Sweet Yet Sour

Galette – with Cherries, Vodka and Ice Cream

Sunday, August 29th, 2010 | Cooking | 1 Comment

As one of the original members of Have the Cake, I should have been baking every month… But alas, I have two young children and not a lot of time for anything other than changing diapers, nursing, potty training, etc.

But, the hot winds of August brought Rena to Colorado and with the extra hands in the house I was able to whip up a Cherry Galette to meet this month’s challenge.

Since I have the lovely, but evil, ice cream maker we decided to first make some ice cream to accompany the galette. We were inspired by Katie’s post, with a delicious sounding roasted cinnamon ice cream that she made to go with her dark chocolate and blueberry galette.  We decided upon a recipe for Cinnamon Brown Sugar ice cream that would go nicely with the galette.

The ice cream is simple: 1 cup whole milk, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp vanilla extract and 2 cups of cream.  Mix until the sugar is dissolved and put in the ice cream maker.  Anna, who was having a “I’m staying in my Cookie Monster pajamas all day” day, helped:

Cookie Monster Stirs the Ice Cream

(All photos, by the way, are courtesy of Rena, who has a much nicer camera that I do.)

Next, I made my standard pie crust, 1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cup unsalted butter, 1 tsp salt, and when it came time to add the water, I used a new trick that I learned from my mother, and added Vodka to the crust.  According to my mother this makes the crust easier to roll out and bakes out nicely.  Unfortunately, I had not paid attention to my mother when she was giving me these instructions (a lifelong problem, really) and I thought she meant replace all the water with Vodka… Turns out she meant only about 3 Tablespoons of Vodka should go in, with the water filling in the remainder until the crust comes together.  Oh well!  It was lovely crust anyway…

While we waited for the crust to cool in the refrigerator, Anna took a ride on her new scooter:

Of course the scooter is pink...

And I worked on finding Henry’s ticklish parts.  Oh look! I think I found a spot!

It's right there under his chin!

I have a lot of pie cherries from the tree in my parents’ front yard, so while the pie crust cooled, the pie cherries sat and soaked up some sugar and almond extract:

Pie Cherries

Pie cherries, if you’ve never had them, are not sweet cherries that you can just pop in your mouth.  They are very sour by nature, but when mixed with enough sugar and whatever else you want to add (my mother always adds almond extract) they make lovely pie filling.

Once the pie crust had cooled enough I rolled out the dough and added the cherries, sprinkled the crust with sugar and baked it at 400 for 45 minutes.  Needless to say, although Rena said it several times anyway, “It’s rustic”.  I just wasn’t capable of making this one pretty…

Finished Galette

But that’s okay, because with a scoop (or two) of the Cinnamon Brown Sugar ice cream, it was a dream of a galette.

Cherry Galette and Cinnamon Brown Sugar Ice Cream

I’m pretty sure all that Vodka cooked out of the crust, but who cares if it didn’t?

Henry and The Rice Cereal

Thursday, August 5th, 2010 | Henry | 4 Comments

Henry - Clean and Cute

And here’s what he looked like after a few spoonfuls of rice cereal:

Is there something on my chin?

The goal of these first few meals is mostly to get the baby used to eating from a spoon and to taste the new food.  Success can generally be measured by whether or not more cereal makes it into the baby’s mouth than is splattered in the surrounding area.  As you can see from the picture below, we are not at that stage quite yet:

More on the bib than in the boy

Hence, the first few feedings are followed by a nice warm one of these:

And now it's bath time...

Since Henry’s mama has been heretofore his only source of meals, this is an exciting stage for me.  Perhaps soon I can start to eat a little more dairy, chocolate and then a gin and tonic (or two!) every once in a while.  And since Henry has been refusing a bottle for the past few months, this gives Mike another option if Henry gets hungry and I ever get to leave the house – it’s a win-win situation.  In a few weeks we can start on pureed vegetables and have a whole battery of colorful foods to splatter all over Henry and anything within four feet.  I’ll post more pictures of that when that day comes…