Inspiration comes at the oddest moments. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do, still laying in bed, is a scroll-through of email, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to see what happened over night. Sunrise is at 5 something now, alarm goes off at 6, and there is zero chance I'm getting out of bed before that. On one of those scroll-throughs, Chronicle Books was doing a Twitter contest to win a signed copy of the Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream Book
and a bag of bacon peanut brittle. All you had to do to enter was come up with a dream Humphry Slocombe flavor. My idea: Chocolate y Churros -- a cayenne-kicked Mexican chocolate ice cream with churro chunks (I didn't win)...but it led to these cayenne-kicked fudgesicles for the Zoku.
There's really only one thing to say about Humphry Slocombe's Butter Beer ice cream: OMFG. It's not hyperbole. It's not even sucking up, this ice cream is really that good. It's ridiculous. And hold the phone, I didn't get this scoop at the shop, I made it. At home. From the new book - the Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream Book.
Now, if you're already a Humphry Slocombe fan, I know what you're saying, "What, you didn't start with Secret Breakfast?" I love me some Secret Breakfast and Blue Bottle Vietnamese Coffee, but I said, "We gotta go for one of the deep cuts. And it shall be Butter Beer." This isn't the Butter Beer you're thinking of, it's a combo of their Stout and Brown Butter ice creams, and it's not one for the kiddies.
It's been four years since we left the Bay Area, so the list of restaurants we need to try has gotten ridiculously long. We don't get down there as much as we should (our friends can vouch for that!). So when an opportunity to try Dominique Crenn's "poetic culinaria" came up at Matt's in the Market, it was hard to pass up. Except we did, because I thought, well, we can't do these dinners two weeks in a row. It'll be too much. But then, after a wonderful meal with Andy Ricker, we went for it, got on the waiting list and hoped for the best.
Not only was it a chance to try Chef Crenn’s modernist cuisine outside her home turf in the Bay Area, but it would be interesting to see how the two chefs -- Chef Crenn and Matt's Chef Chester Gerl -- would develop a menu of complements. In six courses, it was inventive, it was sometimes challenging, it was beautiful.
You never expect a Monday to be the best day of your week. But man, yesterday was about as good a Monday as it gets around here. A sunny, 75 degree day, where I sat out on the deck at lunch and then wrapped up the day with a Thai-themed extravaganza/ Traveling Chefs dinner at Matt's in the Market, with dishes from Matt's Chef Chester Gerl and Pok Pok's Andy Ricker, 2011 James Beard Foundation Best Chef Northwest.
We got clouded out on the initial Supermoon rise last night, but later I did manage to get at least one interesting shot of that super bright moon illuminating the clouds directly east of us...and a lot of bunk ones, too (sigh). Some potentially interesting shots have a nice green reflection of the moon, maybe from my UV filter.
last year, the two popsicles I knew I wanted to make were Nutella fudgesicles and orange creamsicles (did you call them 50-50 bars when you were a kid? I did). I figured out the Nutella fudgesicles right quick, but the orange creamsicle eluded me. I kept seeing it exactly as I remembered it -- a cream center with an orange outside. Last summer, I even made Lemon Buttermilk Zoku pops using David Lebovitz's recipe, but never stopped to think, "Hey, why don't you just swap out the lemon for orange?" DUH!!