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.

Olive Oil-Almond Cake

I chose this recipe for March because I like to bake and because it had a couple of ingredients that I was somewhat skeptical of: olive oil and buckwheat flour.

I know people everywhere have been making olive-oil based cakes for a while now, but my butter-based prejudices told me, "That's just weird. Nothing is as good as baked goods made with butter." I was worried about an olive-y aftertaste and that kind of greasy moistness I don't care for in a cake.

Buckwheat flour was also a hard sell for me. I remember loving the Aunt Jemima buckwheat pancakes my dad used to make us on weekends, but somewhere in the meantime I tried and hated kasha (buckwheat groats), and from then on I have associated buckwheat with bitter and rancid. Still, I do eat and enjoy buckwheat crêpes on a regular basis: in France, all savory crêpes are made with buckwheat flour. Therefore, this was an easy ingredient to procure.

OK, enough whining now. The cake comes together very easily: you just whip eggs (with baking powder at this stage because I'm weird), add sugar and oil and flavorings, and whip some more. Then come flour, buckwheat flour, and ground almonds (another easy ingredient to find). And you're pretty much done. I used some ground almonds to coat my pan for an extra almond kick.

While the cake was baking, I made some vanilla crème fraîche, since it's more available and less expensive (and slightly less rich) than mascarpone. Only mascarpone can make crème fraîche look like diet food in comparison.

This is the innards of half a vanilla bean: even though I have a whole bunch in my spice drawer, I'm still a vanilla bean miser. It was plenty to speckle the cream and make it delicious.

And here's the finished product, served with strawberries macerated in vanilla sugar (thus the dark specks) to celebrate the arrival of spring and our two guests, Bob from Pontlevoy and Katrin, an exchange student from Germany.

Did this cake win me over? I certainly liked it. I tried it by itself (not bad), with the cream (better), and with the strawberries and cream (my favorite). I didn't get a strong sense of either the olive oil or the buckwheat, since the orange and almond flavors dominate. There was no ranting and raving at the dinner table, but people seemed to have no problem putting away the cake, either. So I would say this recipe is a great "backdrop" cake: easy to put together and serve with seasonal fruit. 

Rescued Recipe: Crêpes Polonaises

I have an odd collection of cookbooks, to say the least. I certainly don’t have 101 cookbooks like Heidi Swanson, but I do have a bookshelf full of them. The thing is, I forbade myself from buying new cookbooks back in the 90s, so my collection is dated. Of course, I occasionally let other people buy me cookbooks (if you’re reading this and want to gift me, I’d love Dorie Greenspan’s Baking from My Home to Yours and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian), so I do have a few from this century. But I still have Cookbook Rules. I don’t like cookbooks with too many pictures, and I don’t like fussy chef’s cookbooks. I know that so many people love beautiful food photography, but frankly, it intimidates me. It’s like looking at clothes in a catalog—it looks great on the model, but I’m going to look like a sack of potatoes in it. And even though my food tastes great, it’s no model ready for photography. All I need is a list of ingredients and a tempting description, and I’m ready to cook.
So the cookbook that I’m “rescuing” a recipe from today is called Mes Meilleurs Desserts by a certain Anne LeChastenier, printed in 1988. I bought this baby at a cookbook store in Paris in about that year. I didn’t speak much French and asked the lady at the shop for some guidance. She didn’t think much of my French or cooking skills and guided me to this book and another, Cuisine Sans Souci, that I still cook from. These are both simple but not basic books. They assume that you have all the basic cooking skills and just need some ideas to get you through the next meal. If you’re making crêpes, which we are here, they just tell you: “Préparer la pâte et la laisser reposer…Faire sauter les crepes.” (Make the batter and let it rest; cook the crêpes) That’s it. You don’t know how to make crêpes? Go ask Maman.
I’m going to take this approach with you, because I’m not the official crêpe maker in my home. My French husband gets this task, which he does with aplomb. He even gets the first crêpe right. One of the reasons I married him. I see on the Internet that there is a video of Alton Brown making crêpes. If you don’t know how, you might start there.
So here’s the recipe, translated and adapted. We had it for a dinner party and then for breakfast the next day. It’s not mind-blowingly delicious, but we had no trouble polishing it off.

Crêpes Polonaises
Makes about 18 crêpes; would probably serve about 6 for breakfast and about 10 for dessert.

Crêpe batter:
3 eggs
50 g. (1/4 c.) sugar
Pinch salt
1/2 liter (2 c.) milk
300 g. {10.6 oz.; about 2 c.) flour—I used about 1/3 whole wheat pastry flour
25 g. (2 T.) melted butter
More butter for frying the crêpes
More sugar for sprinkling

Filling:
50 g. (about 1/3 c.) raisins—I used golden raisins
a shot glass full of rum
200 g. (7 oz.; a scant cup) fromage blanc (I used homemade ricotta; you could also use cottage cheese that’s been puréed in the food processor for about a minute)
3 T. cream or sour cream (really crème fraîche, but I can’t get that here)
100 g. (1/2 c.) sugar
2 egg yolks
pinch salt
1/2 t. vanilla (not in the recipe, but pretty good anyway)

For the crêpe batter, put the eggs, sugar, salt, and milk in the blender. Blend it for a few seconds, then add the flour and melted butter and give it another few seconds until it’s smooth. Let the batter sit for at least half an hour.
For the filling: Soak the raisins in the rum for at least half an hour. Use a mixer or a food processor to mix the cheese, cream, sugar, egg yolks, salt, and vanilla; fold in the raisins. Chill until the crêpes are ready.
Now it’s time to cook the crêpes. Heat up an 8-inch skillet. Take a stick of butter out of the fridge and unwrap about the bottom fourth. Hold it by the paper and swirl it around the pan to butter it. Now pour in about 1/4 cup of batter and swirl it around the pan. Get out your pancake turner and start scraping at the edges. When you start seeing the bubbles popping at the top of the crêpe, do your best to flip that baby. Give it another 30 seconds and it will be done. Repeat this procedure until you’re out of batter (although the batter will keep for a while in the fridge if you get tired of making crêpes and just want a drink). If your name’s not Sami and you’re not from France, you’ll probably have to make 2-3 crêpes “for the cook” before you get it just right.
Now turn on your broiler. When your crêpes are done, spread each one with a large spoonful of the cheese filling, fold into quarters, and put it on a baking sheet. Sprinkle the crêpes with about a tablespoon of sugar and run them under the broiler for a few minutes until the sugar caramelizes and the crêpes get all crispy. This process also makes me feel better about those raw egg yolks ☺. Enjoy, perhaps with another shot glass full of rum.