Hmmm... Well, regardless of what the precise dates are for salad celebrations, salads are always a welcome and refreshing choice for a meal in the heavy heat of summer. So here's the recipe I use when I make my favorite pasta salad. Enjoy!
Today happens to be my birthday. The night before last, my wife and I were talking about what she would like to get me as part of the celebration this week, something in addition to other things that were already planned. I suggested getting a snack food. She asked for a list of some of my favorite fun snack foods, things I don't usually get or that I at least regulate so that I don't eat too much junk food. So we started making a list, first a couple items, then added a few more, and so on, so that she could choose something for me.
She texted me from work yesterday saying that she had something for me. I assumed it was going to be a single item from the list. Well, she got 14 items. You can see them all in the picture above, except for the chocolate milk which was in the fridge and I forgot to pull it out to include in the picture.
Now, her taking the time to get all these items and to surprise me with the number of different fun snack foods is worth a blog post all by itself. But there's also this to think about: fun snack foods, whether made fresh or bought at the store as preprocessed items, or even ultra-processed, well, these items are certainly not the most healthy for us, but they are definitely very very fun.
Food is something we need to eat in order to survive. And why not have a little fun with it at the same time. There is certainly something to be said for eating extremely healthy, but I'm for moderation in all things. Eating healthy is important. But sometimes the joy that comes from eating "fun" is just as important.
Thanks to my wife for her wonderful and unexpected massive contribution to my birthday celebration. And I hope all of you have someone who will spoil you in the same way once in a while.
Eat for fun when you can. It's worth it.
Today is National Ice Cream Day! Now, for me, it's not one of the greatest food days of the year because in actuality I celebrate it all year long, not just a single day. As many of my readers, friends and family know, ice cream is far and away the most favorite food of all for me.
I enjoy especially making mint chocolate ice cream, French vanilla, triple chocolate, roasted strawberry, and even something a bit more unusual like lavender with blueberry swirl.
All my ice creams are made beginning with a custard base. This means I heat up cream and sugar and eggs until just the right temperature. Then other flavor components go in. And the whole batch is chilled overnight before it's frozen in my trusty Cuisinart ice cream freezer. This freezer uses canisters that must be frozen before use. I keep 5 canisters ready in my freezer at all times. This is because sometimes I like to make lots and lots all at once. After each batch of ice cream is completed and packed in containers, the canisters must be cleaned and then refrozen. So 5 is a good number to have in my freezer. They take up a lot of space, but it's worth it.
I'm always thinking of new flavors I want to try. A couple times in the past, I have made banana with caramelized white chocolate. It's very very good. But the busy-ness of my schedule has kept me from doing the final tweaks I customarily do with new foods to be added to my menu. And so it hasn't happened yet for this flavor. But it will eventually. And in addition, there are many other flavors I want to experiment with.
I've seen some pretty unusual flavors, such as beet ice cream....hmmm. I've never tried some of these offbeat flavors, and I'm not sure it's worth it to satisfy my curiosity to buy a whole cone or sundae made of this kind of flavor which I would probably have to do at a high price since this kind of flavor is usually only made by trendy high-priced small ice cream shops. Perhaps sometime I will, but it's hard to see me doing it for such an unusual flavor for which I have an instinctive doubt.
In any event, enjoy the day, eat some ice cream, and keep doing it regularly. I have to exercise considerable restraint to not eat it every day. If it were healthy to do so, I'd definitely do it.
Today, July 14, is National Mac and Cheese Day! Yesterday my wife and I tried a quaint country café in a small town outside of the Kansas City metropolitan area. The meal included a side of mac and cheese. It was OK, to be blunt, that's all it was. But it was still a nice comfort food to eat. Most of the time in restaurants, at least in my opinion, the mac and cheese is only OK. It's often too liquidy, or the cheese flavor is too bland, or the pasta is not tender enough.
I'm a big fan of multiple cheeses in mac and cheese to give it lots of flavor, and a little pepper and dried mustard as well as a few other things; the pasta should be very tender; and too liquidy just isn't fun. There should be a minimum level of viscosity to the cheese sauce.
The really hard thing about making good mac and cheese is whether or not it can be reheated and still be more than satisfactory. I'm have three different mac and cheese recipes in my repertoire. However, I only use one for orders on the website. That's because the other two recipes, while excellent in all ways, only work when they are fresh. Sometimes when sitting and chilling overnight, especially if the sauce is too liquidy, the pasta absorbs a lot of the moisture. Sometimes the sauce simply can't take being reheated in a way that leaves the dish tasting at least close to the same level of excellence as when it's fresh. Sometimes, especially with sub-par sauces, the sauce and cheese break down, separate, become yuchchchh!
So even though I have three recipes which I love and which have different flavors due to the types of cheeses in combination, two of them are only made for occasions when they will be eaten immediately. The third one, after much testing when I was developing it, has proven itself to be very very good even after reheating. It's even better when fresh, as almost all foods are. But it's the one that can take reheating and still prompt an enthusiastic response from kids and adults and which can also satisfy my obsessive desire to make high quality, highly delicious food.
Never underestimate the significance of reheatability in foods. Test them for it. Tweak them. Do everything you can do in order to prove that they are reheatable on a consistent basis. Then you never need to worry about the quality when eating them on Day 2 or 3 or 4.
I have multiple types of chocolate chip cookies in my repertoire. One of the most popular ones is a cookie that uses 3 different types of chocolate and is made with cake flour and bread flour. In the process of experimenting with this cookie over time, I discovered something interesting about the timing of shaping the dough.
When I finish mixing the dough, I immediately place it in a plastic wrap-lined bowl. It will sit in the fridge and chill for at least 24 hours. And when it comes out, it looks like this:
It is one massive chilled ball of dough which must then be cut. I put on knife-resistant gloves to ensure that trying to cut a very dense block of dough with a very sharp knife doesn't result in some very bad cuts.
Once this gigantic dough ball is cut, then it is finally shaped into cookie dough balls that are ready for the oven.
