Ice Cream Cupcakes

Ok, this recipe is so cute it almost makes me want to ralph. Except for the fact that it is so friggin perfect for a summer evening, I would have completely denied that I ever made it. Lucky for you, it is perfectly one-, two-, or twenty-person sized, so it made the blog cut! Bonus: super easy.

Ice Cream Cupcakes

(serves as many or as few as you want, depending on how much of the ingredients you buy; takes at least 2 hours)

1 slice pound cake, about 1 inch thick

2 scoops ice cream

freshly whipped cream

• Take two cupcake liners (foil works best, but doubled-up paper will probably work too) and cut two circles of pound cake to fit in the bottom. Top with a scoop of ice cream and set in freezer to harden, at least 1 hour.

• Whip your cream or break out the cool whip and "ice" the "cupcakes" with whipped cream. Return to the freezer to fully freeze, another hour.

Notes: I used lemon pound cake and blueberry ice cream, but work with any combination of flavors you like. Truly, this little concoction would make an adorable dinner party denouement: perfect single-size, able to be prepared well ahead of time. If you just want one or two, try buying a single slice of pound cake from your local bakery.

Jammy Jam

I've been doing some jamming lately, taking advantage of delicious Massachusetts berries (thanks Carrie and Cory!) and training myself to preserve the good stuff while it's bounteous.

This post is not a recipe or an instructional, mostly just a tip that I've learned through a little practice. Ever noticed how tooth-bracingly sweet many jams are? Ever heard of agave nectar?

It's a sweetener extracted from the agave plant, mostly found in the southwest U.S. and Mexico. It resembles honey, though it's sweeter and with a much lower glycemic index--meaning it doesn't spike your blood sugar and trigger and insulin response the way sugar does.

Very roughly speaking, this is the principle that diets like Sugar Busters, Nutrisystem, and in some ways Weight Watchers operate on: good sugars (certain fruits, breads, lactose, etc.) versus less advantageous ones (refined sugars, processed foods, corn syrup, etc.). The "better" sugars don't invoke the insulin response, which, when it runs out of calories to process, simply stores fat. A lower glycemic index = lower sugar response = less fat storage.

PHEW, all that to say, I've been making jam with agave syrup instead of sugar lately. All you need is a low sugar pectin like Pomona's, and a really big pot. Check Pomona out. You'll thank me, and be proud of yourself for making your own jam!

Cold Cantaloupe Soup

Oh baby, nothing like cold soup in the summer. No stove. No oven. No heat.

Fruit soup is usually considered more of an appetizer or dessert course than the main event itself. It's up to you, really. You like fruit? Me too! Sounds like a meal!

Cold Cantaloupe Soup

(serves 4 as a side/app; 2 as the whole deal; total time about 10 minutes)

1 small cantaloupe, peeled, seeded and cut into chunks

1/3 cup orange juice

1/3 cup yogurt

1 Tbsp lime juice (lemon will do in a pinch)

1 Tbsp chopped mint

• Place everybody in food processor or blender and whiz, whiz, whiz until nice and creamy, about 1 minute (can be done in batches if you're working with a small machine). Store in refrigerator. Will keep about a week.

Why you should join a CSA

Because you don't get to choose your vegetables; they choose you.

This is a carrot. Apparently, carrots don't all come in the comforting, non-trifurcated shape you are used to. And you know why you've never seen this carrot? Because the grocery store won't take it. The grocery store only wants pretty produce, the kind that shows very little signs of ever having touched the earth. The grocery store wants huge, cascading mountains of fire-engine tomatoes and glossy apples. Its intentions may once have been good--scary looking produce has a better chance of being diseased produce--but have become instead a marketing strategy designed to give you warm, fuzzy feelings about your purchasing options and make you want to use them.

Do I sound cynical? I will now admit that I marched down to Whole Foods today and bought several items from their displays (though, I must say, I was hunting for their reassuring signs, "I'm a Local!", indicating food that has come from nearby farms). Wandering the produce aisles in big, fancy grocery stores is, for me, like gliding dreamily through shoe stores for some women or scholars losing themselves amid towers of titles in bookstores. It's comforting. It's attractive. It makes me hungry.

But it's also a bit of an illusion. A disappointingly mediocre amount of those piles will actually be purchased, taken home, and eaten. It seems the only way to convince us that we want something is to show us more than we will ever need, and then throw half of it away.

Creamy "green" barley

As the weather maintains its sweltering severity and my days are already full of working and errand running and trying to see my husband and sleeping somewhere in there, I find myself gravitating more and more to one-dish meals. I don't mean Food TV creations designed to cause you the least amount of hassle (and, correspondingly, the least possible interaction with your food). I mean decently-rounded meals that can be stirred together in one bowl and happily, if somewhat lazily, consumed. Spoon to mouth, that's all I'm asking for.

Since ice cream does not a meal make (at least not every night), I'm falling back on my old steadies, whole grains. Tonight I wanted a creamy bowl of pearled barley flecked with nutrient-rich green vegetables. Instead of making a cream sauce, then stirring my grains in at the end, I had a thought: why not just take the elements of the cream sauce and just cook the barley straight in it? Remove a step (and a dirty dish)? Wouldn't you know, it worked!

As always, use the vegetables of your choice, just make sure they're cooked--or sufficiently edible--first. This would certainly be a decent meal on its own, but we added some broiled fish and it was perfect. It's best eaten warm, but can be stored in the fridge and reheated later.

Creamy "Green" Barley

(serves 2-3; start to finish about 45 minutes)

1/2 medium onion, diced

1 cup chicken or vegetable broth

1 cup milk

2/3 cup pearled barley

1/2 cup broccoli florets

2 cloves garlic

4 stems of greens of your choice (I used collards)

1/4 cup peas, freshly shelled or frozen, defrosted

1/4 cup chopped parsley

1 Tbsp lemon juice

Salt, pepper, and olive oil

1. To reduce dishes, start by filling a medium saucepan with water and bring to a boil. Stem and slice green leaves into thin strips and blanche in boiling water 5-7 minutes, until tender. Drain.
2. Now, take that same saucepan and over medium high heat, saute onions with a little oil and a sprinkle of salt about 5 minutes, until translucent. Add broth (or water, alternately), milk, barley, and 1 tsp salt. Bring to a simmer then reduce heat and cook until almost all liquid is absorbed, about 30 minutes. Take it off heat before the barley has sucked up all liquid--that's where your creaminess will come from.
3. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 400º. Toss broccoli and garlic cloves in olive oil and salt. Roast 20 minutes. (Alternately, steam or saute broccoli until firm-tender.)
4. When barley is ready, stir in vegetables and lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper.

**Very important note!! What I forgot: bacon. I had every intention of frying a few slices of bacon and stirring in their tiny crumbles. Try it, and tell me how it went.

Cantaloupe Sorbet

If you ask me--and I'm sure you would, given the opportunity--the best thing about summer is not freedom from school or warm lazy evenings or even (gasp!) the Red Sox.

It's fruit.

Everywhere blooming, growing, weighing down bushes, sagging on vines, bursting with sweetness, ripening too quickly, then disappearing before you have the chance to get sick of it. Because David and I have been working hard at eating as locally as possible, and because we live just south of the North Pole, our fruit season is short. But don't pity us. We are extravagant (hence the bounty of cantaloupe recipes you've been/will be seeing). It is my personal goal to overindulge on every fruit in its season, so I can live without until it comes again.

I recently invested in a copy of Lindsey Shere's Chez Panisse Desserts, a brilliant but simple approach to enjoying the sweeter part of your meal in line with the seasons. Shere has a lovely way of bringing out the essence of whatever she's highlighting, not drowning it in cream cheese icing or pounds of cocoa powder. It is in this book that she includes a "sherbet" recipe for almost every fruit--and almost every recipe is identical.

Fruit + sugar = sorbet.

Cantaloupe Sorbet

(serves 3-4 but freezes nicely; start to finish 3 hours; requires food processor or blender)

1 medium cantaloupe

3/4 cup sugar

1 Tbsp vodka or other liquor of your choice (optional)

1. Peel, seed, and cut cantaloupe into large chunks. Place in food processor or blender with sugar and liquor and process until smooth and sugar has dissolved. Place in ice cream maker and churn or pour into container and place in freezer, stirring every 30 minutes until frozen through.

Note: after a day or two in the freezer, this sorbet will firm up. A few days later, if it's still lingering, be sure to let it sit out for 10-ish minutes (or give it 20 seconds in the microwave) and stir well before consuming.

Peach...something

Total failure as a downsized cobbler, total GENIUS as an ice cream accessory.

Cobbler can be a very personal thing: some devoted to Grammy's biscuit topping, some preferring the kind of batter that rises up around the fruit, some only eat it from a skillet ... cakey, cornmeal, gooey, crunchy. Show me ten ladies, each with a basket of fruit, and I'll show you ten different ways to throw together a cobbler.

I happen to be of the camp that greatly dislikes the "biscuit method," that is, the piling of the fruit on the bottom and the plunking of biscuit-like dough in rounds on top. I don't like my fruit and my topping segregated into different layers, usually dry and crumbly ones that I must fork through like a picky child hunting for the good stuff.

Enter this delightful peach cobbler recipe from the William and Mary Cookbook of all places. It works fantastically as a 13x9-inch crowd pleaser, but how about just for two? Well, the answer is (according to my math), not so good. I believe my problem was pan size. I went too big, leaving the batter too much room to spread out and not enough resistance to rise. The result was about an inch of bubbly caramel interspersed with peach slices and cake. Unsuccessful as a stand-alone entity, but unbelievable spooned over ice cream. You're welcome.

Peach Cobbler Ice Cream Topping

(serves 2; start to finish about 40 minutes. If you use a 3x3 or smaller pan, you might just get something resembling cobbler)

1 medium peach

2 tsp lemon juice

1/4 cup brown sugar

pinch cinnamon

2 1/2 Tbsp flour

2 Tbsp sugar

1/2 tsp baking powder

pinch salt

3 Tbsp milk

1 Tbsp butter, melted

1. Preheat oven to 350º. Slice peach (no need to peel) into wedges and layer in a small pan. I used a 4x4 which gave me more of a topping than a cake. If you go smaller, you may have better luck achieving cobblerness. Pour lemon juice over slices and sprinkle brown sugar and cinnamon over top.
2. In a small bowl, combine flour, sugar, powder, salt, and milk. Whisk smooth; batter will be thin. Pour over peaches and drizzle melted butter over all. Bake 35-ish minutes, until edges are nice and bubbly. Serve with ice cream.