Lavender Honey Ice Cream: Provence and Disney Feels

As you can see, the lavender theme of this food blog continues! I am excited to announce that my small 1 oz bag of lavender is now maybe only 1/4 full now! I'm even starting to get anxious that I'll run out soon, and then order MORE, and then we can continue this happy romance with lavender. It's mildly amusing that I love lavender-flavored desserts (and floral flavors in general) so much because most people I imagine associate florals with perfumes, and if there's one thing I hate unequivocally in this world, its an excess of perfumes. So instead of smelling them, I choose to eat them instead. But seriously, what is wrong with the smell of soap.

I wrote the subtitle for this post a while back, so I got really confused about why I was feeling Disney feels. But then, I started thinking about the gorgeous lavender fields in Provence, France and then inevitably that scene in Beauty and Beast where Belle is running through the grass fields belting out her dreams of adventure after avoiding the unflattering advances of Gaston came to mind. Which, based on my iTunes library/Youtube is from Belle (Reprise).

Gotta love reprises. Though, do they have dandelions in France? Probably. I don't have an excessive amount of that ~wanderlust~ that seemingly every middle to high income 20 year old has, but going to a lavender field would 100% make it on my travel list if I bothered to ever make one. Not that I'll have much time for backpacking trips from the next decade....#academiaorbust.

The great thing about this ice cream is that its a fairly simple flavor- honey and lavender, both of which are detectable and well-balanced in this ice cream (gosh, doesn't that sound SO pretentious? well-balanced). You could probably be extra extra fancy and find an interesting tasting honey, and pair it with fresh farmers market lavender (or idk, take a jet to France if you're into that kind of thing) and have that extra effort actually come out in the flavor of the ice cream. A lot of times you can get away with using generics just because so many flavors are being mixed together in recipes. But I think the extra effort put into finding good ingredients would be worth it here. That being said, cheap honey and dried lavender makes for a great ice cream as well, as I and some tipsy medical students can attest to. I need to stop using ice cream as a crutch for social events.

Recipe via The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz, a book I seriously recommend, but you can also find the recipe reposted on other food blog sites, such as this one if you wanted to try before you buy or something.

Also, cool side note, but I'm basically internet famous! Jk, not actually, but a photo from my last post about Asian Glazed Drumsticks was successfully submitted to foodgawker! My battle with natural lighting has finally given me one small victory!

Sticky Chicken Drumsticks: Air Quotes Asian

As a kid, getting to tell people the real story behind fortune cookies was incredibly satisfying. And honestly, I still get amusement out of getting to remind people that Chinese American food is really not what people in China eat. Same goes for Chipotle and probably most of the ethnic food that we eat in the US. Which is really sad if you think about it, or read the wiki page about American Chinese food that give racism and the resulting inability to get any actual jobs as part of how American Chinese food was developed.

I mean, when I was a kid, it was a revelation anytime you learned that what your teachers/parents taught you about the world was only one version of the super complex and messy truth. And this was before iPhones, and wireless internet (what up dial-up!), and twitter, and tumblr to teach you that everything in this world is a conspiracy. Nowadays, most people know that fortune cookies are not Chinese, and that Chipotle is not Mexican, but doesn't it terrify you to think about how back in the day your small community was the main source of knowledge, rather than like the infinite internetz?! It scares me at least, because think what research would be without pubmed, and think where the hypochondriacs of the world would be without webmd. Which reminds me of this amazing (AND IMPROVISED) line from the now departed, but forever loved show that is Parks and Rec.

Getting back to Sticky Chicken Drumsticks, this was lovingly categorized as "Asian" from the blog where I found this recipe at. But it's literally the epitome of American Asian cuisine. Like homemaker, food blogger, small town American Asian. Chicken drumsticks, I *think* aren't really part of Asian cuisine? From my n=1 experience, I don't really remember ever eating chicken legs while visiting relatives in China (chicken feet on the other hand, yes). But Asia is literally a continent, and while China is huge, Asia is even larger and there may very well be people in actual Asia who eat chicken legs sans air quotes.

I literally googled "Sticky Chicken History" to see if I could find a wiki page about this dish, like the one for fortune cookies, but alas, goose eggs. This dish is, however, incredibly popular on pinterest, with the words "finger lickin' good," or "melt off the bone," frequently accompanying photos. While I do like "real" Chinese/Asian food, this doesn't exclude me or my family from enjoying things that are "Asian" either. For example, cream cheese wontons? I would happily eat those on a daily basis.

And if you should care to know, fortune cookies are not Chinese, but actually were invented in the early 20th century in San Francisco. So if anything, they're American fortune cookies.
Recipe via Farm Girl Gourmet

Green Tea Strawberry Cake: National Dry Cake Day

I was reading an article the other day via my twitter feed about the fact that we have a "Food/Animal/Normal Thing Everyone Does Day" for essentially every day of the year now and how it's particularly driven by social media. Oh! It was in the NYT I think, because the very first 2 sentences were about some 13 year old from like Palo Alto looking forward to National Watermelon Day so she could post a picture that she took weeks ago of herself eating watermelon. This is what triggered my memory of the NYT because 1) Lol California is so far away from NY and 2) Lol this article is about a 13 year old from a fairly affluent part of the US.

Anyways, the article just spends a very long time talking about how people feel that its weird to just post a "random picture" of themselves unless they can caption it to tie-in with a a national event/day. My second favorite part of that article was when they described this 13 year old's watermelon picture, particularly emphasizing just how boring and uninspiring the picture was. As a quote below (clearly I've become so invested into this article that I of course looked it up and will now link it here):

Ms. Khan does not “have a special thing about watermelons,” and the picture of her eating one was not a momentous event. It was a hot day in June. She and a friend bought a watermelon. Someone took a picture.

Isn't that just magical? To be fair, you probably could go off the deep end here and make a reasonable point about how these random national holidays are favored because they make your watermelon day part of a greater community of watermelon days and obviously at our core, we're social creatures that like to feel that we belong.

I bring up this entirely forgettable article about how social media works because I'm a bit culpable to it myself. When I have no idea what to talk about for a post (ie here), my train of thought usually goes along the lines of "what season is it, how can green tea and or strawberries be relevant to the fact I'm horribly sunburnt and musing about the fact I just bought a sun cookie cutter because I could make it into an astrocyte cookie too." And darn, green tea and strawberries have nothing to do with any of those things! Arg! If only there was a national green tea strawberry cake that looks great but is actually too dry day.

Unfortunately there is not a day (yet) for such a holiday, so you'll have to just savor these relatively pretty pictures without a "btw it's green tea and strawberry cake day!" caption. As I alluded to earlier, this cake didn't actually turn out as great as I wanted it to due to the fact I continue to suck at baking cakes. I probably could have soaked the cake in a bit more simple syrup to counter the dry factor, and there was likely some fishiness going on with my egg whites folding and integrity. But the color contrasts between the red, white, and green are appealing regardless. So you know, if you suck at baking cakes like I do, just put this out as decoration, but bring out like ice cream when you need to actually serve people dessert.
Recipe from La Fuji Mama, with an added 1 tbsp of matcha/green tea powder to the dry ingredients.

Roasted Strawberry Buttermilk Sherbet: Sweet and Sour Beginnings

I think there's an inverse relationship between me stating on my blog "I promise to blog more consistently!" and me actually blogging consistently. I got into a major baking kick right in early June. And then I went on vacation and hiked some rocks. And then I realized how awful taking pictures of real food is. And then I moved to San Diego. And now we are here.

I probably have been putting off writing a new post because I don't know what to write. Maybe I was hoping that after a few weeks in San Diego doing things I would have things to write about? But unfortunately, my less than chipper attitude seems to be able to render even the biggest, most exciting of life changing moves into something that is just meh. Like yay! I moved! My new lab is cool! I wish I was less shy and awkward! I hate driving for 10-15 minutes stretches in traffic! I miss New Haven pizza! I miss walking to the grocery store even though I can now actually buy things like watermelon with my car! I feel awkward getting a car for essentially free because it was from high school and being so not an adult because I didn't buy my own car here! I watch way too much Scrubs! I need to run more since bad weather is no longer an excuse! What if I'm so unsociable that new lab won't even take me if I do want to do my PhD there! Being quiet sucks when I want to learn to do things and take initiative! My priority plot thing 100% did not work because I didn't fold my laundry until like today even though I said I was supposed to do it like 3 days ago! Clearly I have a lot of repressed slash fake stress given that its summer and school and real responsibilities haven't even like started and I keep using the word like!

So maybe its a good thing I'm forcing myself tonight to post a blog post since every habit starts with a first step. And what better place to sandwich rambling sentences about my life that no one cares about than between really really crafted shots of roasted strawberry buttermilk ice cream (roll credits)? If I were actually a food writer, this would probably be the place where I would start romanticizing youthful summers, and farms, and cows, where kids frolicked and strawberries were so fresh they were a perfume and buttermilk so rich it was heaven or something. But no, we live in a modern world with billions of people on the earth that need to be fed, and the very lucky couple of them doing highly productive things in the labor force to advance society so 'aint nobody got time for romanticizing a pastoral life that is very much not the way we would actually want to live today.

But hey, if you were hoping for your own farm one day- a dream I just crushed because you also now  realized why the midwest is so cheap- let it be known that delicious strawberry buttermilk ice cream can be made with you local grocery store's offerings of such products from commercial big agro farms (this is not to say that there are not issues like antibiotic overuse or labor/wages/lobbying or sustainability issues in agriculture).

If you've never roasted strawberries before, I 100% recommend that you do. Even if you don't eat them. Just soak in the amazing scent that will be coming from your oven, and definitely stick your nose a little too close to the pan when they come out. The buttermilk adds a sour tang to the ice cream that while interesting, felt a little too strong for me relative to the strawberries. I'd probably either add more strawberries or more sugar next time I make this. Because there will definitely be more stress induced posts in the future where ice cream will very very very much so be needed.

Recipe from Bon Appetit.

Ginger Beer, Rum, Lime and Coconut Sorbet: Frou-Frou?

Serious Eats' ice cream guy, Max Falkowitz, called this the ice cream version of a frou-frou cocktail drink. And frou-frou it is indeed, in the sense that it is fancy and overly ornate maybe. If you're thinking of the association of frou-frou cocktails with wimpy drinkers and girly drinks, then congrats! You've just unnecessarily genderized something!

But don't worry, I did the exact same thing in draft one of this, going on a tangent about how absurd it is that we have "male" and "female" drinks based on how much your drink tastes of bark and leather belts. Alas, I made the mistake of assuming that a frou-frou drink must be girly, which is part of the internalized societal biases that harm myself and others. So you know, just because you don't blatantly say things like "girls are distractingly sexy in science!" or advise other female scientists to "take it with humor" when your supervisor keeps looking down your shirt, doesn't mean there aren't unconscious biases that we all need to actively remind ourselves to check. The word frou-frou doesn't even mean girly-it just means excessively fancy. And I know plenty of males and females who are frou-frou. And of course, if you choose to identify with any other gender identity, you too have the freedom to be as frou-frou or not frou-frou as you want to be.

So cheers to everyone enjoying bark-like alcohol when they want on a Tuesday, and then having a frou-frou drink (umbrella included) on a Thursday. Because it would be such a sad, flavorless world if we were confined to drinks and food based on random identifiers that are frankly probably most useful when playing "Where's Waldo" or on an episode of "Criminal Minds."

Societal sexism aside, despite its fancy name, this sorbet is really really easy to make. Sorbet, is a non-dairy frozen dessert. Unlike a sherbet, which contains about 1-2% of milk fat. Unlike an ice cream, which I guess contains more than 10%. And unlike the 3-9% milk fat desserts which get the really creative name of "frozen dairy dessert." Did they just get bored haphazardly going through naming frozen desserts by milk fat content? This sorbet technically contains coconut milk, which is a form of fat, so I'm not sure if the milk fat content scale is in reference to only animal dairy, or all types of fat?

The coconut is the most prominent flavor, though the ginger does come up quickly afterwards, and the lime/rum as more of an afterthought. If you want to add more rum, I would add it afterwards as a topping rather than into the sorbet, as adding too much might cause problems with freezing.
Quick note, if you for whatever reason don't read it on Serious Eats, ginger beer is a much stronger (in flavor) version of ginger ale, and 100% more delicious.

Recipe via Serious Eats

Lavender Lemon Hippocampus Cookies: aka Seahorses

For those of us who are less nerdy and who spend less time looking at brains, or who maybe don't bother memorizing the names of aquatic animals in Latin, hippocampus is 1) the latin term for seahorse, and 2) the name we give the structure of the brain that is deeply involved in learning, memory, and navigation. Given that these functions are involved in almost anything and everything we do, the hippocampus is also pretty frequently affected by diseases (ie Alzheimer's, temporal lobe epilepsy, etc).

It's also one of the most distinctively structured part of the brain, with a mass of well organized cells and layers as you can see below in probably one of the widely distributed pictures of a hippocampus ever where each adjacent neuron (the dots) is labeled a distinct color.

via J Litchman Lab 

The combined quirk of its name, its hugely important role in major functions, and its pretty structure all make the hippocampus the pet favorite of a lot of neuroscientists/neurologists/neurosurgeons/etc. For example, my former (tears) lab has a picture of a seahorse hanging out in our lab, and one of the neurosurgeons our lab works with has hippocampi/seahorses decorating a large portion of his wardrobe in addition to his entire office (supposedly). And here I am drinking in the hippocampus kool-aid, making seahorse shaped cookies for my lab as an adieu. Well rather, made, since I've officially left as of last week. Big life changes make leaving sad, but on the other hand, there are new exciting Californian things to look forward to as well.

Of course, there are probably a lot of neuroscientists who may think the hippocampus is overrated, because there are a lot of other interesting/weird brain structures also hugely important since in this day and age, we know that no singular area of the brain is solely responsible for a task/behavior, but rather dependent on a network of regions and how they communicate. That aside, other brain structures have weird names too. Take the amygdala, hugely important in emotions, decisions, and memory, named after the drought pariah almond. Then there's the zona incerta, which is literally called "the uncertain zone," because no one really knows what its role is.

Now that I've spent way too long talking about the brain, I'm sure the real questions for a food blog are 1) did they actually taste good? and 2) how did these decorations work? As you may notice, lavender and lemon are a pretty frequent combination I use, in part thanks to my lifetime supply of lavender that I will probably never finish. But also, lavender and lemon is just a great combination for other fairly boring sugar cookies. That said, I think the lavender and lemon flavors were a bit more muted this time, in part because I had a fear of feeding my lab people flowers, and in part due to the neutral/almond flavored icing on top.

With regard to point 2), these were decorated the standard way- creating an initial border with thick icing, then flooding with thinned icing. The designs on the inside were either made with thick icing lines after the inner flood icing dried, or by adding dots of thinned icing to the still wet flood icing and then running a toothpick through the circle to create the hearts/swirled effect. And the black dot? A food pen because I'm the type of person who owns a decorative, edible food pen.

Sugar Cookie Recipe via The Kitchn, modified to add 1-2 tsp of dried lavender buds, blended separately with the sugar in a food processor before adding.

Royal Icing Recipe via Bake at 350. I find that about 1/2 the batch is usually fine for 1 batch of the above sugar cookie recipe. Doubling is way too much.

Cinnamon Dulce De Leche Ice Cream: The ~Spice~ of Life

Day one of my longest vacation yet starts now. I had the inkling of an idea to be productive-get this blog post done, go for a run, make pizza dough, temporarily unpack my life, find books to check out from the library. But then I ended up on amazon prime instant video and the asoiaf reddit. And its now the afternoon, or early evening EST. If I were in lab as I were last week, this would be ridiculous.

Of course, how typical that as a fairly motivated person, I think that my vacation and free time are wasted unless I'm doing something interesting. Oh, I could go on and on about how the work-life balance of our generation and times has become a 24/7 work lifestyle, or how being busy is the new way we measure social value, or how we're now happiest when we're busy, but we've all seen this article/headline/podcast story plenty of times. We've all thought and nodded "YES THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG," maybe even have written a motivational sticky that says something like "take time," or "no decision you make is ever a mistake," (my personal sticky) and yet we're all still going to continue trying really hard regardless and occasionally reading and nodding to these articles.



So I'm not going to delve into that (or I'm going to try to not), because these kinds of commentaries about how we should live our life kind of remind me of both commencement speeches and horoscopes- nothing new is ever really said and if you make it vague it enough, it will always apply no matter what kind of life you're living (plus, I'm not getting paid to make a click bait article about 10 ways to improve your life here).

To make this semi-relevant to cinnamon ice cream with dulce de leche, there are times when my life can be interesting and varied- like the dash or heaping of spices I like to add to different things. And then there are times when it can be dull-like a creamy white ice cream base that's just waiting for something extra. Which frankly, is what most ice cream is. It's milk, cream, sometimes eggs, infused with something partway through or swirled through at the end. Technique-wise, ice cream is pretty boring and standard, but the ability to mix and add almost anything keeps it an easy way to do interesting things. Maybe thats all I need in my free time, lazy ways to be interesting.

As a not-quite-real-adult, I don't really have a large spice assortment, particularly in the savory department. But cinnamon is that warm, Christmas-time, fuzzy feelings spice that is the Target of spices- ubiquitous enough for fake adults, but with the potential to be fancy when it wants to be. David Lebovitz likes to be fancy obviously, but again, being not a real adult, I don't have 3 types of cinnamon (surprise! there are different types of cinnamon!). So I went with the in-between fancy option of using normal cinnamon sticks to infuse the cream base and hand grated cinnamon rather than the powdered stuff every single other normal person uses. I did initially have a hard time tasting the cinnamon in the base, and consequently shaved about 75% of a cinnamon stick into the base for extra taste at the end, which definitely helped make the churned ice cream taste like cinnamon. I'd probably add more sticks or seep longer next time (in addition to buying fancy cinnamon).

Cinnamon aside, I had an extra can of sweetened condensed milk I never used, so I made dulce de leche out of it via the microwave method to mix in at the end. Within the realms of homemade dulce de leche, people online are seriously divided. I've only tried this microwave method so I can't really comment, but based on the 5-10 tabs I read, I'd say microwave is one of the safer methods, and adding a 1/2 tsp of water every couple of minutes seems to help with the problem of the dulce de leche becoming too brittle before it is done. I was trying to go for more of a swirled effect with the dulce de leche, but fairly thick toffee + cold = lumps rather than streaks. No complaints flavor or texture-wise though as the dulce de leche was still soft in the ice cream, albeit you got it in rather large quantities rather than interspersed.

Cinnamon Ice Cream via David Lebovitz
Dulce De Leche via Cooking for Engineers (multiple methods exist)