Straight from the Farm

 

Bread and butter puddings.  How many have you made?  A few?  Maybe a dozen?  Well, apparently I’m way behind the rest of you because I’d never even heard of bread and butter puddings until just the other day when VegeYum mentioned them as one of the things she cooked when she was first starting out.  I have, mind you, made bread puddings before, but they are decidedly different, or so it seems to me.  For one thing, bread and butter puddings let you play with your food by cutting sandwiches into triangles.  I always cut my sandwiches into triangles when the fillings allow so this was a real selling point for me.

From what I can gather, I guess bread and butter puddings are rather a staple in the U.K. and its former colonies. I wonder where it got lost along the way when the pilgrims came to these shores?  Oh well, it doesn’t matter now.  I’ve happily claimed any long lost bread and butter pudding heritage after making this Berry Bread and Butter Pudding.

I’ve still got a few jars of Sparkling Holiday Jam hanging out in my cupboards so I thought that would be a great flavor to use in my very first bread and butter pudding.  I then decided I’d even go so far as to make the bread, using that old trusty stand-by, Miracle Bread.  (I didn’t have to though as I remembed a loaf I had in the freezer still. Sweet!)  I just wish I still had some of that fresh milk left from the ice cream I made last week.  Store-bought worked just fine.  Although, after considering the amount of butter going into this dish, I decided to use fat free milk and was please with how creamy the flavor was still.  

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Ooo-la-la!  This is going to be a very pretty post.  The color of this Spiced Green Tea and White Chocolate Ice Cream was shockingly vivid and kicked in my photographer’s spidey sense big time.   I could fill a book with all the colorful photos I took. But, we’re not here just to look at pictures (okay, I admit, sometimes that’s all I do on the blogs I visit).  No sir, we’re here to talk about making green tea (or matcha) ice cream. 

This is no sissy recipe.  It’s got a lot of ingredients, and there’s some time investment too with all the constant stirring required.  But, please, trust me…trust me when I say it’s so very worth the effort!  I’ve been eyeballing green tea ice cream recipes for years now… yes, years. This recipe is the first I’ve undertaken for a couple reasons.  For one, matcha powder can be a little tricky to find.  I got mine recently at a great Asian supermarket in North Wales, PA. 

Second, anything fun that I make these days, I’m always looking for a way to make it “blog eligible” by incorporating an ingredient straight from the farm.  With my matcha powder in hand, I then acquired a gallon of fresh whole cow’s milk from my parents’ Holstein herd on a recent trip home.  Unpasteurized milk straight from the udder is so rich and creamy that I actually skipped the heavy cream called for in the recipe and just used all whole milk.  I kept the cream in the recipe below though as I doubt many of you have access to unpasteurized milk, given all the federal regulations on it. 

Third, and most importantly, I abstained from making my own green tea ice cream for so long because I have such a fond taste memory associated with it.  When I first moved to Philadelphia several years back, I worked for a great company with a great set of coworkers who took long group lunches, often ending with a trip to the ice cream shop, Alaska, which used to be at the corner of 18th and Sansom Streets.  Besides having the most hysterical giant moose on their exterior sign, we loved going to this old-fashioned scoop shop for the unique flavors they carried, one of which was the most delicate and creamy green tea ice cream you can possibly imagine.  I always got it, even when I swore I wouldn’t.  Its sirens song and pale green hue always lured me in.  Since Alaska’s closing, I’ve had such a hankering for that ice cream.  But I was, frankly, a little intimidated that the green tea ice cream I would make myself just wouldn’t be right. 

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Amidst my browsing of the pleasantly cluttered and charmingly disorganized shelves of Walk A Crocked Mile Books, previously touted here on SFTF, I stumbled upon what may be the best cookbook to ever be printed.  Well, really, let me refine that brash statement.  Tassajara Cooking, printed by Shambhala Publications in 1973 for the Zen Center of San Francisco, may just be the best ever cooking philosophy book that happens to also contain some excellent recipes and practical how-to for the beginner and intermediate cook.
 
You read right: this is a book about the philosophy behind cooking.  I find it utterly fascinating to flip through its pages at bedtime as it has such a wonderfully relaxed approach to preparing food that nourishes not only bodies, but also souls.   It’s all very “zen.”  Sadly, I think this original version is out of print, but if you have a lovely used book shop near you, perhaps good karma will yield you your very own copy.

It was this tidy summary on the back jacket of the book that prompted me to lay out the princely sum of three dollars that was needed to make it mine. “This is a book to help you actually cook – a cooking book.  The recipes are not for you to follow, they are for you to create, invent, test.  It explains things you need to know, and things to watch out for.  There are plenty of things left for you to discover, learn, stumble, upon.  Blessings.  You’re on your own.  Together with everything.” 

You’re on your own…together with everything…I love it!  The first chapter, entitled “Beginning”, does indeed outline how to begin: “You follow recipes, you listen to advice, you go your own way.  Even wholehearted effort sometimes falls short, the best intentions do not insure success.  There is no help for it, so go ahead, being and continue: with yourself, with others, with vegetables…The way to be a cook is to cook.”  

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Shame on me.  I should have told you about this recipe before the Easter holiday, not the day after, as it would have been the perfect springy side dish to accompany the ham and hyacinths.  I’m also a bit irked with myself to be giving you two rutabaga recipes back-to-back since I like to mix things up around here.  But, keeping with the reverberating theme of my spring so far this year, you go with what you have right now and worry about tomorrow when it gets here.  So, today we have a delicately flavored Herbed Rutabaga Couscous Salad.  And tomorrow? Perhaps an exotic ice cream… 

I’m sure I’m not alone.  I come home from work, open the fridge door, and blankly stare at its contents for a good five minutes with disinterest, knowing all the while that it’s up to me and my weary brain to yet again come up with something good for dinner.  Sometimes I do a belly flop and settle for a veggie burger (hey, at least I cook it in a pan and not in the microwave).  Other times, like last Wednesday evening, I am inspired and end up making an elegant swan dive from the fridge to the table.  Now, the challenge remains to be get what was a “little of this and a little of  that” invention into a repeatable recipe for you to try. 

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I’ll just come out with it.

This eating locally in winter is getting a little stale. 

There. 

I said it.

As Barbara Kingsolver noted in her Animal Vegetable Miracle memoirs, March is the leanest of months for those of us interested in eating seasonally and locally.  According to Kingsolver, Native Americans actually referred to March as “hungry month”.  You’d think March would be bright and fresh, what with it being the beginning of spring.  But the problem is, you plant in the spring, but you don’t harvest much until summer.  Granted, there are a few things on their way that I can’t wait to gobble up…asparagus, for one!

So it is that March is, in my experience, full of root vegetables with skins that have wrinkled as their moisture evaporated while being stored over the winter and the slim pickings of frozen and dried preserves, namely tomatillo sauce in my case.  Why I ever thought I’d use that much frozen tomatillo sauce, heavens only know…

This is an awful lot of lamenting for someone who actually has something wonderful and delicious to talk about.  Remember that revolution I talked about a ways back?  No?  Come on, people, you should have been working on your signs and chants all these months!  Viva la Rutabaga Revolution!!!

I have really come to adore rutabagas amongst the slim pickings of spring.  They really just seem fresh, even after sitting around for four or five months.  I think in part it’s their lovely orange color in dishes that does the trick.  This sunset hue is also what made me think to exchange the sweet potatoes called for in the original recipe with chunks of rutabaga instead. 

Warm spices, bright colors, a little kick…this dish is far from boring and stale.  In fact, it’s really much more like a breath of fresh spring-time air! 

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