Hey there Ice Cream Club. If you’re Canadian, like me, you may have what’s known as a ‘turkey hangover.’ Mine is running a few days now. Soon I’ll have a turkey sandwich for lunch, then make a stock using the carcass from the turkey, and then eat some squash soup using the stock for dinner. See you again tomorrow, hangover.
I really enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner, including and especially the preparation. I like making the turkey and the stuffing, and this year I also did gravy and cranberry sauce. I prefer simple and classic, after some mediocre results from things like bacon wraps and cornbread stuffings over the years. The turkey was brined for a day in salted water with some peppercorns, then given an olive oil massage before the oven. That’s all. It was a little over, but super tasty with perfect skin. Everything we all want to be.
The stuffing was white bread with bacon, onions, celery and some sage. The cranberry sauce was cranberries, water, sugar and some balsamic vinegar. I hard fried the giblets, added butter’n’drippins, strained it out, and then added a packet of seasoning for the gravy. I’ve done a jus-style/roux-style split in the past, when the first is basically drippins and the latter also gets some flour to thicken it out, but the packet was gluten-free and they usually go over pretty well. It was good.
My Roommates made the potatoes and added some salad, our guests brought a caesar salad and some extra veggies, and we all had ice cream for dessert. I’m really thankful for the meal and the people I got to share it with. It was awesome. We’ll probably do it again in November, in large part because it’s really cheap compared to how much food you get.
In the meantime, I’m trying to slog through the hangover and get going on making some more Hallowe’en-themed ice cream pictures for October. The ones from the previous week involved some highs and lows.
Day 5 involved all my dinosaur molds. I’ve been consistently impressed with how well anything I put in these molds holds details. When I made all of the batches that I made into dinosaurs, I put some into one of the four molds so that I’d have four different kinds when I did the dino day. I’ve done the dinos a lot, and it’s unlikely I’ll do more than one more. They’re kind of borderline Hallowe’en anyway.
On Day 6, I did the Coffee Crypt, which worked really well. For the coffee ice cream, I made a standard vanilla base, used some liqueur instead of vanilla for a less pronounced flavour, and then added several Starbucks Via sachets right before churning. I’m not sure that adding the coffee then is best, but coffee is better when it’s fresh as a rule of thumb. It works well, so I’m going to keep doing it that way. I used instant coffee because that’s pretty much the only way. Adding any water to ice cream upsets the balance, and most of coffee is water. Even espresso shots add too much. I’m sure any instant coffee would work, but the Via sachets are pretty good quality and don’t have any extra flavours and sugar and stuff that I’d rather not add. Stuff like roasted hazelnuts and cookies go well as additions to the coffee ice creams. To get the coffin shape, I used a cookie cutter. I covered the bottom with cling film to contain the ice cream, which also helped me push it out of the mold. For the rocks/fallen debris, I used a silicon bar mold that doesn’t produce bars well with soft ice creams. It makes terrific chunks, though.
Day 7 produced a little gravesite with some emerging Zombies. Except for the vegetable matter, this would make a fine party dessert for some kids. I remember ‘worms in dirt’ being big when I was young. That was chocolate pudding with cookie crumbs and gummy worms. This is brownies crumbled for the dirt, some chocolate chip cookies for the headstones, and then several ice creams that were frozen into hemispherical molds. I use those a lot, and put some of every batch into them. I’m really pleased with the eyes, which are marshmallow slices and chocolate chips with the tops sliced off. It was finicky work, but worth it. Cutting the marshmallows with a chef’s knife worked out well, because the weight pushed the slices into a more eye-like shape.
On Day 8, the vegetable usage was kicked up a notch, in part because of a weird story about sexy onions. I had a really good skull from the peaches and cream batch of ice cream, and decided to use some corn silk to make some scraggly locks. Eddie Van Halen died earlier in the week, and a tribute to rock legends seemed appropriate. We have some wacky musical instruments kicking around the apartment, and a couple of those featured heavily in the photos. I got my Roommate to make the little onion tart as a nod to the news story, and to give our rock star an adoring fan. I don’t think onions have a place in ice cream, and any equipment used to make any might always make onion ice creams afterwards. That being said, I would love to make some batches based on traditionally cold soups like Gazpacho and Vichyssoise. Who knows, they could be amazing.
On Day 9, the results were a little spotty all around. I made a fresh corn ice cream mix, but something went wrong and there was a very sour element in it that I’m pretty sure is spoiled dairy. We’ve had some milk go off long before the expiry date recently. Not much, but some. I was still able to use a bit of the mix in the picture above. I’ve been watching a lot of Halloween food competitions, and a staple move of the sugar artists is to make isomalt eyes that look fairly real by layering different colours of sugar under a translucent dome. I tried that here with ice in the hemisphere molds. I put a little measuring spoon in the water before freezing it to give me a big empty cavity in the ice. I then put a chocolate chip in the cavity and filled it with a little of the corn mix. I’m actually pretty happy with the result, although 4 out of the 6 eyes I made were unusable because the cavity was too shallow. In the picture we were going for a ‘Children of the Corn’ thing, but the eyes look like mantis eyes, and the corn husks never really stood up in a convincing way.
Finally, on Day 10, I constructed a well of sorts using graham crackers, then used another ice cream hemisphere from the stock for a head, more cornsilk for the hair, chocolate chips for the eyes, kale and parsley for the foliage, and the centre of a sandwich cookie for the hand. I like this one a lot.
So hangover or no, I feel compelled to continue and make more spooky ice creams for the rest of October. Starting tonight. The one thing we didn’t get to in the Thanksgiving dinner was a quarter watermelon brought by one of our esteemed guests. It will be a lovely sorbet, likely with cucumber and mint. Like a melon mojito.
It is the custom of Thanksgiving to give thanks. Even Zombies know that. So thank you for reading! I hope my words go down as well as my ice creams have, and I look forward to making many more. Thanks. Your life matters! Black Lives Matter!
The Ice Cream Club 