OMG a Recipe: Cheesecake Ice Cream to Soothe the Savage Computerbeast

I spent a whole Sunday afternoon reorganizing my music playlists. The best thing about getting a new computer is the most annoying thing: a clean slate. Especially with music, the way mp3s have gotten all tricksy-Hobbit with embedded DRMs and music playing software saying, "What playlists? You don't have any playlists. Please, buy this new Justin Bieber album - it's hotttttt!" Maybe there's easier ways to get around this First World Problem, but I did it The Hard Way, sifting through old stored music, re-compiling files in a single location versus spread out like computerized sneeze spittle. In short, my mindgrape was crushed and I needed some Ice Cream Non-Sexual Healing. Enter: Blackberry Cheesecake Ice Cream. Commence Moonwalking, as I finally got my Michael Jackson hits in the order I like them.

Cheesecake and berry ice cream - what's not to love? - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I keep saying, "This is the last ode to Summer... no, this is the last ode to Summer." I think this one might possibly be it, but don't be surprised if some summer squash posts randomly show up in the middle of November. The berry season is sweet, but agonizingly short, and with an equally short shelf life. For all the free blackberries you can pick on the roadside, you'll never eat all of them before they start getting mushy and slimy. Like raspberries, they're just too delicate and fleeting like the seasonal moment that bore them, hence the invention of jams and jellies. This seasonal conundrum applies equally to the wild red huckleberries that grow in bushy shrubs that tend to pop up from rotted tree stumps -- which we have an abundance of in the Northwest, including my backyard. The little red berries are pretty, but tart, and kind of an effort to pick, as even the largest ones never get bigger than a pea and they're delicate. But I try to gather at least a few cupfuls every season and then stare at them, wondering what the heck I'm going to do with them, since they're wicked tart. Last year, I made a sour jam from the berries and used it with beets on a really tasty savory tart. I picked even less berries this time, not enough to bake tarts with, but I thought, let's sweeten things up because I think they would look beautiful swirled in a cheesecake-flavored ice cream. (Music to play while making ice cream, for its meditative beat track: Spoon's "I Turn My Camera on")

Wild berry ice cream, and how a creepy LV window display made me think of the berries - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Brain, I like your way of thinking. Even if it is a bit of a one-sided conversation. One of the things I love best about cheesecake is how incredibly dense it is. Cheesecake, you are my density, if George McFly were awkwardly wooing a dessert. I wanted the ice cream base to be as rich as possible, without just being a sweetened lard bomb. I opted for half and half versus heavy cream, and used a brick of cream cheese to round out the richness, plus add that bit of sourness that you get with cheesecake. No eggs in this, there's plenty of fat to emulsify into a rich custard-like base. Just some sugar and all that went into the blender, to make sure everything was fully liquefied. I let the base chill in the fridge overnight and made a quick stovetop sugar-sweetened jam from the wild berries, straining out all the seeds and skins so that it would be a smooth jelly to swirl into the churned ice cream. That's really the trick to getting that pretty swirl, adding dollops of a fruit jam over the ice cream, swirling lightly, then layering with more of the churned ice cream. Let it freeze, fully set, and your ice cream scoop digging into those layers will make it look magical in your food blog-approved serving dish. (Music to play while taking annoyingly endless food photos: Duran Duran's "Girls on Film")

And guess what? It really tasted like a frozen cheesecake, minus the graham cracker crust. Will wonders never cease! I'm sure if I wanted to be more industrious, I'd have baked graham crackers from scratch, crumbled and made them into a streusel topping to finish the dish. But good Lord, man, I was mad for dessert. I was so in love with this that I pretty much finished off that whole batch in a week and wanted to make another one. By then the blackberries were in full swing, so I ran down the hill to the massive bramble that just lines this whole part of the street and picked about a quart's worth. They weren't particularly sweet. I had Indy with me and while she ate a few, she wasn't so excited about them so as to take the liberty of picking and eating them on her own. Which is a shame because, do you know how funny-cute it is to see a dog gingerly pick berries and eat them? (Music to play while picking berries with your fuzzy BFF against a summery, picturesque backdrop: Harry Connick Jr.'s "A Wink and a Smile")

Fresh-picked blackberries and a ghoulish vampire-like strained berry sauce - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I repeated the same steps of thrown-together ice cream base, including making a much larger batch of blackberry jam, probably more than what the ice cream could handle, but whatever. Everything chilled, ice cream was churned, blackberry jam was overly-swirled, and it patiently awaited the freezer's work while I faced my music organization conundrum. It felt like a wasted Sunday, like spending a whole day reorganizing sock drawers and alphabetizing your DVDs, but the drudgery was rewarded with a bowl of blackberry cheesecake ice cream and rocking out to a playlist that included They Might Be Giants, Ben Folds, Cake, The Beach Boys, Dead or Alive, Lily Allen and Stevie Wonder. (Music to listen to while writing a blog post: Nicola Conte's Bossa Per Due album on shuffle, because it's peppy and jazzy and I can't write when there's lyrics messing with my brain)

Frozen Cheesecake Ice Cream

Ingredients:
1 pint of half and half
1 8oz package of cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar 

Reserve 1 cup of fruit jam or jelly - can be homemade or store-bought

Special tools/gear: blender and ice cream maker. 

Combine the half and half, cream cheese and sugar into the blender and blend until smooth and the cream cheese is fully incorporated into the liquid. Chill the ice cream base for a couple of hours or overnight. 

If you're making your own jam for the ice cream, strain out the seeds/skins of the cooked down fruit to give it a smooth consistency. Store bought jam is fine, since you don't need a lot of it to achieve the swirl pattern in the ice cream. You can even use chocolate sauce or caramel if you want to make it a chocolate or caramel cheesecake, you wild devil, you.

Follow the instructions on your ice cream maker. When the base is churned, put a third of the base in the final serving container -- I like a Pyrex loaf pan with a snap-top cover. Put a few spoonfuls of the jam on the ice cream and lightly swirl, then add another layer of the churned ice cream, and spoonfuls of jam and continue until everything is in the container. Seal that bad boy up and let it set up in the freezer for a few hours before serving. And yes, You're Welcome.

UnRecipe: Berries Gone Wild

The end of summer signals one significant thing -- load up on Vitamin D pills, because the sun is disappearing for months and you don't want to get rickets. Oh yeah... and there's lots of berries in season!

Berry gory looking dessert you've got there - Photo by Wasabi Prime

While an alarmingly gory color and texture, this is blackberry jam spooned over some Greek yogurt, and not some disturbing dessert that one of the vampires from True Blood might eat. And contrary to the name, the berry is not black at all, but, duh, like that's a surprise. It's wickedly magenta-hued, especially when you start cooking the berries down for jam, which is what I did recently. The nice thing about blackberries is that they are free, minus a little bit of manual labor. I was off the hook, as Mr. Wasabi's family was in town and while I was out, they spent an afternoon picking blackberries from a wall of scruff that's growing down our street on an empty lot. It's probably private property or city-owned, but everyone heads there, as it's got full-sun, the berries ripen there pretty fast, and no one's called the Duvall Five-0 about our renegade gang of berry pickers. Yet. Having three people picking berries at once means you end up with several pounds of the stuff. They weren't super-sweet, but they were super-free and even tart berries can make for good jam.

We be jammin' at Wasabi's - Photos by Wasabi Prime

So I jammed-out for a morning, washing the berries and just throwing them into a large pot to cook down. I like keeping it a little chunky, so I don't totally cook them into a smooth pulp, plus I keep the seeds in, so it's quite a textural wonderland. Just remember to floss. Because they were tart, I added sugar, maybe a cup's worth to several pounds' worth of berries; not to make it candy-sweet, but something to take the edge off that sourness. I didn't have a primary goal in mind for the jam, I just knew if I didn't cook them down, blackberries are so delicate and moisture-prone, they would mold wicked-fast. Lately, we've been using it on yogurt and ice cream. At the moment, I have a batch of peanut butter custard chilling out, awaiting the final churn to make it into ice cream, and I'm going to mix ribbons of the last bits of jam in the final stage, right before it freezes. While I've never been a fan of PB and J sandwiches (I was more of a PB and honey sandwich kind of girl), I think as an ice cream, it will be quite a treat. Unfortunately the finished product wasn't ready at the time of this post, but stay tuned, I'm sure I'll post pictures of the peanut butter and jelly ice cream on Twittter, Flickr and/or Facebook. (Post Script - since this post was written/published, the ice cream has been made and nearly gobbled up! Will likely do a post later, but here's a peek, if you want to see an early photo, on my Flickr page.)

Farmers market Smurfberry ice cream - Photos by Wasabi Prime

A berry ice cream I made a little while ago and did take photos of, was a boysenberry and blueberry ice cream. This was supposed to be a vanilla ice cream with ribbons of boysenberry-blueberry jam mixed in. But I got overeager and churned the jam with the ice cream and wound up with Smurf Ice Cream. Lesson learned; drizzle the jam in after the ice cream is churned, layering and swirling the jam with the churned ice cream. Got it. Much thanks to Alexandra Hedin for the tip; she's always got the good kitchen advice! The color was a very intense purple-blue, but the ice cream was good. It just looked a little unreal and I think your brain kept sending signals to the tastebuds to expect bubblegum grape flavor. I had picked up several containers of enormous blueberries and a basket of ridiculously large, plump boysenberries at the farmers market and was so excited to use them. So excited, I made an ice cream that looked like I ground up Smurfs to make it. Have a Smurfy day yourself, you annoying little blue buggers.

Do you know the Muffin Man? Would you like to? - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I saved enough of the blueberries to make my favorite blueberry pecan muffins. This is a bit of a nostalgic recipe for me, as it was featured on one of my earlier posts. It wasn't my recipe, it was originally from one of my favorite blogs, Omnomicon, who offered it up as one of the best blueberry muffin recipes EVER. And I have to admit, it's pretty dang good. Crunchy pecans with big bites of blueberry, all mixed in with a really moist, dense cake. Granted, my first attempt at it was a fail, as I fooled with the recipe, using whole wheat flour and yogurt instead of buttermilk. Don't mess with baking recipes, they bite you in the derriere. I made it again, they came out great, and since then, this has been one of my favorite "company" recipes, when people are visiting and it's more than just Mr. Wasabi and I to eat these dangerously delicious things. I think they bake up especially well in the giant Texas-sized muffin tins, since the larger size is in better proportion to the big berries and chunky pecans. They also photograph nicely. But then you wind up with muffins the size of small cakes, and you feel twice as guilty for eating a whole one all by yourself. Well, maybe not that guilty...

Berries for all... even a stalking Indy - Photos by Wasabi Prime

So, that was our berry season in a nutshell. It's nice to enjoy fruits in the height of their season, you take full advantage of their freshness and kind of wear yourself out from the experience until the next year, which is sort of the point. It keeps you from being tempted to buy blueberries in the middle of winter, which probably came from some other continent. Until next year then, berries...So long and thanks for all the antioxidants.

UnRecipe: Chasing Summer's Shadow

Our scale is broken, or needing a battery replacement, and it's probably just as well because I've been on a serious baking/dessert kick, no thanks to the fleeting days of summer. I feel like a bear fattening up for winter, I just need to find a cozy cave to crawl into for the next few months. The balmy sunny season seemed to have made a hasty exit, stage left, but in its wake were some fleeting handfuls of blackberries, which I put to good use. Exit summer, enter Blackberry Clafoutis and Buttermilk Blackberry Ice Cream Float in Lavender Soda.

Clafoutis... Clafoutis Kline... (really bad "Overboard" botched quote) - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I've never made a clafoutis before, but it sounded fancy and I had a recipe lying around from a magazine. It's like a big, fruity souffle you make in a pan, dotted with fresh summer fruit. I should have had more blackberries and a smaller pan, as my clafoutis turned into a skinny, puffy pancake. It was still delicious, don't get me wrong, but it was stretched too thin and more crepe than cake. Dusted with confectioner's sugar, I honestly didn't care, and its thin-ness only served to provide my brain with the unhealthy logic that it's totally okay to eat half of it in one sitting. I will revisit this dessert and improve on technique to make a proper clafoutis, so consider the dessert gauntlet thrown.

The last of the summer berry haul resulted in me and the ice cream machine, yet again. I love homemade ice cream, what can I say? This latest creation had a buttermilk custard churned with cooked down, sweetened blackberries. It all kind of came together tasting of a berry cheesecake, which is never a bad thing. You know what else isn't a bad thing? A big scoop of that ice cream sitting in seltzer water flavored with lavender simple syrup. If that doesn't taste like pure summer I don't know what does! While the last of the blackberries are gone, it's a nice flavor memory to keep around and a nice reminder of what to look forward to next year.

Blackberry mania at Wasabi Kitchen - Photos by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: Currant Events

My cousin who lives in Sweden inspired this post, along with all the summer berries that have ripened around us. She told me about the five liters of black currants she picked, and then photographed the delicious scones and jams she made from her impressive harvest. We weren't that fortunate with our own berry gathering, only picking whatever was left of the blackberry brambles throughout Duvall, and small currant-like berries from our own backyard. Our modest berry harvest was used for a colorful Pork Tenderloin and Berry Wine Sauce, served with sauteed Swiss Chard.

Pork tenderloin and Swiss chard in a sweetberrahwine sauce - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Yet another recipe-free adventure in MacGyver Cooking-land, this dish was a good way to use up the quickly-softening berries we picked. We were late to the party for gathering blackberries, so most of the bushes had been om-nommed by either people or animals. Too few to bake with, so a sauce seemed like a good solution. After searing the pork tenderloin, I used the same pan with all the delicious drippings leftover to make a wine reduction sauce. I used a bit of pinot noir and threw in the berries when the liquid was starting to cook down. It made for a richly-colored sauce with a concentrated flavor that went well with the mild pork.

Crazy colors of summer: fresh Swiss chard, red currants, blackberries - Photos by Wasabi Prime

We had two bouquet-like bunches of Swiss chard from the Redmond Farmer's Market. They were in a stunning array of colors -- you didn't know whether to eat it or put it in a vase!
We went with the first option and chopped everything up and wilted them down in a hot pan. Chard has a nice peppery, bitter flavor that tastes amazing with a big chunk of meat, or even something creamy like a fried egg. My only disappointment was not buying more, since two whole bunches cook down to maybe enough for a couple of servings. Talk about shrinkage...

My cousin's currant-rich dishes would have made for a great dessert after the berry-sauced tenderloin and veggie side. I'll just have to be content with her photo of the scones and jam. I hope you're as hungry as I am, looking at the goodies she made!

Treats from afar - fruits of my cousin's labor! Photo by Dawn Yoshimura

* Post Script - Serious thanks go out to Serious Eats' Photograzing for posting pics of the Swiss chard and tenderloin!