Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I've been making matzo ball soup by making the matzo balls, putting them aside, and then putting them into chicken broth with leftover cooked chicken, cooked carrots, celery, and spices.

Notes: simmer the carrots in chicken broth, in a covered saucepan, for an hour or so. A bit of ginger powder seemed to improve this. (You can cook carrots by microwaving them, but the broth adds flavor. If I wanted to make glazed carrots, I might use the microwave.)

Cutting up a few scallions and adding the green bits, and maybe some of the white bits, to the bowls of soup after serving is a good idea. Yesterday, the white parts of the scallions went into the broth, because onion is good in chicken soup.

Spices: powdered ginger, powdered shallot (Penzey's), garlic powder (I used the Penzey's "toasted granulated garlic." Throwing in a piece of ginger root also works, but fish it out of the soup before serving.

The chicken broth was a mix of "Pacific Foods" brand boxed broth -- this is the one that tastes good and contains neither dairy nor mushroom powder -- and chicken-flavored "Better than Boullion." If dairy is a problem, don't get the "premium" better than boullion, because it contains whey. The one we want is the "organic" chicken soup base.

[cattitude can't have mushrooms, and adrian_turtle has to avoid dairy. I'm almost always cooking for one if not both of them as well as myself.]

My current theory on the ice cream maker is that I want to make flavors that I can't just go to the supermarket and get from Ben and Jerry's or Haagen Daz. That's why my first batch was cinnamon vanilla, not just vanilla.

Today's was lemon. The ice cream maker's recipe booklet only had lemon sorbet, and I wanted ice cream, and cattitude had talked about fond childhood memories of lemon ice cream, so I googled. The recipe I found was remarkably simple, five ingredients, though I took it up to six by adding a little bit of grated lemon rind before folding in the whipped cream.

We like it a lot. So does julian_tiger, who also got a bit of the whipped cream that I scraped off the bowl for him.

For a good batch of chocolate ice cream, we'll need to select our chocolate carefully; Cattitude's theory, which seems plausible, is that there was wax in the Ghirardelli chocolate chips he melted for last weekend's batch, and that this was why the ice cream came out gritty. (He checked closely before we discarded the remainder of that batch, and the small gritty bits were white, not dark brown.) I was blithely thinking "well, the Guittard chips I have for baking ought to be safe," because I read the label, but I don't know whether they're required to mention it on the ingredients list if they use wax in chocolates. The large hunk of chocolate I bought for this purpose at Sahadi and didn't mention to Cattitude is from their shelf of "we cut up huge pieces of dark chocolate," so labeled only with weight, not a list of ingredients or even a manufacturer.

(My theory is "flavors I can't just go out and buy," but I would like a good home-made chocolate as well, and I think Cattitude wants to try again because the first time didn't come out right.)

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The recipe, in case the link fails:

1 Cup granulated sugar
1 Cup whole milk
1/3 Cup fresh lemon juice (about 1 1/2 lemons)
1 Cup whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Fresh mint leaves, lemon slices for garnish

Mix sugar, milk and lemon juice. Whip cream until stiff. Fold cream into milk mixture. [added October 2006]