First Homemade Ice Cream - Mocha

The first batch of home churned ice cream is finished and currently sitting in the freezer hardening. I gave my sister a choice between mocha and green tea for my first batch. She choose mocha and we* were off.

Time for the problems. Aside from possibly over cooking the mixture during the first part nothing major really happened. However, after letting the mixture sit in the fridge overnight I set to churn it this morning. This is where the real problems happened. Even after cutting the recipe in half it still completely filled the ice cream maker, just barely not overflowing. I knew that it would expand, but hoped it wouldn't be that much and could be contained. I came back 30 minutes later to find the ice cream all but falling out of the top of the machine. Thankfully it was ice cream enough at that point that I was able to scoop a sizable portion of it out and throw that into the freezer. There was the collateral damage of making a complete mess, but the ice cream was saved and finished nicely. Transferring the finished ice cream to another container for storage and further hardening also added to the mess and was no easy feat.

Currently chillin' out in the fridge is a green tea ice cream base that I made soon after this, but more on that once it's churned. I've only got a few more ideas in my ice cream hopper at the moment, so if you have a request please share. And if you're close enough I'll share it with you. ;)

*This is a 'royal we' in case anyone was wondering.

EDIT: And I just realized that I never commented on how it tasted. The little bit I've had of it so far has varied in the amount of coffee flavor. It seems like it's necessary to eat small amounts to get the nice combination between the chocolate and coffee. When I remake this one I think I'll either up the amount of instant coffee or decrease the cocoa powder. Over all it has been quite delicious. :)

Introduction and Catch-up

Hello everybody!

I'm a naturally curious person, and like to figure out how to do things myself. This includes cooking. However, I'm not fond of cooking or making mundane things. Often times they're things I've never tried or have only recently heard about but that sound interesting or challenging. My dad has also asked me to cook one meal for the family while I'm home for the summer. So far I've completed two meals and no one has died or gotten sick (yet).

This blog will, therefore, be a tribute to all of my cooking ventures from hence forth. It will serve as both a reminder to me should I chose to go back and cook something again and as a source of humor to the rest of you who don't have to suffer through the beginning stages of me learning to cook. I can only hope that it might also help someone out there in deciding what to and not to cook.

Now for some catching up.

-Thursday, May 27th-

As I said before, one of the main purposes of this blog is to track my cooking of family meals over the summer. This being my first full meal, I may have bitten off more than I could chew. On the menu was baked macaroni and cheese and sirloin steak with a spicy rub. My downfall was not realizing how much time it would take to actually cook all of this combined with not quite having all of the skills necessary to complete the meal. It also didn't help that I was trying to multi-task and take part in a meeting via Google talk (a mistake I won't make again). The final major hurdle came when the recipe called for me to "temper an egg". This was something no one in my house had ever heard of, but thankfully the internet came to the rescue, and after a short bit of Googling I found an answer. (For those wondering, tempering an egg is where you mix the hot liquid into the egg a small bit at a time in order to slowly raise the temperature of the egg. This prevents your egg from scrambling itself.) After cooking for three hours straight I finally finished everything and we got to eat at ten o'clock at night for a meal I was suppose to have ready at nine when everyone was getting back home.

The meal itself was definitely edible and the family had few complaints. In my rush I had forgotten to salt and pepper the macaroni and cheese before baking it which left it quite bland. This was something my dad also agreed with, but also added that other than that it was very good. My sister, however, said she really liked it as it was (something that came without any prompting even). I also felt that the lemon in the steak rub was over powering all of the flavors, but no one else shared that sentiment.

Along with the meal I made a drink that I had recently heard of called a mango lassi. A lassi is a popular and traditional Indian yogurt-based drink similar to a smoothie and can come in a number of different flavors. They're ridiculously easy to make so long as you own a blender and are pretty good, though I wouldn't recommended them with the meal I cooked. They're also a bit slimy, so if you have a problem with strange textures in your food, like my mom, they may not be for you.

-Thursday, June 3rd-

Second meal to be cooked. I scaled this one back a bit and made only one dish instead of two. Dinner again and this time I went for chicken stroganoff. Cooking this time only took around an hour and we were able to eat at a more reasonable time. The trickiest part of this meal was coordinating things such that the noodles got done cooking at relatively the same time as the rest of the dish. Luckily my dad, the resident cook, was there the whole time and able to use his experience to help me with that. The chicken also didn't want to cooperate and wasn't thawed by the time I had planed on starting to cook. All I was able to do at that point was chop my onions and measure the other ingredients out so I was able to hit the ground running when it finally did thaw.

All in all the meal was well received. I feel like I had a critique of it at the time, but it now eludes me. However, this was the second meal during which I failed to serve a vegetable of some sort. The first meal I completely forgot about it and this time I decided I'd do salads only to find out at the very last moment that we didn't really have lettuce. Next time I cook I plan on figuring out my greens well in advance to prevent such a problem from reoccurring.

Later that night I saw my dad eating some ice cream which gave me a craving for a chocolate shake. After poking around the internet for a bit I found a recipe I liked and, thinking we had chocolate syrup, went to work. As it turned out, we did not have chocolate syrup; not even for baking. What I found we did still have, however, was baking cocoa. Both parents said it wouldn't work, that it was too bitter, something I was well aware of. Being well aware of its bitter nature, I figured that the sweetness in the ice cream would be able to balance the flavors and I proceeded by substituting equal parts cocoa for the syrup. The end result was quite delicious tasting like a dark chocolate shake. I would recommend it to anyone who likes dark chocolate.

Now that I'm all caught up I'm off to do more cooking. This time with my new toy, an ice cream maker. I'm guessing that new and interesting flavors of ice cream will make a semi-regular appearance on this blog.