An unexpected love affair with Filbert.

The recipe sounded, felt, smelled, looked, tasted like poetry.

Warm, roasted hazelnuts rolling free of their skins in a clean kitchen towel, milk chocolate flakes melted by hot cream, sweet, nutty milk stirred into a custard, every step was a beautiful, satisfying aroma of things to come.

Engaging in some light reading with The Perfect Scoop, my dad bookmarked the recipe for gianduja gelato.

I might have passed over it, favoring fruit flavors in this late summer season, and preferring bitter dark chocolates to the creamy milks.

It may be the best ice cream I've ever eaten.

But please, disregard the instruction to "discard the hazelnuts" after infusing the milk with the roasted, ground nuts. They can be put back in the oven, covered with the milky, sugary residue, and roasted until they become the perfect crispy topping to sprinkle over the thick, rich, smooth gianduja gelato.

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.