32 Flavor Challenge - Flavor #3 Maui mint chocolate chipper

This winter, Elena, Anna and I went on a trip to Hawaii, spending most of our space journey on the island of Maui. In remembrance of the good times we had and the friends we made I concocted this recipe. What puts the aloha in this recipe is a couple teabags from Maui, they contain things like peppermint, mamaki, lemon grass, chamomile, cinnamon bark and star anise. At first I was just gonna make regular mint chocolate chip (because it's my fave), but then I remembered I had these magical teabags. So into the pot they went. I'm glad I added them, I think it brought the ice cream to the next flavor dimension. Oh! And you can purchase these awesome teas online if you so desire. Anyways so many Maui stories to tell, but we're here for ice cream, so let's keep on keepin' on. 

Elena and I in between Big Beach & Little Beach

Flavor #3 Maui mint chocolate chipper

Ingredients:

2 Cans coconut milk (A little less than 4 C.)

2 Makawao mint teabags 

3 C. fresh mint

½ C. sugar

1 t. vanilla extract

*If you, understandably, can't obtain these teabags, a normal mint tea would be fine too, or you can omit the tea bags entirely and just add more mint. OR you can try to recreate the teabags. 

Unlike the other flavors posted so far, this recipe uses coconut, resulting in a creamier ice cream and does not require the thickening magic of arrowroot. To begin the ice cream process, go ahead and pour your coconut milk into a medium sized sauce pan. Heat it on medium, making sure that it does boil. 

As that's heating up grab your mint and sort through it. I chopped up my mint a bit, but in hindsight I don't think it's necessary, as it just made straining out the mint more difficult. In my bunch of mint I found an assortment of insects including this fellow here, so be careful!

So cute! So slimy!

Once your coconut milk is warmed up, go ahead and add the mint and teabag. Turn the heat down to low, and just let those flavors infuse for about 30 minutes or so. You could probably infuse for a shorter amount of time, but I wanted to get as much mint as possible into my ice cream.

Some serious infusion going on here.

After your coconut milk has been infused go ahead and strain out the leaves and tea bag. I just used a slotted spoon so I wouldn't have to deal with pouring hot liquids through a strainer or something like that. Then let that mixture chill in the fridge. If I haven't mentioned it already, it's extremely important to make sure your pre-ice cream slurry is thoroughly chilled before you put it in the ice cream maker! If it's not chilled your ice cream will not freeze as well. I usually let my mixtures chill for like 5-6 hours, if not overnight. So be patient!  When your ice cream batter is nice and chilled, get the chocolate ready.

Just choppin' some chocolate.

So this step will be different for different people and their ice cream makers....I have a nice little hand cranker so I got my ice cream about half of the way done and then added the chocolate shavings. Using a spoon to cram them in doesn't hurt either.

And there you have it! Delicious Maui minty ice cream. My batch turned out extremely minty, which is what I was going for. Every burp was really minty, so it may be good in lieu of gum/breath mints/mouthwash/toothpaste/etc. I've got a lot of exciting flavors coming up and i'm trying to keep up with the blogs. I have made a new flavor every day since the conception of this idea, but I can't seem to blog as regularly. And I'm trying to hype up this project, how do I go about doing that?!

America's Next Top Matza Ball

i've been talking about restaurants a lot and probs not enough about food we've made! we made vegan matzo ball soup a long time ago. it was delicious.

32 Flavor Challenge - Flavor #2 “Sara's Childhood” with Apricots and Cinnamon

First off, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!  I certainly wouldn't have been able to concoct this flavor, inspired by my childhood, without having been birthed....so shout out to my mom, Estrella! I hope she never finds this blog.....

I'm totally the butterfly in the middle. 

So let's get right out into this thing. Maybe you're thinking “whoa, what is up with this flavor name?” Well let me tell you, when I was growing up in California (Concord, CA!) we lived in this little house, the nuclear fam and my paternal grandparents. It was a neat house, we had tons of rose bushes growing along our fence, gardenias and other pink flowers, and best of all an apricot tree. I totally forgot about this tree, until I was shopping the other day at M&M farms, this run of the mill produce market that has a rotating selection of Chilean grown fruits and veggies. 

Not my tree, but a similar one. 

Proust may have had his madeleines, but I had my apricots;tiny, sweet little fruity jewels. I squeezed the apricots available for purchase, making sure to select only the softies, the softer the sweeter is my rule for apricots. Oooh these babies were sweet alright, I bit into them and memories from my childhood came flooding back. Like that that time I pretended to run away by climbing up our apricot tree and just chillin' till someone noticed I was gone. Or eating playdoh in the backyard mmmmm yeah playdoh ice cream. 

Anyways, yeah. Thats what's up with this flavor du jour. Let's get on to the creating.....

Flavor #2 “Sara's Childhood” with Apricots and Cinnamon

Ingredients:

2 T. arrowroot

3 ½ C. soy milk

½ C. pureed apricots (use fresh ones!)

½ C. sugar or other natural sweetener

1 t. pure vanilla extract

3 T. cinnamon

1. In a small bowl, combine ¼ C. of soymilk and arrowroot, blend and set aside.

2. Cut up apricots and puree them in a blender. I used our trust Magic Bullet.

3. In a medium size sauce pan, heat the rest of the soy milk and the pureed apricots to a simmer. Keep stirring, don't let it boil! It's really important to sit a lot, the puree will eventually combine with the milk, so don't be discouraged! 

4. Then add the arrowroot mixture and stir until it thickens. You should be able to feel it thicken. Don't let it boil! Keep the heat nice and low.

5. Once it has thickened, remove the pan from heat, add the sugar and stir till it dissolves. Go ahead and add the vanilla extract and cinnamon. You may want to add more or less cinnamon, depending on how spicy you like your ice cream. I probably used way more than 3 tablespoons to be honest.

6. Let the mixture cool, then refrigerate it till it's nice and cold. The colder the better. Then freeze in ice cream maker.

7. Garnish with fresh apricots if you have any left. Mmmmmm yeah.

"Refreshing" - A. Martin

"Hit's all five flavor stations on my tongue" - A. Fitzgerald

Restaurant Project: Tiengarden

i've wanted to go to tiengarden FOREVER. finally ariela agreed to go with me, although she's been there before. it's a novelty for ME.

tiengarden is a vegan joint on allen street. i was really super excited about going, but ended up kind of non-plussed. this may be because i went for a semi-early lunch, and i don't get really excited about food until after 3:00.

ariela got cold sesame noodles, which were pretty to look at and pretty damn tasty.


i had this bok choy/tofu/carrot/mushroom concoction, which was great, but a lot of bok choy and not a lot of the other stuff.


tiengarden was good, but not as good as i'd anticipated! i give it a b; no plus or minus, just a b. what vegan delights are in my future? only time will tell..

Restaurants: Su Xing House: Philadelphia, PA

lest you believe that everything in philadelphia is totally gross, let me quickly tell you about a wonderful place mr benjamin picante rhine turned me onto during my aforementioned visit: su xing house! su xing is an adorable all-vegetarian chinese joint in center city. i was in such a daze that i neglected to notice exactly where, but menupages says 15th and sansom, so let's go with that.

i'm broke as a joke that isn't particularly funny, so i'm all about LUNCH SPECIALS!

we got miso soup! tough to mess up, wonderful to eat.


ben ordered this gorgeous shredded soy protein in garlic sauce, with a side of braised mushrooms. OM NOM NOM NOM


i had general tso's tofu with a side of seaweed - the best general tso's tofu i've ever had! crispy, light, and the perfect mix of sweet and spicy - and the ginormous chilis lurking between the tofu cubes made me really happy.

congratulations, philadelphia - you have ONE THING that doesn't suck.

Restaurants: Gianna's Grille, Philadelphia, PA

In my fledgling vegan years, I lived in Philadelphia and depended on cute boys to tell me where to find delicious animal-free delights in the City of Brotherly Love. My friend Wish turned me onto Gianna's Grille, which at the time was a legendary vegan pizza joint just off South Street. Gianna's claim to have originated that which we know all over the Eastern seaboard as "Vegan Treats," delightful cupcakes and cakes and other amazing dessert products that defy all explanation! And their pizza was delicious - until the great vegan scandal of 2003 (or so), when it came to light that the cheese they used on their pizza contained casein!

Re-veganized, Gianna's pressed on, and because their desserts were so delicious I never really gave up on them. They quit lying to me about what I was eating, and somehow I never stopped loving them. Lie to me, just keep me well fed - this sounds a lot like most of my romantic misadventures. Anyway, years passed, I moved away from Philadelphia, and Gianna's experienced a lot of changes over the years, including the delightful-but-failed Gianna's Jr. in Center City! Whenever I came back to Philly, I'd always make sure to stop there - so a few weeks ago, I swung by the old S 6th St location for a slice of delicious nostalgia.

And um...


Yeah, Gianna's is done. No selection, rude(r than usual) staff, and then there's this dry, unwelcoming-looking piece of unhappiness they call a Sicilain slice. You really let me down this time, guys.


Um, but I might still pop by for cannoli. Old habits die hard.

The 32 Flavor Challenge

Hello out there! I'm Sara, and this is my first post to "Were you gonna eat that?" (I think). I wanna kick off my recipe with a brief-ish anecdote about ice cream....

So about a year ago the dolls of the dollhouse picked up an ice cream maker at our local Milford, CT church tag sale for about a dollar or so. We were skeptical about it actually working, but the thought of having on demand vegan ice cream was too great a thought for Elena to say no to. Our first attempts at becoming ice creamers were deemed edible by a group of potheads, but that's really not saying much about (cr)edibility... 

Flash forward to May 7, 2009. I had just finished my first year of graduate school, quit my job at an "asian bistro" in a McFlurry of tears and obscenities, and was left with essentially nothing to do! I had dabbled in making food out of felt, getting my brain scanned for money and pillaging my Netflix queue; yet I still felt an emptiness in my heart. 

Felt Edamame. 

Opening up our freezer, I found our trusty little ice cream maker, nice and frozen after all those lonely months. At first I paid it no attention, after all I was on a mission for Tofutti cuties, everyone's favorite processed food dessert. Alas, the box was empty and I was without my creamed ice and sandwich cookie. 

"Saaaaaraaaaaa......", called a faint chilly voice. No one was home and it couldn't be the cat, she had stopped communicating with me after that last acid trip.

I pressed my face deeper and deeper into the freezer until half my body was inside. "Wow! This freezer is a lot bigger than I thought". (Think The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but a freezer). Luckily I was wearing my winter coat so I journeyed onwards, that voice getting closer and closer as I crawled further and further into the icebox.  

Our ice box.

Suddenly, everything went dark and I felt this strange sensation, it was like I was falling, but I knew that couldn't be! Despite being inside my freezer a la Mr. Popper's Penguins, the laws of physics couldn't have failed me! Below me I could see a light, and it was getting closer and closer to me...or was I getting closer and closer to it? I began to make out a faint shape, it was similar to a truck.....strangely similar to an ice cream truck.....ok, it was an ice cream truck. I could no longer cling to rational thought; I had definitely fallen off the edge of reality via my freezer, and I was rapidly approaching a floating ice cream truck. 

I fell and fell, passing the ice cream truck, banana splits, creamsicles, snocones, and other varieties of sundae. (Think Alice in Wonderland, but with ice cream). As I fell through a cloud of rainbow sprinkles, I began to suspect that my descent would never end. But as soon as the thought passed through my brain I landed on the ground with a thud. I looked around and around, and couldn't believe my eyes; standing in front of me was my ice cream maker! It was alive! And talking to me!

“Greetings Sara. So glad you could make it to the nether regions of the fridge, it's awfully lonely back here”.

“Uhhhh.....what do you want from me?”, I asked my ice cream maker. 

“I'm here to inform you about the 32 flavor challenge. You're our only hope!” 

“What are you talking about? Does this have something to do with Baskin Robbins?”

“No, no, no!! Damn that ice cream man!” my little ice cream maker screamed, “We're talkin' about something totally different....Sara, we need you to make 32 flavors of vegan ice cream and we need them to be good, like really good”.

“Well I don't know.....I mean i'm pretty busy”. I lied, I mean who did this ice cream maker think it was?

“Oh c'mon, I know what you do all day....let's be real. The fate of the vegan ice cream universe rest in your hands”.

“But I can't do this alone!”

“Don't worry, I'll be by your side, the two of us will take over the ice cream universe....together”.

“Oh ice cream maker, I love you! Let's get on this challenge!”

When I came to, I was laying on the floor and my roommate Anna was hovering over me.

“Dude, are you ok?”

“My god Anna, I just fell into this parallel ice cream universe and the ice cream maker told me I had to do this 32 flavor challenge to save the ice cream universe....so anyways I am gonna do it”.

I opened the freezer in hopes of showing her where I had been, but it was just a freezer. I took my trusty ice cream maker in my hands, held it close, and whispered into it's handle, “Don't worry baby, we're gonna make it through this”.

“Whoa, dude”, Anna interjected, “you have way too much free time, maybe you should get your brain scanned again”.

Me and my baby after our long journey.

So there you have it. The 32 flavor challenge. Maybe it was a little long winded, but I'm on a mission and I just thought you should know about it. 

Flavor #1 Earl Green Tea

Ingredients:

2 T. arrowroot

4 C. soy milk

5 teabags of Earl Green

½ C. sugar or other natural sweetener

1 t. pure vanilla extract

This recipe is an adaptation of the ice cream recipe from Vegan Planet. Earl Green Tea is like, Earl Grey, but with green tea, rather than black. It's da bomb. I used the Trader Joe's brand. The flavor is quite nice....subtle like other green tea ice creams, but with a hint of Fruit Loopy bergamot oil.

1. In a small bowl, combine ¼ C. of soymilk and arrowroot, blend and set aside.

2. In a medium size sauce pan, heat the rest of the soy milk to a simmer. Keep stirring, don't let it boil! When the milk is heated, add the tea bags and let them steep for about 5 minutes or so. 

3. After the bags have steeped, take them out and discard 'em. Then add the arrowroot mixture and stir until it thickens. You should be able to feel it thicken. Don't let it boil! Keep the heat nice and low.

4. Once it has thickened, remove the pan from heat, add the sugar and stir till it dissolves. Go ahead and add the vanilla extract. If you would like (I did) add a couple drops of green and yellow food coloring to get a nice pale green tea color. 

5. Let the mixture cool, then refrigerate it till it's nice and cold. The colder the better. Then freeze in ice cream maker.

Little owl enjoying some Earl Green Ice Cream.