The Pineapple Encore

Remember when I made pumpkin ice cream from tinned pumpkin back in  vegetable week ? Well this week, after I’d carved my pumpkin, I made another pumpkin ice cream using fresh pumpkin. The recipe and method is the same, but it’s so much better!  The video for this one:  https://youtu.be/V3zI9khDF6Q?si=G_VKaveZ06m1-rRH

This is exciting for me. Remember I teased last week that I’ve been working on how I’m going to bring future ice cream to the world? Well, it’s here… I made a YouTube video!  https://youtu.be/YqTnjLt7dyE?si=Q6_LvofH_UiBtBCQ I’ve actually made two!  https://youtu.be/NwOVOp9hH7A?si=xnbVJpfSyhygVtOR The first one is this week’s theme, for which I made Roquefort sheep milk ice cream, and the second one is my introduction where I made two versions of my plain ice cream, which was the first ice cream I made for this blog too. I’m not abandoning the blog or the Instagram, but I’m probably going to use the blog just to post the recipes without all the elaboration and the Instagram for incidental photos. If you can spare a bit of time, go and watch the videos, and maybe even let me know if you like them. Roquefort sheep milk ice cream 450g sheep milk (45%) 350g Roquefort cheese (35%) 200g caster sugar (20%) 1. Put all the ingredients into a saucepan, crumbling the cheese into small pie...

This week excited me, both because I generally love orchards and fruit picking, and because the theme of orchard is semi related to what I’ve been up to for the last few months. I said back in  Oceania week  that I was considering where the future of my ice cream making was going. I’ve learned a lot about both ice cream and myself, and how I enjoy ice cream. When I look at the themes I’ve most enjoyed, they’ve been the ones that had me working with the natural environment around me, like when I went  foraging for blackberries ,  used the  local honey  and incorporated  flowers  that were  in bloom  into my ice cream. I decided a while ago that I wanted my ice cream to become a celebration of local, seasonal and homegrown produce; I also wanted to expand the influence of food history in my ice cream, and they tie in well together because until the wider use of food preservation techniques all food was local and seasonal. To that end, I’ve...

Living in the English countryside, you’d think I’d have much greater access to harvest festivals than I actually do. For a start, such events are often held on weekends and I work weekends so never get an opportunity to attend them. For another, this is not actually a Victorian countryside idyll, it’s not like we spend autumn in a constant state of community social harvesting. Farming and harvest is a mechanised and industrial undertaking, and people who just live in the villages have their interaction limited to being frustrated that the tractors are driving slowly on the roads and holding up traffic. The third thing is, harvest is basically over here. I don’t personally work in farming but I have several close friends who do and they’ve been winding down on the harvest for a while. And so, as is usual for me, I turned to history and harvest festivals of years past. Seed cake has an association with harvest going back centuries, I’ve read the caraway seeds themselves represented the w...

My ice cream this week has become a running joke for my friends. I don’t have many personal associations with fireside, fireplaces and food, so instead I thought about fires in general and decided to make a smoky tea (ignore, as one of my friends pointed out, that fireplaces aren’t smoky unless you’re doing them wrong.) I did consider simply using liquid smoke but that’s not very in keeping with my historical theme for ice creams, so instead I decided to use a smoky tea - lapsang souchong - and also use the opportunity to sort out how to do tea ice creams with my new method. Having decided this, and here’s where I went wrong, I had my friends guess the flavour. Only one guessed it and that was more by luck, she alone managed to get to ‘a hot drink of some sort’ and using the cooler/hotter system of approving guesses she made it to tea and then lapsang souchong. She disagreed that it suits the theme of fireside, I explained my reasoning, and she said, “But no one says ‘bring the lapsang...

We’re back into my history realm now! I usually base my recipes on older ones, but there were a lot of interesting things happening with food in the 40s and 50s, with wartime rationing being the basis for my ice cream this week. Rationing in the UK was strict and lasted for a long time. To state an obvious fact, we are an island, a lot of our food was brought to us via the sea - there was a good potential for the Axis to just starve us out. There were a series of studies conducted on how little food a person could survive on, and it says a lot about our biology that rationing was never as harsh as the bare minimum - even under threat, we didn’t need to go that far. We should be cautious about glorifying paleo diets because it’s not like people lived long and healthy lives in prehistoric times, but the human body is capable of surviving scarcity, it was honed to live for long periods of time on foraged berries with the occasional mammoth steak to shore up the fat supplies; the problem w...