Today I tried Martha’s All-American Vanilla Ice Cream from page 75.  Of course, vanilla ice cream is a wonderful blank canvas to add almost anything your heart desires to the mix.  It’s also best when it compliments a fabulous dessert. So I made Bananas Foster With Spiced Bourbon Vanilla Ice Cream.

Bananas Foster comes out of New Orleans, as do most desserts that add a generous amount of spirits!  It’s simple to make and absolutely scrumptious.  Many people are scared to make Bananas Foster because they’re afraid of setting fire to their kitchen when the sugary bananas do the flambé with the liquor.  This is a completely reasonable fear, that’s why I’m going to let you in on a chef’s secret – the flambé is all for show!  That’s right my friends, there’s no need to make your pan go BOOM!  It’s a theatrical trick that chef’s employ to look cool.  And it does look cool, it just doesn’t really add anything in terms of flavor.  However, liquor and flame are a combustible combination and you need to be very careful anytime you add it to your cooking.  I suggest you remove your pan from the heat before you add any alcohol, and then carefully put it back on the heat, making sure it’s not on full blast.  The heat will burn off much of the excess alcohol meld it’s unique fruity and nutty notes to your dish to create the same rich flavor you would get with a pan full of flames without risking a frantic call to the Fire Department.

Martha’s vanilla ice cream recipe has a rich and luxurious texture that was perfect with the caramelized bananas.  I added a touch of bourbon and some warm spices like cinnamon and nutmeg to the custard before I churned it into ice cream.

Jeff said this was his favorite dessert from me ever!  That’s quite a compliment considering how many desserts I’ve made him over the years.  With a little creativity, dessert never needs to be just plain old vanilla.

Today I tried a retro recipe from the West with Martha’s take on an Orange Julius from page 347.

I haven’t had an Orange Julius since I was a kid in the 1970s.  Back in those days they were hugely popular and you could find a stand on almost every corner.  These days, chains like Jamba Juice have surpassed them in popularity but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Orange Julius is still around and is owned by Dairy Queen now.  Creamy whole milk and orange are always a great combo as fans of Creamsicles can attest to.  Back in the health craze of the 70s, the Orange Julius was considered a fattening and decadent treat.  But when you compare it to today’s 900 calorie lattes (which used to be known as ‘milkshakes’ until someone figured out you could sell a lot more if you gave them fancy schmancy coffee names) the Orange Julius is healthier and lower in sugar.

Martha’s recipe calls for egg whites, but if you’re scared of raw eggs you can leave them out.  I was happy that I had saved my egg whites while making her ice cream recipe that called for a lot of egg yolks!  It’s always a good idea to save the part of the egg you’re not working with in an airtight container in the fridge.  I’m not going to say I’m the biggest environmentalist and conservationist, but I really do hate wasting food.  When I was working at restaurants I saw a lot of perfectly good food get thrown away and it made me sad when I thought about how many people in the world are going hungry.  And from a practical point of view, you can always find a good way to put your extra food to use.

Martha’s Orange Julius was as frothy and creamy as I remember them being back when I was a kid.  This is a nice, easy way to whip up an easy and relatively healthy treat your whole family will love.

Today I tried a Midwestern spin on an All-American favorite with Martha’s Malted Milk Ball Ice Cream from page 276.

Christmas came early for me yesterday when my new KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker attachment finally showed up at my door!  Ever since my last ice cream maker broke over a year ago, I’ve been dreaming of the day I could finally get a new one.  This was my birthday present to myself.  Of course I wanted to tear it out of the box and get started on making ice cream right away, but alas it doesn’t work that way.  You need to freeze the bowl for a day before it’s ready to use.  Today I got started on the glorious task of making fresh ice cream.

I was intrigued by the Midwestern take on ice cream with a malted milk ball flavor.  You start with the vanilla ice cream recipe but then you add some powdered malted milk.  I made a small change to the recipe.  Instead of adding the milk chocolate it called for, I added some Nutella instead.  I love that hint of hazelnut with the rich chocolate.  I also added some chocolate covered hazelnuts along with the malted milk balls at the end.  Does this sound like too much of a good thing?  Oh, baby…it sure was!  This was a case of too much is never enough…OMG…it was so good!!!!

Martha’s malted milk ball ice cream with a touch of Nutella is a modern twist on a classic flavor.  It was smooth and creamy and chocolatey with a touch of nuttiness.  Do you have an ice cream maker sitting in the back of your closet collecting dust because you’re too intimidated to use it?  If you do, take a chance and give it a try! Even the best premium brands of store bought ice cream can’t rival the taste and texture of homemade.

Today instead of a typical lunch, I tried Martha’s Triple-Berry Smoothie from page 347 of the Western section.

Martha’s triple-berry smoothie has a lot of great flavors.  Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and bananas.  It’s super-easy to make; just blend it all together with some milk and plain yogurt and I added just a touch of honey to the mix.  This smoothie doesn’t just taste great, it also gave me a good shot of energy because it has a lot of vitamins and minerals.  Sometimes eating makes us feel sluggish.  That’s because it takes a lot of energy for our stomachs to digest food and it can make us very tired.  It’s refreshing to have something that’s both satisfying and healthy that doesn’t weigh your body down.

I have been on every diet imaginable over the years, including liquid diets.  That’s where you substitute two meals a day with some kind of tasteless, low-fat shake.  I’m proud to say that I’ve finally come to embrace Health At Every Size and refuse to put my body through the hell of yo-yo dieting any longer.  But I understand the appeal of those shakes because when you’re on the go they give you a quick boost.  Making a fresh fruit smoothie is the more nutritious and delicious way to drink your lunch.  I recommend using full-fat dairy products because not only do they have health benefits that are lacking in low fat dairy, they also leave you feeling more satisfied.  It’s been over 30 years since we’ve rejected fats and now we’re heavier and sicker than ever.  Perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate conventional wisdom and start embracing food in its natural state again.

Give this triple-berry smoothie a try sometime when you need a quick, energizing and genuinely delicious meal.  And why don’t you whip some up for the little ones and tell them it’s a milkshake?  I bet they’ll never know the difference and just think it’s yummy!

Tonight I tried Martha’s Southern Fried Catfish Sandwiches with a side of Turnip Greens from page 184.

Living right off The Gulf of Mexico, I’m lucky to have a lot of fresh fish available.  In fact, living in a house that has a canal right in the backyard, we’ve even done some fishing.  Jeff and I have a division of labor when it comes to fishing: he catches ’em and I clean and butcher ’em.  I don’t have his patience and skill for getting them on the hook and reeling them in and he doesn’t have my poissonerie training that’s left me with a surgeon-like ability to cut the perfect fillet.  We have catfish in our canal, but we haven’t caught any yet.  Fortunately, their availability makes them very affordable.  They’re also always super-fresh and delicious!

When you’re making a fried catfish sandwich you need a great tasting fish to start with.  That’s the key to any good seafood meal, ’cause if your fish isn’t fresh there’s no recipe in the world good enough to make a delicious meal.  But even if you have a great fish, it’s easy to cook it up the wrong way.  Fish can be difficult to get right because they overcook very easily, but you also don’t want them undercooked.  I really like frying them up because by the time the crust is a nice golden brown, the fish should be perfectly cooked.

Martha’s fried catfish sandwich was very good.  I enjoyed the stewed turnip greens on the side.  I also thought the sweet onions right on the sandwich was a nice, flavorful touch.  I added a little lemon and sriracha to the mayonnaise just for a little extra kick of flavor.

If you love fresh fish as much as I do you can’t go wrong with Martha’s take on this Southern classic.

Today I decided to challenge myself with Martha’s Soft Pretzels from the Northeast on page 124.

Why are pretzels a challenge?  Because you need to make a bread dough, which is always a little more difficult than your average kitchen task.  But the hardest part for something like pretzels is getting it to look like a pretzel!

Making the dough actually wasn’t too hard.  I’m becoming more use to the challenge of bread making.  Do you know that old joke ‘Excuse me, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ with the answer being ‘Practice, man, practice.’  Bread doughs are like that!  Julia Child spent 3 years working on perfecting a baguette recipe for the home cook.  Modern kitchens have become more user-friendly for baking bread than they were in the 1960s.  But it’s still not easy to make the perfect bread.  One trick I’ve picked up over the years is to put an ice cube in the oven while you’re baking because the steam generated will help the bread develop the right consistency.

The recipe for the dough was pretty straight-forward and easy enough to put together.  It’s after you cut the dough into pretzel size amounts that things get interesting.  First you need to roll out each piece into a rope using your hands until it’s 20 inches long.  You need to do this in such a way that the entire thing stays even — you can’t have a thick part in the middle with thin parts toward the end.  Many of my early attempts at doing this made my rope fall apart!  Then you need to do the pretzel shape, which sounds easy enough, but the hard part is pulling out the sides a bit so that it’s not squished — this too resulted in the heartbreak of many broken pretzels…le sigh!  And the good times are not over yet.  After you let your pretzels rise you need to get them into boiling water without tearing them.  Once they’re in the water you need to give them a turn.  Here I have a quibble with Martha’s recipe, because it suggests you use tongs to do that and I did.  Guess what my pretzel did?  Yep, it fell apart!  Ah, there was indeed so much falling apart in this process.  I found that using a spatula to flip them in the water worked better.  Finally, if you make it through all of this with at least one pretzel in tact, you give ’em some salt and bake them in the oven.

My first batch came out looking pretty silly, but they tasted good!  Finally, through the process of trial and error I got a few decent looking pretzels in my second batch.  I used coarse salt which I’m not accustomed to working with and I definitely overdid it.  I think you can actually notice that when you look at the picture.  But it wasn’t hard to shake some salt off and that improved them greatly.

So after all of that, how were the pretzels?  Delicious! These pretzels were warm and soft — way better than anything you’ll get from a street vendor. They taste great with a little spicy mustard and a beer to drink them down with.  I liked the addition of a little cayenne pepper that gave them a nice spicy bite.

Sometimes the toughest kitchen tasks are the most rewarding.  If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again until you get it right and in the end you’ll have something homemade and delicious to reward yourself with!

This is a good question that has been asked of me by nobody.  I’m making an assumption that if you’re checking out My Life In Spice you might be frustrated by the lack of recipes.  I even have a category called “Recipes” but if you click on it, all you’ll find are a few recipes that represent my Menu Project from culinary school…not exactly a rich resource of material!  So what’s the deal?  Am I just being lazy?  Am I being guarded with my “secret” recipes?  Do I even have any real recipes of my own to share or do I only know how to cook using recipe books?  These are all good questions and I want to attempt to give an honest answer, so here it is in a nutshell…

I DON’T LIKE RECIPES!  There I said it!  Now it’s pretty reasonable to ask why a person who doesn’t like recipes has just completed 100 recipes from a Martha Stewart book?  If you look carefully at what I’ve written I’ve made clear that I seldom follow Martha’s recipes exactly.  I use them as inspiration and a starting point toward trying new things.  I also have a particular affection for Martha’s American Food because it traces the rich history of American cooking and the immigrant roots that inform it.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a total food history nerd.  So with that said, what’s the chip on my shoulder concerning recipes about?

I think recipes are alienated and fetishized.  How’s that for an esoteric answer?  Let me try to explain that in a more concrete manner.  This post will delve into the issue of alienation and the way recipes are created in a way that doesn’t necessarily translate for the person who is trying to replicate them in their own kitchen.

Most of the recipes you find on cooking shows, books and online are worked on in test kitchens.  People who work in test kitchens are paid to try out recipes that have been created by a particular cook to determine how well they work.  If the recipe is a flop, it’s back to the drawing board, complete with an analysis of what went wrong and how to improve the results.  That sounds very precise and scientific, doesn’t it?  But here’s the problem — professional test kitchens are set up to achieve the best results possible.  The temperature of the room will be neither too humid nor too arid.  The equipment used is of the state-of-the art variety.  If the testers need their stove at 350, it will achieve that temperature on the nose.

Test kitchens are the perfect environment for cooking.  But your kitchen is not.  Test kitchens are to real world cooking what fit models are to real world clothing.  What’s a fit model?  That’s the person who clothing manufacturers use to mass-produce attire.  The fit model, whether modeling for small or plus size clothing, has proportions that are considered perfect.  This is why it’s so hard to find clothing off the rack that fits you correctly.  Because the odds are that you are not built on that level of so-called perfection.  Your arms and legs are too short or too long.  Your breasts and hips are too big.  Your waist is too long.  You’ve likely spent a lifetime feeling insecure because your attempts to buy decent clothing have always led you to those conclusions.  But the reality is that your body has nothing to do with it!  It’s the cookie-cutter approach to mass production that limits our choices and makes shopping for clothing a humiliating pain in the ass.

Following a recipe exactly and not getting the desired results is also a humiliating pain in the ass.  Just as that trip to the clothing store leaves you feeling like something is “wrong” with your body, the failed recipe leads you to believe that there’s something “wrong” with your ability to follow simple directions.

Here’s an example of how environment can trip up even the most skilled and professional chefs.  Have you ever watched one those ubiquitous cake or pastry contests on The Food Network?  The pastry chefs selected for the shows are world-class artists. Making cakes into works of art not only takes a great chef, but it also helps to be a skilled mathematician and architect as well.  I once had the unique pleasure of watching in person a very famous pastry chef preparing one of the elaborate cakes you see on those shows.  Her work was slow and meticulous and she approached her task much like a brilliant artist approaches the block of marble that will become a great sculpture.  These shows, which are for entertainment purposes, don’t begin to cover the amount of work, detail and laser-sharp focus that goes into these creations.  Part of the drama of these competitions is watching how the chefs deal with working under the time constraints and pressure of a televised competition.  One theme that shows up over and over again is the way their best laid plans go off the rails because they hadn’t anticipated how hot the television studio would be.  Think about that for a moment.  These people are the best in the world at what they do.  They are frequently geniuses and I don’t use that word lightly.  But they can’t make their recipes work under the blazing hot lights and the heat generated by all the equipment.  They usually recover and move on to Plan B.  But my point is that environment matters!  And if the greatest chefs in the world are tripped up by issues pertaining to humidity and room temperature, why wouldn’t these same things have a negative impact on a home cook?

I’m not anti-recipes.  I think that recipes can be one of many helpful tools that can push our creativity in cooking.  But the very creation of recipes is alienated from the real life limitations that come up in our own kitchens.  That’s why you can’t truly be a great cook until you learn how to improvise and learn some basic cooking science.  If you’re making a bread dough and the 2 cups of flour the recipe calls for leaves you with something that’s the consistency of sticky glue, you’re going to have to add more flour.  And you’ll need to keep adding until it’s the right consistency.  Being able to do this means breaking out of the recipe box and thinking on your feet.  This isn’t easy to do, which is why I’d rather use My Life In Spice as a tool that can bring the home cook that kind of independence and not simply share recipes.  If that’s what you’re looking for, there are thousands of other resources out there and I even link to some of them.

My next post will cover the issue of how recipes become fetishized. How words written on a piece of paper can become larger than life and viewed as nearly “godlike” in their importance. I’ll tell you some interesting stories from my time in culinary school, where I observed some very talented chefs turn into total basket cases over things like a teaspoon of water and a single gram of flour.

Finally!  After almost four days of being sick I finally felt better today.  And that means it was time to cook my 100th recipe with Martha’s Yellow Layer Cake from her All-American section on page 65.

Martha’s blurb for this cake talks a bit about chemical leaveners like baking soda and powder and how they changed the way people bake.  I found this interesting from the perspective of having studied at a school that taught the French culinary tradition.  The French don’t like chemical leaveners, preferring instead to use the old-fashioned method of using whipped eggs to give cakes volume.  If you’ve read Julia Child’s Mastering The Art Of French Cooking (and I’m sure you have, right?), you’ll notice that all her cake recipes use whipped eggs instead of chemical leaveners.

With all due respect to the French tradition and the late, great Ms. Child, I’ve never understood the reasoning behind this.  Things like baking powder and soda give us more freedom to use plenty of butter in our cakes to give them moisture.  They also make life much easier!  Having tried both ways, I’m a big fan of the modern use of chemical leaveners — it’s one of those rare times where doing it the simpler way actually yields better results.

This yellow cake was moist, dense and delicious!  I made a simple milk chocolate frosting for it.  That’s the thing with frosting, whether you go for a complex buttercream or quick whipped one using powdered sugar and creamy butter, it always makes whatever cake you’re making more yummy!

As you can see from the picture, my cake is not as tall or as beautiful as Martha’s.  This is why I love making bundt cakes, because I can always make them look gorgeous!  I still haven’t figured out how to get my layer cakes looking as good as they taste.  But this yellow cake was still a fun way to celebrate 100 recipes from Martha’s American Food!

So, you might ask, why haven’t you made recipe 100 yet you lazy bum?  Well, I have a pretty good excuse – I’ve been sick as a dog!  Yep, I’ve had some kind of stomach flu from hell that I’m finally recovering from, but for the past couple of days I’ve lived off plain crackers and ginger ale with generous sides of Pepto Bismol.  I’ve wanted to make something special for my 100th recipe, and I figure that since it’s also my birthday week I should do some kind of cake, but until I’m fully recovered I don’t think cake is a great idea.  I’m hoping tomorrow I will be able to work some kitchen magic again because I miss both cooking and eating real food.

Still, as I get close to being halfway through this project, I thought it might be nice to reflect on the Me n’ Martha Project.  It’s funny, when I got this book it didn’t occur to me that I would actually attempt to make everything in it, you all can thank Jeff for that!  He looked through the book and said “If we were rich you could do a “Julie and Julia” with this book and cook everything in it!”  Although he didn’t say that as a dare, I decided to take it as one.  I knew it would be an interesting challenge to get through Martha’s entire book even though I’m pretty far from rich and I’d have to do some substitutions.  Venison, for example, is not easy to get and costs over $80 to have delivered from the fabulous Broken Arrow Ranch.  Sadly, I can’t afford to do that so I substituted pork and it tasted great.  Part of the challenge is trying balance the high-brow with the low-brow in Martha’s eclectic cookbook and find a way to make it fit my budget.  And that’s really been the hardest part of doing this, because as car repairs busted my already precarious financial situation, my postings became less frequent.  But I’m a very determined person and if I set my mind to something I’m gonna make it work no matter what!  Let’s take a look at what I have made since I started this project on May 22nd:

I’ve cooked 24 Dinners, 29 Desserts, and under the category I call Appetizers, Lunch and Brunch I’ve made 43 recipes!  Not too shabby, if I must toot my own horn (toot! toot!).

What were my favorites? There have been so many great dishes that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed that it’s hard to pick favorites, but I’ll try.  I’d say the Chicken Enchiladas Verdes was one of the best dinners I’ve ever made, not just from this book, but in my entire life!  The desserts are even harder to chose from but I’d call it a tie between the Whoopie Pies and the Key Lime Pie.  As for the rather broad category of Appetizers, Lunch and Brunch I think that the Asparagus With Prosciuitto and Lemon Sabayon was the most unique delicacy.

Any not-so-favorites?  Eh, I can’t say I was happy with my Johnnycake efforts since it turned to mush!  I also wasn’t happy with how my Lasagna turned out, and that one will certainly haunt me until I try it over again and get it right because lasagna is an important part of my Italian heritage.

All in all this has been a developmental and fun challenge that I’ve given myself.  My hat is off to Martha for giving me the tools to take my kitchen creativity to a new level.  Onward to 100 and beyond!

(Here’s one of my favorite photos so far of the yummy Whoopie Pie!  Betty Boop and Bimbo are celebrating the Me n’ Martha Project halfway point LOL!)

For my birthday, I spent the weekend letting others do the cooking. Yesterday I went to a more “upscale” (at least by Florida standards) seafood restaurant. Today Jeff and I had hot dogs and ice cream at a local dive. All things considered, I liked the dive better!

Not to be too immodest, but I prefer my own cooking to any restaurant. I’d like to get other people more excited about their own cooking; I want people to go out to eat once in a while and say “Eh, not bad, but I could do this better!”   I’ve had a chance to peek behind the curtain of the Great and Powerful Chefs and I’ve seen the little men that lurk there. All they have that you don’t have is the confidence to believe that every morsel they touch turns to gold.

I’ve decided that I want to write a book about cooking. Not a traditional cookbook. I want my book to be more centered on my own philosophical approach to cooking and eating. I also want to talk about technique and science because I think that there are literally thousands of recipes out there but very few resources on how to unleash your own creativity in the kitchen without being trapped in the “recipe box”. There’s no magic formula or trick that makes anyone a great cook. But I truly believe that anybody with the nerve to be a mad scientist in their own kitchen can become a true artist as well. If cooking a meal is merely a chore much like doing the laundry you’re doing it wrong. I want to help unleash the chef that lurks deep in your heart and soul.

So that’s my goal to accomplish this year. I will need your support to make it work. As midlife crises go, this is a better way to deal with it than bleaching my hair, reading 50 Shades of Grey or starting some kind of Hudson chapter of “Desperate Cougars Who Want To Boink That Sparkly Vampire Dude”.

Thanks for your support!  And look out you rock n’ rollers, ’cause pretty soon now you’re gonna get older…