I owe you an apology. I've completely botched the subject of this week's post. Total culinary failure. It was bound to happen, I suppose. Last year, at about this time I derided the onslaught of Christmas-themed recipes which appear in cooking rags, both in print and online. Particularly, I took aim at the endless eggnog recipes which crop up, weed-like, during the holiday season. I made some passing remark about posting about this, North American's favorite festive drink, only if I ran out of subject matter. While I have not yet run out of things to say, I did decide to post about eggnog this year, with a bit of a twist. In what hoped would be a continuation of the theme of last week's post, I wanted to show how cold weather Christmas traditions can be adapted to warm weather climates. Namely, I wanted to chuck eggnog into my ice cream churn and make a frozen treat out of my favorite holiday drink. It was a disaster.
Fail!
Unstoppable Roast
It's December and it's hot. No surprise really, as it is summer here in the southern hemisphere. Still, seven-and-a-bit-years post-migration, it's often a challenge to equate warmth with the months that I've always associated with the frigid depths of hell that were the Wyoming winters of my youth. While a sweltering January is something I can (just), after years of practice, comprehend, December, in my mind, is still all gloves and snow and fires and dinners in the dark after the sun sets at 4 p.m.. This inability to shake past associations, no doubt, has much to do with the celebration of Christmas. I can't yet disentwine the holiday from the memories and therefore find myself thinking of cozy nights and icicles when what really awaits me are heat waves and mosquitoes. It seems, however, that I am not alone, as decorations of snowmen and frosted trees appear on countless green suburban Australian lawns.
It's What's On the Inside
Chefs love to stuff things. We are forever looking for new cavities which we might fill. Birds, for example, beg to be stuffed. And stuff we do, with all manner of foods: bread and rice and nuts and meat and fats and herbs and veggies and fruit. Chicken with lemons, quail with veal sausage, turkey with bread and butter. The same goes for all meats, really. I love to roll up a bit of fennel in a pork belly and slow roast it, or to pack tapenade into a boned lamb leg. While the primary objective of stuffing meats is to add flavor, it also has the secondary outcome of increasing the cooking time (also increasing flavor) while keeping the meat moist.
Obsession Flavor
Summer Down Under officially started on the first of December. It has yet to really feel like summer here in Sydney (we've had quite a bit of rain), but a trip to the local fruit market is enough to convince. Summer fruits are in season, and, as the weeks roll by and they become more abundant, the prices are falling. I've already eaten my body weight in mangoes (something I traditionally do several times over each summer). The peaches have only recently really come into their own, though white peaches, my favorite, are not yet very good. So far the cherries have been prohibitively expensive, as one would expect; it is, after all, only the beginning of the season. However, I couldn't pass up $6/k cherries, less than a third of the going rate, when I saw them the other day. Sure, they are on sale because of their tiny size. These little cherries have nothing on the plump blood-juice-filled monsters I'll be eating by Christmas, but they do taste good, and I've been dying to try out this cherry ice cream recipe I've been writing in my head for the past eight months or so.
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