice singing "Animal Nitrate" by Suede a capella in the court yard below my bedroom window (which is, in fact, what we awoke to each morning), I know where to go. I imagine I will crave that sooner rather than later. 

Next up (with, perhaps, some pumpkin biscuits oak ice cream in between...) the long over due New York part II, Sunday Suppers Workshop & Dinner with Nikole Herriott!

white peach, rose, & basil hand pies

Sometimes I get this resplendent feeling. It starts in the pit of my stomach. I can feel it pressing against my ribs and radiating out of my finger tips. A coniferous forest rises up around me. It's symphonic. These trees, they aren't rising, they're shooting up, dwarfing me. The canopy is closing rapidly, and the rays of sunlight are reduced to pinholes. Scarab beetles and snowshoe rabbits conspire in the underbrush. There is music here. A primal composition of every song ever written. Every blip, every snare, every haunting a capella. It's played on quantum strings. It's the vibration of the very fabric of reality and so lovely. The streets and houses that were once around me have disintegrated and the milky way runs like a creek through the forest. There are faeries and strange little people with giant gems for eyes that I don't entirely trust but seem to know ancient things about pain suppression. Magical beasts and deities, many armed and fire breathing, play dice. There is math here and neurons too. There is no time. The universe and all it contains are one moment, one substance in this forest. I have no body, no fingers or toes or little belly. I'm not afraid to die or fall out of love or be mediocre. Those concepts don't even make sense.

My heart feels swollen in my chest. I feel majestic, but the tick-tock of a blinker intrudes. Headlights. I'm driving. I'm driving a pick-up truck. I'm driving a pick-up truck because he moved in with me this weekend, moved in with his stacks of books and antique furniture and a piece of obsidian. I'm driving a pick-up truck back home, now our home, from Walgreens. It's midnight. I bought a pint of cookies & cream for $1.29. We're going to share it in bed and watch our favorite television show. The forest is gone, and I'm mortal again. And then, as my street comes back into focus, for a moment I feel as if I'll become untethered and be flung clear off the face of the earth, a special case that gravity capriciously forsook. It doesn't happen. I stay planted. We eat ice cream in bed. But you see, sometimes I lose my gravity. In a moment all of reality ripples and shimmers as if it were about to dissipate entirely, and then, just as quickly, it solidifies back into lawn, mailbox, ceiling fan, spoon.

This phenomena, if you will, is one of the many reasons I love to cook & bake. For me, baking pie is, in a sense, like holding on to clumps of dirt for dear life. It's real. I'm real. You're real. He & I are real, and I don't need to be afraid. And as I slice into ripe fruit, as flour mushrooms out of the bag into my mixing bowl, as I shred basil leaves with my fingers, I am here, and it is now.

I realize that the season for peaches has all but passed like a sigh, but I made these in August and wanted to share them with you. If you're quick you might be able to grab the last peaches of the season depending on where you live. And this was not the last summer on earth, unless of course you believe that this world will end come December, so when the market stalls are brimming with peaches again next summer, you'll be glad to have this recipe tucked into your apron. Or back pocket. Or hat. Or wherever you do your tucking. I tuck my recipes into an old symbolic logic notebook. I don't even wear an apron. I just mess up my clothes all the time. It's senseless.

White Peach, Rose, and Basil Hand Pies

The rose water in this pie filling compliments the floral notes of the white peaches and adds that certain je ne sais quoi that makes a dish feel special. It should  be noted you can certainly use yellow peaches. Nectarines would be nice too. This can be easily adapted to make a full sized pie, just slice the peaches instead of dice them. While I've given measurements below, I usually just add the rose and honey to taste along with a healthy handful of basil. I often make it as a galette for a quick & easy dessert for impromptu dinner guests with dough I keep on hand in the freezer. Try it with some homemade cardamom ice cream & candied almonds. You'll just die. It's so good.

Ingredients

One batch of Thomas Keller's Buttery Pastry Crust or your favorite pie dough

2 cups diced peaches (about 2 peaches)
2 Tbsp packed roughly chopped basil
1 tsp rosewater (or to taste starting at 1/4 tsp)
pinch of kosher salt
1/4 cup of honey (more if you'd like it sweeter)
squeeze of a lemon wedge
1 Tbsp cornstarch

1 egg, lightly beaten for wash
Sugar for sprinkling (raw, sanding, or regular all work)

Cooking Directions

Heat oven to 425° F.

Mix all of the ingredients except the cornstarch in a bowl. Adjust taste to your liking. Let sit 15 minutes to allow the flavors to meld.

Pour off about a tablspoon of the liquid in the bottom and mix with the cornstarch. Stir this back into the peaches.

Generously flour your work surface. Place one chilled, unwrapped dough on the flour and flour the top of the dough. Keep the other disk refrigerated while you work. Gently roll your dough out from the center until about 1/8 inch thick. Re-flour your surface as needed, continually lifting and rotating your dough to make sure no parts are sticking. If the dough becomes difficult to work with at any point, chill for a few minutes in the freezer on a baking sheet before continuing. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Cut an even number of circles in desired size using a floured biscuit cutter or the base of a small bowl. (I made 4" pies using a scalloped biscuit cutter.) Lay circles on parchment lined baking sheet. Chill dough if getting too soft for a few minutes in the fridge or freezer before continuing. I find myself popping them in and out of the freezer as needed while I work if they start getting gooey.

Fill a small bowl with cold water and keep it near by. Top half the circles with a small amount of filling, about 1 Tbsp for 4" pies and about 1 tsp if making bite sized 2" pies.  Using your finger lightly wet the bottom half with the water, top with another round, and seal edges by pressing gently but firmly to seal. You can also use a fork to seal them. Brush top with egg wash, sprinkle with raw sugar, and cut to vent.

When completed place in the refrigerator to chill and repeat with other disc of dough and remaining filling. When second sheet of pies are formed, put in fridge and remove the first sheet. Bake for 5 minutes at 425° F and then reduce the temperature to 350° F and bake 10-15 more minutes until pies are golden brown.

Cool on racks. Pies can be stored in air tight containers but are best eaten within 24 hours of baking.