I have never made black sesame ice cream or any ice cream for that matter, but I really enjoyed this video about how one can make black sesame ice cream at home.
I love the flavor of black sesame, and I do have plenty of that black sesame powder left from my last trip to Indiana. I also have fresh cream and all of the equipment described here. What I especially find charming in the video is the two methods described for making the ice cream without an ice cream maker, using simple things you already have in the kitchen.
I will be posting more on this after I try to follow the recipe. Wish me luck!
This time when I visited my mother in Indiana, I got a new container of 100% pure black sesame seed powder at the local Chinese grocery store. I was used to getting black sesame porridge in small pouches, already mixed with sugar. I remember it fondly from my days in Taiwan when I first discovered Sesame Seeds and Joy. A very important character in my novel, Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way, is even called Mr. Sesame or 芝麻老師.
The pure black sesame powder with sugar added on top
I asked the woman at the grocery store for the black sesame porridge in pouches, but she said: "This is better. This is pure ground sesame -- nothing else." Well, she didn't have it in any other form, so I bought it.
Now, many people add either rice or flour along with sugar to their black sesame seed powder to make porridge, but this time around I contented myself with just adding boiling water and sugar. The powdered black sesame seeds contain a lot of very healthful fat.
The idea of adding too many extra carbs besides the sugar to sweeten it did not appeal to me. So I kept it simple.
Bow loves sesame seed porridge, But this time I made it a bit watery, so it was more like a drink, and that's how Bow treated it.
Whether you drink it or eat it, black sesame porridge is always good.
Bow's friend has been bringing him Pickle Ice, and he has been enjoying this treat very much. It's delicious!
But many people may not know that there could be health benefits to enjoying this salty treat. Pickle Ice consists of frozen pickle juice. And pickle juice is made of water, salt and vinegar. There are no calories in it at all.
Sodium is good for hydration, so having some Pickle Ice on a hot day is much better than a sugary popsicle. But there's also another surprise benefit I had never heard of before I researched the topic.
There is said to be an antiglycemic effect to ingesting pickle juice before mealtime. As I understand it, that is the vinegar at work. I am not sure as to the validity of this health claim, but if you look at the second reference I have listed below, you can read the abstract by the authors from Arizona State University and perhaps research it yourself.
You can buy the Pickle Ice treats at your local grocery store, or you can make your own in an ice cube tray by using leftover pickle juice.
It tasted quite a lot like cherry pie, although it wasn't. The dough was very rich, but not sweet at all, and all the sweetness came from the cherry jam.
Ingredients
a jar of cherry jam, 10 oz.
2 cups all purpose flour
2 1/2 tsp of baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 cup shortening
1 tbsp melted butter
3/4 cup whipping cream
I mixed together all the ingredients except the cherry jam to make the dough, and then I used a little over half of the dough for the bottom of the baking tin and and a little less than half for the top. I spread the jam evenly over the bottom layer of dough and covered it with the top layer. Then I baked it at 375 degrees for about twenty-five minutes.
Bow really enjoyed his piece!
He liked it so much that he licked the fork.
This is something that you can make at short notice from ingredients found at home, and of course there are many different variations possible, such as a different flavor of jam, and non-dairy substitutes for butter and cream, for those who cannot tolerate dairy.
My mother has been making excellent homemade yogurt for decades now, but I never really took the time to observe her when she did it, so I myself had no idea what to do. The day after Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how she does it. She very graciously agreed to show me.
Boiling milk
(If you want to avoid a crust forming, stir constantly.)
Ingredients:
milk, plain yogurt for starter
Instructions.
My mother pours the milk into the bowl containing yogurt starter
1. Take milk, of whatever quantity you choose, and boil it. 2, Allow the milk to cool back down to room temperature. 3. If there is a crust formed, remove it. 4. Add one teaspoon of plain store bought yogurt for every cup of milk you boiled. This will be your yogurt starter, as it contains a live culture. 5. Stir the yogurt tablespoons into the milk until it is all as homogeneous as possible. 6. Pour the mixture into glass cups of individual serving size. 7. Place in a warm spot for eight hours. (For us, the warm place was the oven, periodically warmed just a little, but not enough to actually bake anything. But in the summer you could achieve the same result by placing the cups in a hot car parked outside.) 8. Chill the yogurt in the refrigerator before serving.
The finished product
This kind of yogurt is called לבן (leben) in Hebrew. It is not sweet at all and has a nice, slightly tart taste.
Of course, you could add fresh fruit for a very special dessert. But we like it plain.
Let your family taste the yogurt and see what they think!
One of the things that we do in order to socialize a chimpanzee in an ape language experiment is that we have regular family meals together. We used to do that while all of us were seated at the big dining table, the children and the adults, the humans and the chimp. But back then I had interns who watched Bow while I cooked, and we were able to engage in elaborate rituals, such as games to see who would finish their vegetables first. We don't do it quite that way anymore, because Bow is confined to the pens, both the little ones are now teens, and there are no interns to watch Bow while I cook.
Other families used to have regular family meals together that now do not, too. I hear there is a national crisis.
Eating together has become a luxury of the high bourgeoisie that is unavailbe to lesser burghers, according to the above linked article from The Atlantic.
In America, it seems snobbish to take time to eat good food with one’s family. The Norman Rockwell portrait of the family around the dinner table now seems less middle-class and more haute bourgeois, as many families can’t afford to have one parent stay home from work, spending his or her day cleaning and cooking a roast and side of potatoes for the spouse and kids. Most parents don’t have time to cook, many don’t even know how, and the idea that one should spend extra money and time picking up produce at the supermarket rather than grabbing a bucket of Chinese take-out can seem unfeasible, unnecessary, and slightly pretentious. It’s understandable to want to save time and money. It’s the same reason that small shops go out of business once Walmart moves into town; but in this case it is not the shop owner who suffers, it is the consumer of unhealthy and rushed meals.
I never gave up on the family meals, even when we had to move into the pens. At first, I relied greatly on baked chicken, of the Cornish hen variety, because there was virtually no prep time. Sweet potatoes and the hen went into the oven at three and were served promptly at five. It was homemade, it required no actual prep work, and it meant we had our home-cooked meal.
But certain very vocal members of the household complained about the monotony of the thing, so I had to branch out. One of my current standby meals is the pork and onion and potato in a skillet dish. I manage it with very low prep time, because the oil heats while I chop the onion. Then the onion fries while I chop the potatoes. Then the potatoes and onions are cooking while I chop the pork chops into smaller bits. Then I add lemon juice, so that the final part of the cooking includes a bit of steaming.
I learned about adding water to food frying in a skillet to create a steam effect from my college friend Revathi a long time ago. This use of the lemon juice is about the same, only it adds flavor, too.
Because the vegetables take longer to cook, I let them cook first, and I spend absolutely no time on preparing something when something else is not cooking. Therefore, to my way of thinking, there is no prep time involved with this dish. There is just the time that it takes to cook. And because everything is chopped into smaller morsels, it cooks faster. So the whole thing takes about fifteen minutes from start to finish.
Ingredients to serve two at lunch: One large onion, two small potatoes and two breakfast pork chops, lemon juice.
Directions: Heat oil while chopping onion. Chop potatoes while frying onion bits. Add potato slices to fry mix, while chopping pork chops. Add chopped pork to the mix and keep frying. Add lemon juice and keep cooking till pork bits look done. (About fifteen minutes.)
The result is a meal that Bow gets to watch me make from the interior of the pens, and that he is glad to eat in my company, in a ceremony of communal living. It is part of the way that he has been socialized that meals are a time of togetherness. I don't want Bow to ever end up in a place where food is simply thrown at him and he is expected to eat it like an animal. That's not how Bow was brought up, and whatever happens to him in life, I want him to remember our family dinners and to keep up the tradition with his own family, once he starts one.
This is ultimately the hope of every parent: that something will stick, not because of anything we have said, but because of the example that we have shown them and the fellowship that we have shared.
1. Take milk, of whatever quantity you choose, and boil it.
