Many of my posts are about adventures in ingredients and cooking. This post is not adventurous at all.
I've mentioned that I live in Ithaca, but visit Toronto frequently. I may not have made the frequency of these visits clear, but some already know that I'm usually in Ithaca for most weekdays and about one weekend per month. Most of the rest of the weekends I spend in Toronto, which is great for recharging, exploring and hanging out with friends there.
Weekends in Ithaca are scarce and have become special. They're an opportunity to see my friends here, which is great; but also a time for some quiet and not spending hours in the car. And I usually try to spend lots of my quiet time on cooking and food prep. This past weekend was no exception, so I thought I'd tell you about the things I made.
Saturday I had plans to watch football with friends and promised to bring dessert. I'd been craving ginger ice cream. When steeped with fresh ginger it has a wonderful burn that is tempered by the richness of the custard. I was definitely planning to make that. Wegman's also taunted me with Meyer lemons that I couldn't resist, though. So I picked up a bag and made some sherbet as well. I took all of the ice cream to my friends, but saved some sherbet for myself. Recipes for both of these came from David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop, which I've said before is a fabulous ice cream book.
While the ice cream was steeping , I also threw together some peanut butter cookie dough. I like to have cookies on hand to take to work for dessert with lunch, and had another party on Saturday night to which I'd promised to bring baked goods. I had actually never made peanut butter cookies, so this seemed like as good an opportunity as any. I used the recipe from the Flour book; they're quite simple: cream butter and sugar for a long time, add eggs, add peanut butter, add flour. Rest dough. Bake. Tastiness.
I also have a habit of making foods for myself for lunch and dinner a week at a time. Most weeks lunch is just assembling ingredients for sandwiches. This week I had seen a recipe in Bon Appetit for a roasted carrot and beet salad with feta and parsley in a cumin/lemon vinaigrette. It sounded delicious, but the presentation was a little over the top for my tastes (it had everything nearly whole and artfully arranged on a platter). I wanted something I could eat out of tupperware with a plastic fork. So I chopped everything a bit smaller prior to roasting. And I also added the beet greens to the roasting pan because it seemed a shame to throw them away. And had some walnuts so I tossed those in too.
For the week's dinners, I made soup. This will come as a shock to some of you, as I have historically not been a soup eater. I still am not a broth-y soup fan, but love purees of various sorts. In this case, I made a fennel-leek soup; starting with a stock from fennel, leek greens and potatoes, combined with more fennel, sauteed with more leeks, carrots, potatoes, spinach, dill and lemon. I've been eating it with some nice bread and fennel fronds.
In addition to hanging out with friends and a great walk on Sunday afternoon, that was my weekend.
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