Thai-Style Ground Meat

Back in France, we're back to tightening the belt a bit again: all that homemade ice cream means that I need to watch what and when I eat; all that shopping (and not working) means that we need to work on making the most of our budget. This recipe was nice in both respects: it's a light dish that uses fairly inexpensive staple ingredients.

 Ground turkey isn't easy to come by in France, so I rescued some ground pork from the freezer and added it to the ground veal pictured. Otherwise, I followed the recipe fairly closely. It's super simple and fast to make: you make a quick sauce with soy sauce, fish sauce, lime zest and juice, and a bit of sugar. You then brown some ground turkey or your favorite ground meat and add some minced onion (the white part of a scallion), garlic, ginger, and chili. Add the sauce along with a large handful of chopped basil and a finely sliced scallion, and you're done. I would get your sides (we had rice and peas) ready first because this stir-fry really takes just a few minutes from start to finish. I saved a few of the aromatics and a bit of sauce for some scrambled eggs for Julia, and she seemed to enjoy it.

Agreed, it doesn't look like much, but it tastes really good. The chili I used was not very spicy, so we used a bit of siricha to spice it up. Otherwise, the flavors are balanced and clean, so that even though this is a hot meal, it's nice for summer. A great meal to come home to.

Fresh Peach Buttermilk Ice Cream

My California Cooking Adventure continued in Livermore, home of Dad and Sharmyn and a whole lot of delicious seasonal produce. I decided that July could be closed out with some ice cream, after all those salads. One problem with this plan, however, was that Dad and Sharmyn only had an old-fashioned hand-cranked ice cream maker, and I am rather a lazy ice cream maker.

Fortunately, that problem was solved in that Sharmyn and Dad do not object to doing some hand cranking. So I bought some buttermilk (why can you only buy half-gallons of buttermilk here??) and rock salt and got busy. First up: (barely) cook some peaches (here I used white nectarines) with a bit of sugar and lemon. That gets puréed and refrigerated for later.

Then you make a brown-sugar custard and add some buttermilk. And then, if you're me, you allow your daughter to convince you a half-recipe will not be enough (it would have been...), so you go through the whole darned process once again. Refrigerate.

Hours later, you dig out the old-fashioned ice cream maker and hand it to professional crankers to freeze the custard. A half-hour or so later, you swirl in the peach purée and get ready to enjoy the tart peachy creaminess.

I liked this a lot, but I believe the peach flavor could be more dominant. I think this is because I didn't have enough peaches for a full recipe, and they were the more mildly-flavored white nectarines. So the brown sugar and buttermilk flavors came through more strongly, though I don't see that as a bad thing, necessarily. To me it tasted like frozen yogurt. If you make this, I would use plenty of yellow peaches, preferably on the almost-shrivelled side. You won't regret it. 

In fact, Dad and Sharmyn so enjoyed their homemade ice cream that they bought an ice-cream insert for the Kitchenaid and have been cranking out quarts and quarts of delicious stuff.

Shrimp Scampi with (no) Pernod

This post begins my reports on my California Cooking Adventure: this one in San Diego at my sister Alicia's house. I gave her the choice between shrimp and blueberry tea cake, and we were all happy with her choice.

The afternoon I made this was a busy one: we went to La Jolla, looking at the sea lions, downtown, and the UCSD campus. It was already on the late side when we went to Whole Foods and picked up some key groceries for this dish. Since Melissa Clark allows for many different variations in the recipe, I decided to skip the fennel and Pernod and use the basil we already had and the white wine we bought (and would drink with the meal).

The scampi goes together in a flash: you make a quick butter-garlic-white wine sauce, cook it down a bit, and then add shrimp and herbs. That's it--and it's all that's necessary for a delicious dish. We devoured it with a somewhat spicy Israeli couscous dish and, I believe, a salad. It's an elegant meal that comes together in minutes, which makes it a great back-pocket recipe.