Because we don't have enough ice cream in the freezer already.

Last weekend I drove down to Santa Barbara to visit my grandmother, and to pick up a slightly used, underutilized kitchen unit for my own use.

When we returned, plus one standing mixer and one grandmother, waiting for me in my parents' freezer was an additional gift.

Then, in our meanderings, my grandmother found some apricots at the local corner grocery that were nearly exploding with over-ripeness.

Luckily, as of last week, I happened to have David Lebovitz's book The Perfect Scoop - which includes a very simple apricot sorbet recipe.

And so, all these lovely gifts from my family came together in the form of an intense scoop of sweet, cold apricot.

As the saying goes, the best gifts are the ones that keep on giving.

It was almost like it was my birthday or something.

What I Did During My Summer Vacation

Life and cooking have had their ups and downs lately, a little more of each than usual. But the good moments outweigh the bad, so that's alright then.

Oh, and I moved back to California. For good. And just in time for tomatoes.

(I still love Philly though! But I hella love Oakland.)

Rhubarb is the new breakfast.

It kept selling out in the first hours of the market. Pounds of red stalks, sitting in tubs behind the farmers, reserved for customers who had had more forethought than I. For three weeks I kept missing the rhubarb. So when I finally arrived at my local farmer's market while one of my favorite farmerstands still had red piles of the bitter plant on their tables, I bought two pounds of it. And then I had two pounds of rhubarb. And no plans.

Pie is, of course, the traditional thing to make with the brilliant stalks. It's usually paired with strawberries, to add sweetness and flavor to the mild, bitter, and somewhat stringy rhubarb. And I like it a lot. Maybe I'll go there. But it's been rather hot of late, and I've been trying to avoid using the oven.

Plus i was in New York a few weeks ago, to watch my little sister perform a crazy, awesome, intense play with lots of dildos, and while I was there, I stopped to get some shaved ice with a friend of mine. The awesome shaved ice dude was using a rhubarb syrup, and I was surprised at the delicate taste that resulted. And thought, "hey, I could do that. I could do that and then use it for drinks!"

I made two different syrups, one just rhubarb and the other with an additional mix of ginger and orange zest. After checking with the usual food blogs and doing a few google searches I used this recipe as a base, which is also where the idea for the ginger came from.

This is a very subtle syrup - sweet, not very strong, and we kept adding more to our cheap, sparkling wine so that we could taste the rhubarb. Turns out, the reason it's so rarely seen on its own is that rhubarb is a fairly bland, mild flavor. Although very pretty.

Adding the ginger, and about a tablespoon of orange zest helped considerably. Although my love of all things ginger has already been documented here, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.

For me, the big success was the remaining solids - mixed together (and therefore rather gingery) they make a pretty lovely jam!

So we had rhubarb jam-stuff and biscuits and rhubarb-mimosas with our coffee and chorizo con huevos the next morning.

Rhubarb: It's what's for breakfast.

Rhubarb Syrups

Boil, then simmer for 20 minutes:

4 cups (1 and 1/3 lbs) chopped rhubarb

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

Strain (ideally through cheesecloth) and refrigerate. 

Retain solids and use them as you would jam. 

For rhubarb-ginger syrup, boil, then simmer for 20 minutes:

2 cups (2/3 lb) chopped rhubarb

6 or 7 slices of peeled, fresh ginger, about 1/3 inch thick (maybe about two inches of ginger root?)

1 tb orange zest

Strain and refrigerate. 

Retain solids and use them as you would jam. 

For drinking, combine:

1 part chilled rhubarb syrup

3 parts chilled, cheap sparkling wine

Fat is for summer too.

For my meat-focused friend's birthday, I got him this meat-filled book, which is connected to the Carcutepalooza Year of Meat challenge that he's been taking part in - albeit without blogging about it. Which means I get to.

His adventures have been hinted at before, but since I participated in this one, and because it was extra photogenic, and also because I've made sausage once before with another friend and thus was the resident expert, I thought it warranted its own post.

The project was also assisted by my lovely housemate's new grinder/stuffer attachment for the standing mixer. When I'm a big kid, with a real job and my own kitchen, I am getting a standing mixer and all its attachment. It's so dope. 

Also amazing: the pork shoulder butt and the fat back we got from Cannuli's. They are reliably awesome. And so was the freshly ground pork, which narrowly avoided getting completely eaten before stuffing only by a well-timed trip to the phở place down the street.

Cannuli's also sells casings, which are fun and gross. Raw pig intestine, as if you didn't know.

Stuffing the sausage is the most difficult part of the whole sausaging saga- tedious mostly, and prone to a lot of dick jokes. If I were getting a PhD in sociology, it would involve traveling the world, watching people from all cultures and walks of life stuff sausages, and cataloging their dick jokes. It would have a lot of graphs and sausage recipes.

Some of our links were pretty ugly and misshapen, but we did eventually get the hang of it. The ugly sausages were just cooked up for our post-stuffing lunch.

This is one of those perfect summer meals that make me thankful for the heat and the long hours and the asparagus.

I won't transcribe the recipe, because we took it verbatim out of the book, but we made a (not very) spicy Italian sausage. It was beautiful, once we worked out the kinks.

With all that said, it's a hell of a lot easier to buy it from the butcher.

Hot, Hot, Hot

The weather is getting really hot and sticky here, and by that I mean that it's getting inappropriate and taking off all its clothes. Time to break out the ice cream maker and the spicy peppers.

When my increasingly frequent partner-in-crime demanded that we make ice cream with his stash of extra- spicy habañeros, I grabbed David Lebovitz's excellent cookbook and did a quick google search. We couldn't find a recipe that did exactly what we wanted, but it seemed well within our comfort zone of slightly odd but totally edible and maybe even tasty cooking projects.

We were wrong. This ice cream went above and beyond tasty. The only think I would change is the quantities. More of everything.

Especially more habañeros. We candied them for about an hour, which gave them a lovely texture and flavor, with a mild - but still present - spiciness. They were perfect, but due to concerns about the spiciness, we only processed three chilis. Next time I'd do everything exactly the same, but up the number of habañeros used.

The candied chili peppers were subtle enough that we needed a low-key ice cream to accentuate their flavors. David Lebovitz's vanilla ice cream recipe did not disappoint. The smooth, rich vanilla made an excellent showcase.

This is one of those recipes that I plan on coming back to, and I'm so happy to have discovered it in the first week of this hot Philadelphia summer.

The only problem is what to do with the intensely spicy simple syrup left over after the candying process. We've bandied around a few ideas - put a few drops in drinks, use it to candy bacon, put some in the actual ice cream - but for now it's in the freezer, with a warning sign in large lettering. Suggestions welcome!

Vanilla-Habañero Ice cream

Wash well:

6-10 habañero chili peppers

De-seed peppers, and slice into small pieces. Don't touch your eyes or your face or any material objects. You are now covered in spicy.

Boil together:

1 cup sugar

2 cups water

Add chili pepper pieces and simmer for an hour. Strain out chilis, reserving syrup for another use (if we can figure one out...). Dry overnight, then place in a freezer.

Make David Lebovitz's easy, delicious:

vanilla ice cream

Once the ice cream has churned, stir in the frozen habañero pieces. Freeze until stiff, serve.

This was particularly excellent after we ate Matt's spicy chorizo as part of his monthly Charcutepalooza challenge. That recipe, although we made a few variations (mostly on amount and type of chili pepper) can be found here.

This is how Californians deal with East Coast summers.