Apple Pie Gelato with Caramel Stracciatella

We don’t drink a lot of juice at my house, but I couldn’t resist the amazing apple cider from Suprima Farms at the Lunenburg Farmers’ Market this week. As long as we were having a treat, I decided to go whole hog. And ended up with this:

Ingredients

2 ½ cups apple cider

1 teaspoon vanilla

4 cinnamon sticks

2 cups heavy cream

½ cup milk

6 egg yolks

½ cup white sugar

½ cup caramel sauce (store bought or homemade—it’s easy! Try this recipe).

Directions

Heat apple cider in a saucepan over high heat. Reduce the cider to 3/4 -1 cup, stirring frequently. Remove from heat, add vanilla, stir, and set aside.

Place the cinnamon sticks in a closed plastic bag and smash to shards with a hammer. Combine cinnamon shards with heavy cream a in a saucepan. Bring mixture to a simmer over medium low heat and simmer, stirring frequently, for ten minutes. Remove pan from heat, cover, and set aside to steep for one hour.

After an hour, strain shards out of the cream. Return strained cream to a clean pan. Whisk in yolks and sugar. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently and scraping the bottom of the pan, until custard thickens, about ten minutes.

Remove custard from heat and whisk to combine with milk and reduced apple cider. Refrigerate mixture overnight, then process in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Just before removing from machine, pour caramel sauce into the machine in a slow stream to form a ribbon. Remove to a container and freeze until hard, 2-3 hours.

This one passes the self-control test—as in, you won’t have any, so proceed with caution. Enjoy!

Seed Starter

...is it already that time again? The garden has turned from slushy to boggy, the birds are singing, and little pink nubs of rhubarb are sticking their heads obstinately from the half-frozen soil. So yep, we're starting seeds.

I owe a great debt of thanks to the fine folks at Hope Seeds, Annapolis Seeds, and Broadfork Farm for all the excellent heritage plants we're putting in the ground this year. Our gardens will include raspberry canes, grape vines, two varietals of kale, rhubarb, strawberries, rainbow chard, rutabaga, corn, pumpkins and two other winter squash, zucchini, cauliflower, 5-7 varietals of tomato (we'll see what comes back from last year), parsley, dill, cilantro, lavender, basil, mint, chives, rosemary, two varietals of sweet pepper, three varietals of hot pepper, and 200 heads of garlic.

Jeez louise, it's starting to sound less like a garden and more like a farm! Now if only we could keep chickens in the town of Lunenburg...

The Real Food Diet

One of the (many) reasons I became a local food advocate has to do with body weight. Like many of us, I have struggled with weight issues since I was a teenager. In the decades since then I have had periods of being slender and periods of being heavy. The slender times, however, have never been healthy ones--I lost weight eating heavily processed "diet" meals and smoking cigarettes. Whenever I returned to eating regularly I put weight back on, and when I quit smoking I put a lot of weight on. I have only lost weight sustainably--in other words, been able to lose weight and keep it off without extreme effort--by eating whole, organic, local, fresh foods, the kinds I blog about here and for South Shore Now.


It seems evident that human beings have an instinctual drive to eat not just to satiate hunger, but to meet our nutritional needs. Most nutrients and micronutrients (not all of which we even yet understand) are refined out of the foods featured in a Standard North American Diet. Eating low quality food while trying to lose weight is like trying to pick up a tree limb with tweezers--the tool just isn't up to the job. When you change your body, you need extra energy to effect the change, not less!

I still struggle with my weight, and it's higher than I'd like. What I can tell you, though, is that I now easily maintain a weight far below my all-time high, thanks to my focus on real foods. I also have far more energy, better health, and happier moods than I did during my cigarette smoking, Lean Cuisine eating, size 8 days. It's a trade-off I'm happy to take.

Winter Dishes

I've been working on food styling for my most recent project... here's a bit of what I came up with this weekend.

Slacker Update

This blog has been quiet lately... mostly because I've been busy promoting the Lunenburg Farmers' Market on facebook and keeping a local foods blog for the newspaper--visit it here! I'm also working on a book proposal about eating local in Nova Scotia to pitch at Word on the Street next month, so I'll be back soon with updates about that. Cross your fingers for me!

Extra Local Yum

Have I mentioned recently how much I love farmers' markets? There's just nothing that can compare with actually getting to know the people who produce your food. I recently began facebook groups for both markets in Lunenburg (summer and winter) and will be writing producer profiles for them soon. I'll be sharing them here, but in the meantime, enjoy this little piece of Canadiana:

Farmers make this country great!

Scape it Up

It's garlic scape season, and most folks here on the South Shore are eating them left, right, and centre before they turn tough on the stalk. Since we're growing all our own garlic for the year we have a loooooooot of scapes... I decided to come up with a way to save them for a rainy day. Or a snowy day. Or, in the case of this particular recipe, a snotty, sniffly, need-food-as-medicine day.

Scape and Ginger Bisque

Ingredients
2 cups garlic scapes, snipped into half-inch pieces
2 cups chicken stock (I used a homemade stock that was already made with ginger, but plain old stock from the can or box works just fine. For you local peeps, I recommend the convenient-yet-fresh stock made and sold at The Biscuit Eater.)
1/2 cup pieces of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped into rough chunks
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions
Combine scapes, stock, and ginger in a stock pot. Heat on medium to a simmer, and simmer until scapes soften and just begin to turn drab green, about 20 minutes. Turn off heat and remove ginger chunks. Puree with an immersion blender (If you don't have an immersion blender--buy one! They're fabulous, save work and dishes, and cost about $15. OR simply pour into a stand blender, puree, and return to pot.) Salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy immediately, or freeze until so moved by your palate.