Posts tagged ‘stand mixer’

Time flies when you’re having fun and Good. Food. Stories. is officially one year old. (GFS, like me, is a Leo.)

This all got started with a simple desire to share our love for food. Casey was regularly answering emails from friends requesting restaurant recommendations and all sorts of cooking advice. I was always snooping around looking for unusual places to eat and an outlet for my never ceasing curiosity. A few emails were bounced back and forth, we picked a name, bought a domain and our chronicle of delicious conversations began.
>> More of Good. Food. Stories.’ greatest hits after the jump. >>

Recently Dan and I were perusing the freezer aisles during one of our frequent Target visits (yes, we go to Target more than is probably healthy—it’s a bonding experience) when he started soliloquizing about the fatal flaw in Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream. It would be his favorite flavor, apparently, if only the chocolate ice cream were switched out for vanilla. “Oh, I can do that,” I said, and immediately wanted to pull those words right back into my mouth.

While I don’t advocate that a sane person undertake the task of making homemade fudge, caramel sauce, marshmallow fluff, and vanilla ice cream to create your husband’s dream ice cream flavor, one of those components is completely do-able in less time than it takes to try on a Liberty of London dress in one of those crazy Target particleboard dressing rooms.

May I present you with my recipe for the world’s easiest homemade marshmallow fluff. Use it for homemade fluffernutters, fold it into your vanilla ice cream along with some toasted coconut for a pseudo-macaroon sensation, spread it on chocolate bars and graham crackers and go to town with a kitchen torch.

Or, you know, go whole hog and make homemade Phish Food ice cream. It’s in the freezer right now, waiting for Dan’s verdict. I’ll keep you posted.
>> Read on for the marshmallow fluff recipe, ready in 15 minutes. >>

I graduated college in 1999, but didn’t get my first “real” job, the kind with benefits, until January of 2000. Essentially, I’ve lived my entire “grown-up life” in the aughts and as I ponder the jobs I’ve had, all the traveling I did, friends and lovers come and gone, and a world with many sharp shifts, I also think about what I was eating. It has been both a hungry and fulfilling decade.

My friend C.C. and I like to refer to the very early aughts as “The Sex and the City” era. We were both working and playing hard at a dot com way downtown, accruing stock options in lieu of 401ks, and drinking a lot of cocktails. Though I was always a dirty martini girl, the drink du jour was the Cosmo. Then came apple martinis, espresso martinis, a resurgence of Manhattans, and pomegranate martinis. With our 10-dollar drinks, we also scarfed down huge amounts of sushi. Sushi was everywhere, even the grocery store, and I was able to convince my Dad, a meat-and-baked-ziti kind of guy, to try a tuna avocado roll. Dudes in banker blue button-down shirts were eating steak like it was going out of style. Any man who hadn’t sunk his incisors into a wedge of Kobe beef hadn’t yet really arrived.

The stock market had a mini-crash, the dot coms started folding, and I lost my job. I stopped swilling martinis and started doing a lot of daytime reading on Cedar Hill in Central Park. One book passed on to me was The Botany of Desire. “Have you ever heard of Michael Pollan? He writes for the Times,” asked my friend Christina, whose cooking prowess increased as the relationship with her boyfriend grew more serious. “I never thought I would be interested in botany, but this guy really opens your eyes.”

>> Read on for details on the rest of the decade in food >>

Apparently every woman that was once a Girl Scout remembers an activity where she put cream in a glass jar and vigorously shook it until it turned into butter. Kelly green never being my color, I wasn’t a Girl Scout, nor did I know that making butter was such a simple process. I assumed you needed a churn, a bonnet, perhaps a 19th century farmhouse. How wonderful to learn that homemade butter can be made in a stand mixer!

For those of you who remember my stand mixer fire, I just received a new one in the mail after Kitchen Aid confirmed that, yes, the previous one was defective. At this point, I’ve made pizza dough by hand a couple of times, so I wanted the inaugural stir to be something I would never do sans mixer.

Toss 2 cups of room temperature heavy cream into the bowl and start mixing it on 4 or 5. (I used organic cream from Ronnybrook Farm in the Hudson Valley.) Within 4 or 5 minutes, the cream will start to solidify and you should lower the mixing speed to 2 or 3. Give it another 2 minutes and your cream will start turning yellow. Butter!!

Once the butter is yellow and solidified, the buttermilk will start to separate. Buttermilk is a delicious sounding word, but it’s really just the grey butter juice that you’re going to have to knead out, lest your butter go rancid quickly. Transfer your butter to a colander in the sink and use your hands to squeeze it until all the buttermilk has been pressed out. Certainly, you should save it if you have a recipe on hand that calls for buttermilk, but I was a bit grossed out and let mine run down the drain. In the end, you’ll have at least one full cup of butter!

I decided to make a bagna cauda butter (anchovy and garlic) to bring to my family’s Neapolitan Christmas Eve seafood dinner. I spread the butter into ramekins, covered the top with a layer of sea salt, and cut little circles of parchment paper to seal them.  If you are in need of a last minute gift idea, consider making butter and using some of these other recipes for compound butters.

Remember the Ask Casey post about shelling out for a stand mixer? Well, that question was asked by me. For a long time now, I’ve been feeling the pressure to buy one, but have resisted due to sticker shock. It’s hard to justify 300 sheckles. Plus, I’m not a baker. I have limited cravings for sweets and following precise directions makes my brain hurt.

Yet, because I continued to feel a nagging pull, I asked Casey, who persuaded me to bite the KitchenAid bullet. I started getting all Martha, fantasizing about the smell of fresh bread in my apartment and the festive holiday cookies I would make. I told my mom that I wanted the pasta attachment for Christmas.  Ah, heck who am I kidding? It was the colors that won me over! Don’t these beasts look like they were painted with nail polish? I’m drawn to Volkswagens for the same reason.

I did a lot of homework and kept my eyes on all the sales. Finally, Macy’s had a Veteran’s Day sale that I couldn’t resist. The KitchenAid stand mixer was on sale for $189! The downside was that this price was for the Classic which is plain white.  The mint green one that I was drooling over was a whopping $100 more! I wiped my chin and went for the Classic. It felt like the most grown-up purchase I had made since buying my couch. I had done my research and clipped my coupons. I even got finger blisters from carrying this little workhorse a mere four blocks from the subway to my apartment.
>> Guess what happened next… >>