Every so often, I get a bril­liant idea for a busi­ness, which I might actu­ally try if I had any busi­ness sense and a lot more chutz­pah. For the last year or so, it was the 24-hour deliv­er­ing pie store, for those 2AM pie crav­ings. Now, in the most lit­eral inter­pre­ta­tion, it’s the “ice cream bar”.

Imag­ine, if you will, an ice cream par­lour (or even bet­ter, real gelato) with only a few dif­fer­ent fla­vors. In addi­tion to this, a full stock of fruit and nut liquers and other spir­its, to put on top. Last night on a whim, I poured about a shot of cham­bord on top of a bowl of vanilla ice cream (doing shots of cham­bord would be pretty intense, now that I think about it). It was fan­tas­ti­cally awesome.

Not only would it be a hip dessert place if done in a prop­erly yup­pieful area, it would be the only dessert restau­rant with a bouncer. How cool is that?

Tags: food

At the age of 14, I worked for a few months as a prep cook at a local restau­rant. It was short, and due to labor laws I wasn’t allowed to do cer­tain things, but it really taught me a lot. Because of this, my friends decided that I was qual­i­fied to teach them the basics of cook­ing, and I think I did pretty well in that regard. One of the things I always told them was that the biggest enemy in the kitchen is fear, so I decided to eat my own words. I haven’t been seri­ously cook­ing for all that long, but I fig­ured it was time to try enter­ing a contest.

And because I’m com­pletely insane, it’s a con­test fea­tur­ing an ingre­di­ent I’ve never used, and I decided on a prepa­ra­tion I’ve never tried. It only took a week of exper­i­ment­ing, but I’m trilled with the result. So, with­out fur­ther ado…

Spiced Pump­kin Mousse

• About 1 cup (packed) cooked, pureed pumpkin
• 1/3 cup heavy whip­ping cream
• 2 egg whites
• 1 table­spoon dark brown sugar
• 1/8–1/4 tea­spoon pow­dered ginger
• 1/8–1/4 tea­spoon ground or grated nutmeg
• 1/8–1/4 tea­spoon ground or grated cinnamon

A few notes about the ingredients:

For the pump­kin, you can use either canned or fresh. For fresh pump­kin, cut it into large pieces, bake it for about 30–45 min­utes at 350^0oF with the skin on, cool, then remove the skin and puree. You want to make sure that there are no lumps at all — this can require a lot of patience, espe­cially if your blender is as crummy as mine, but any lumps here will be an unwel­come lump in the final prod­uct. Even with a small pump­kin, you’ll prob­a­bly end up with more than you need. This can be used for any­thing from pump­kin pie to stuff­ing for ravi­oli, so don’t fret.

The actual spices can be switched around and sub­sti­tuted as desired. When devel­op­ing this, I tried about 15 dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions — this par­tic­u­lar one suited my taste the best, but none of the ones I tried were bad. Other spices that could go well with this include cloves and mace; I can imag­ine going wild and includ­ing things like orange peel. Per­son­ally, I’d advise against repli­cat­ing the spice com­bi­na­tions used in pump­kin pie; if you want pump­kin pie, make a pie!

The amounts for the cin­na­mon and nut­meg are nowhere near exact. I grated these from whole cin­na­mon sticks and nut­meg nuts directly into the bowl, and just guessed at the amount. If you decide to use whole nut­meg and you’re not famil­iar with it, go slowly. Freshly-grated nut­meg is an amaz­ing and won­der­ful thing, but it’s also about 10 times as pow­er­ful as the ground stuff. It can be found at most spe­cialty stores and any Indian gro­cery. Also, it looks cool:

OK, recipe time!

1. Beat the heavy cream until soft peaks form. Set aside.
2. Beat the egg whites until they’re white and foamy throughout.
3. In a large mix­ing bowl, fold the egg whites into the pump­kin puree.
4. Fold the whipped cream into the pump­kin mix­ture, mix until well-combined.
5. Mix spices into the mixture.
6. At this point, I put it into the blender and gave it another go — when mix­ing the spices in, some lumps formed. As I said before, lumps are bad, so it’s impor­tant to keep things as smooth as possible.
7. Sep­a­rate out into mar­tini glasses and chill for at least 2 hours.
8. When serv­ing, grate some black pep­per on top.

Since this is largely unsweet­ened, I’m treat­ing it as an appe­tizer. All of the pump­kin mousses I came across while research­ing this were desserts, but as dessert goes, that’s bor­ing.. This should yield about 2 cups of mousse, which splits quite nicely into 4 por­tions. Note that it is a real mousse — the eggs aren’t cooked, so if you’re wor­ried about such things, don’t do this. Spe­cial thanks to my mom for help­ful sug­ges­tions and mak­ing it pretty for the photo.

Tags: food

So appar­ently my blog makes Micah hun­gry. I can’t think of higher praise

Tags: food