Yesterday, I arrived in Inverness, Florida. I’m here to visit my mother and Gary. One of the first things we’ll do, as soon as I’ve published this posting, is to head over to a nondescript strip mall on Highway 44 West where one of the most unique ice cream establishments in America is found: Lynn’s Ice Cream & Belgian Waffles.

During a previous trip to Inverness, I spent several hours with the owners, Lynn and Rudi Weber, they answering my many questions so that I could write something about them for this blog. It’s amazing what (more…)

It is with guilty pleasure that I write this: pleasure because it’s an ice cream fable; guilt because it has diverted my attention from Odette, a dear French lady with decades of cooking skills whom I’ve written about three times so far.* There are so many more Odette stories to tell and Odette recipes to share.

For the last couple of months, in a spare hour here and there, I have been slowly transcribing and translating what Odette said about her life in an audio interview I did with her this summer. I’m particularly keen to decipher what she says about living and eating in Nazi-occupied Paris when she was a young girl. She recounted a war-time food story (more…)

Compare and despair. That is what my friend John Camilleri said to me after I sized myself up this way: So and so is more successful than me, more confident than me, more charming, more fashionable. That exchange was had years ago, on a subway platform in New York, where we both lived at the time. Those three magic words still resonate.

In cooking, however, most everything that’s learn-able—techniques, flavor pairings—is done by direct comparison. In the kitchen, comparing isn’t despairing, it’s illuminating. Take mint and dark chocolate. When do you ever get a chance to fully appreciate why those two ingredients are a classic pairing? When you buy a peppermint patty, thin mints, or mint chocolate chip ice cream, the flavor components are (more…)

This custard-style ice cream is for devoted black walnut lovers, and wannabe lovers. It gives a double dose of the nut’s unique flavor: First, toasted nuts are ground into a flour and steeped in the cream and milk to impart their flavor, sight unseen; second, at the end of churning, finely chopped toasted black walnuts are mixed in for crunch and another layer of flavor. A few extra steps are involved in making this ice cream—like tempering the egg yolks and reducing the maple syrup—but the results are worth it. Ever since researching the inimitable black walnut for (more…)

On a beautiful early September day, following a late summer swim, my friend Kristina and I found ourselves in one of those classic general stores that are still to be found in Vermont, selling local handicrafts, artisanal cheeses,  hand-scooped cones, everyday necessities like scouring powder and laundry detergent, and one remaining apple pie, looking very handmade and beautiful. We would have that pie for dessert that evening. Why not make some ice cream to go with it, I suggested. My favorite flavor is vanilla (or even just sweet cream), but Kristina wanted something more exciting, something with things in it. She suggested rum raisin, a good idea for apple pie.

Kristina had just been telling me about a trip to India she had taken with her brother and sister-and-law, where every dessert she’d tried had cardamom in it, and not a little  bit, but a lot. She was sick of cardamom-flavored desserts. I like challenges. This was a perfect opportunity to create something with cardamom that she will like.   (more…)