elfs | I have Iron Chef'd out!

Last night, I got it into my head to go a little crazy with the#cooking. At first, I was just going to make ground buffalo sliders (basically, mini-hamburgers) with home-made biscuits, half of them cheddar & bacon, the other half with home-made tatziki sauce and cucumber topping. Tatziki sauce is that dill-and-yogurt sauce most people only encounter when ordering a lamb dish at nominally greek restaurants.

And I did exactly that. I made the biscuits first, and while they were cooking I made the patties and the tatziki sauce.

But as I was looking through the refrigerator, I realized that I had a problem: there were root vegetables that had been in there a long time and were in danger of going bad. I had to cure that immediately. So I made steak fries but with rutabaga and turnips instead of potato. To soften them, I steamed them for six minutes in the microwave first, then tossed them with olive oil and smoked paprika before putting them into the oven at 450°F for 20 minutes. That wasn't long enough; they still came out soggy. I'll have to work on the time/temperature thing some more.

Also, around all this cooking, I made cardamom ice cream, seeding the pods by hand, which took a while. I also used a fresh vanilla bean, superfine sugar, heavy cream for the infusion and whole milk for the chill. I was afraid that I'd ruined it by having the temperature up too high and might have scalded the cream, but no, when it was fully chilled two hours later, oh my gods was it good. Omaha was ecstatic.

I'm half-tempted to try something completely weird, like basil ice cream next. Never know. It might be good. And while it's pricy (a pint costs about eight bucks to make, between the fresh herbs and heavy cream, much more than the $4 pints of Häagen Dazs, but it is so much better), it's cheap enough I can afford the experiment.