smitten kitchen

Raise your hand if you’re surprised that my mother used to make us homemade hot fudge sauce for our ice cream? Right, I see you’re not new here! Welcome back. But really, the crazy didn’t start with my generation, despite the fact that I may or may not have crafted a really elaborate chicken dish this week when sick and not remotely interested in cooking or eating it. So I didn’t waste the ingredients. Also totally my mother’s daughter there.

Is it me, or does something about hot fudge sauce on ice cream seem distinctively retro? I don’t hear much about fudge sauce and their accompanying sundaes these days. Maybe I’ve stepped too far into the Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream in a pool of cognac, drizzled in the world’s most expensive chocolate, covered with shaved white, black and clear truffles, topped with edible 25-karat gold leaf world… Let me fix that right now.

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I’m going to take a brief break from your food phobias today to tell you about my newest one. It lives in the freezer. It controls my mind, and at times, my spoon. And at the rate we’re going, it will be the very end of me. Or my waistline. Or my husband, as he leaves me for the Paris-dweller who envisioned this masterpiece.

It goes by the innocent-sounding name chocolate sorbet but even typing those words was enough to send my resistance into a tailspin and I had to go into the freezer to get another taste, cursing Lebovitz the whole way there and whispering sweet nothings into my spoon on the way back.

I suppose you could say I’m having a Chocolate Weak Week, except it started last week when I was getting a pedicure and they had these tiny chocolate brownie nuggets out and I wasn’t even hungry but the entire 45 minutes of buffing and rebirthing my feet into the kind The Other Half walk on I was thinking “There’s a tiny bite of chocolate brownie in the corner. There’s a tiny bite of chocolate brownie in the corner…” ad infinitum. (When I finally swooped down on my prey an hour later, it didn’t even disappoint.)

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Two weeks ago, I had the honor to meet one of the people who has been reading this site in all of its incarnations for so long, she probably knows me better than I do. And yet she still wanted to meet me for lunch! The lovely Marce and I had a weekday lunch on a stunning day at Tabla’s Bread Bar, sitting outside discussing cameras and childcare, the food in Buenos Aires and the freelance life. It was fantastic, and not only because I can never resist an opportunity to have lunch at the Bread Bar but because she brought me…

A jar of dulce de leche from Argentina! I thought I’d won the lottery. I know that aside from being practically the national dish, it’s no big deal to find a jar a grocery store down there but I didn’t know that there is like a whole supermarket aisle of it! I … I think it’s safe to say that it’s best I never find myself in that aisle. It would get sticky; I’d never be invited back.

Of course, I immediately started scheming what I could make with it, but I wanted to be really cautious about not picking a recipe that would bury the dulce’s charms. Oh, I loved those Dulce de Leche Cheesecake Squares as much as you all did in January, but said then and maintain now that the dulce flavor was not particularly strong in the delicious end product. When someone lugs a one-pound tub of this caramel of the gods more than 5,000 miles to you, you want to treat it with the utmost respect.

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Everyone needs a motto, an inspirational catchphrase or a daily affirmation and at least for the duration of this post, mine is going to have to be: when life gives you stupid, annoying pudding that never, ever sets, make ice cream. What? You don’t think it will work for t-shirts and taglines? I’m crushed.

But I have, indeed, come a long way from my late-February butterscotch pudding nadir. On the heels of the Valentines-timed chocolate pudding rave, it occurred to me that the world really needs more pudding recipes. They’re a great thing to master–not too difficult, not too heavy and complete and total comfort food. And while some (coughmomcough) have tried the chocolate pudding and still feel that it doesn’t have much on her beloved My-T-Fine [Deb shakes head in shame, clucks tongue] it is impossible to argue that store-bought or from-a-mix butterscotch pudding has any relation whatsoever to that which is coaxed from a brown sugar, vanilla and bourbon-hinted caramel.

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I’m patting myself on the back right now–no, not for finishing NaBlo, because I think we have already established that an 86 percent effort doesn’t count–but because I have finally made the fennel ice cream from the October Gourmet and it is absolutely wonderful. You have no idea how many things have had the balderdash to get in my way.

It actually starts long before October, when I was trying to make the roasted banana ice cream from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop. In a small kitchen with one counter, I rarely take pictures of my mise, as it is simply disgraceful. Things are piled and messy and muddled and as long as I can find a clear corner to work on, I excel in ignoring everything else. We all have our skills, non? This usually works for me (ahem) except for that day that it didn’t, and the ice cream maker, all of its parts and sticky, delicious banana batter ended up splayed across the kitchen floor, breaking the plastic paddle that churns the ice cream. Alex and I ordered a replacement part ($8 piece, $9 S&H) from Cuisinart that night which took EIGHT weeks to arrive, abruptly halting my ice cream making season in its tracks.

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