Doctored Ice Cream Recipes, and Summer Reading Kicks Off

I attended a lecture once by a nationally known quilter and she talked about her experience pitching patterns to quilting magazines. She told us that the editors loved two words in the description of the pattern- those two words being "quick" and "easy". Of course they appreciated creative and original patterns and all the rest of it, but those two magic words sealed the deal.

Quick and Easy are very beloved words in the recipe world too. Entire fortunes have been built on 30 minute meals and 3 ingredient cookbooks and semi-homemade cooking shows. You can love from-scratch cooking, as I do, and still have a soft corner in your heart for recipes that produce good results quickly.

As the days warm up quickly and cool desserts are on the menu, I'm sharing two quick and easy recipes for ice cream treats that start off with good quality store bought ice cream and need minimal work for really great results.

Rosewater, used judiciously, gives an indescribably exotic and alluring flavor to desserts. I've made this ice cream two or three times in the last month for different groups of friends and each time, a small scoop of the pistachio rose ice cream left them feeling delighted. This will be my go-to dessert of the season. If you love kulfi and Indian ice cream flavors like kesar pista, you will love this so-simple-it-is-hardly-a-recipe recipe.

Pistachio Rose Ice Cream

1. Set out 1 quart (or 4 cups) good quality vanilla ice cream (I love Trader Joe's French Vanilla but use your favorite brand) on the counter for several minutes until it is soft-serve consistency. Don't let it melt completely.

2. Dump the soft ice cream into a bowl.

3. Add:
1/2 cup chopped roasted pistachios
1 tsp. ground cardamom
1 tbsp. rose water 

4. Fold the additions into the ice cream (a silicone spatula works well), then scrape back into the container and refreeze. 

For special occasions, cake is my go-to dessert, personally. But many of my near and dear ones seem to prefer ice cream to cake. On her sixth birthday in Fall, Lila requested an ice cream cake. Last week, I was organizing a co-worker's farewell party and she too requested an ice cream cake. If you need a simple ice cream cake that will feed a crowd and please the crowd, here's a- you guessed it- quick and easy recipe.

Oreo Ice Cream Cake

1. Set out a quart each of two flavors of ice cream to soften on the counter- I use the classic chocolate and vanilla but other flavors will work too. 

1. Crumble a box of Oreo cookies (gluten-free or regular) into a bowl. You can smash them right in the bowl, or use a food processor to crumble them. Add 1/4 cup melted butter and stir into the cookie crumbs.

2. Add the cookie mixture into the bottom of a 9 x 13 pan and pat down to make an even layer. 

3. Layer with the softened chocolate ice cream and stick it back in the freezer for a while to harden.

4. Layer with the softened vanilla ice cream and stick it back in the freezer to harden. 

Optionally, add a layer of fudge sauce in between the two ice cream layers. I decorate the top layer with sprinkles before putting it back in the freezer.

Here is another easy ice cream dessert from the One Hot Stove archives- the tricolored Cassata, and some ideas for an ice cream social. 

*** Lila's summer reading ***

Kindergarten is finished and school's out for summer. A very exciting thing happened during the last week of school. Lila's school was adopted by a local non-profit that promotes literacy by providing a dozen books (free, and theirs to keep forever) to every child in the school so they have a little home library and can keep reading to prevent "summer slide". I volunteered one morning for the book distribution. The non-profit brought in boxes and boxes of incredible age-appropriate books. Hundreds of books were laid out attractively on several tables, grouped by theme, just as they would be in a book fair. Classes came in one by one and the kids went "shopping" for a dozen books of their own choice. This was a total kid in a candy store situation for any book lover.

We were warned to not steer kids to particular books or to balk at them choosing 12 Star Wars books or whatever. This was the time for non-prescribed books to promote reading for pleasure.

Lila's dozen books

Predictably enough, Lila came home with 12 PINK books about princesses and Dora and stuff, including one book by Danielle Steel of all people. My heart sank that she didn't pick out any of the amazing books that I saw displayed. But this isn't about me so of course I said nothing. We will continue to bring home lots of books from the public library all summer, and enjoying all the books from our home library that we are building up bit by bit.

*** My summer (and beyond) reading ***

I occasionally like doing reading challenges, where you are assigned reading tasks that encourage you to try different genres, seek out new authors and expand your reading horizons just a little bit. Late in the game, almost halfway through the year, I came across Book Riot's 2018 Read Harder Challenge and started it last month, with 24 tasks to be completed until the end of this year. I've completed 3 of the tasks, described below. If you have suggestions for the other tasks (check the link to see what they are), I would love to hear them.

A book published posthumously: For this task, I chose a book written by a terminally ill man whose dying wish was to be a published writer- When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

This brilliant and highly motivated man in his mid-thirties had been in school almost his entire life, training to reach the rarefied heights of medical research and practice. On the way there he acquired a degree in literature and almost becomes a writer. In a tragic twist, he was diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer while months away from becoming a dual qualified neurosurgeon-neuroscientist. Even as he knew that his demise was only months away and his career goals were dissolving, he found a new goal- to write a book (this memoir). The first part of the book is Paul's life as a neurosurgeon in training, helping patients deal with life and death situations. The second part of the book is his role as a patient facing death himself. Finally there is an epilogue beautifully written by his wife- she finished the book and fulfilled his dying wish by getting it published.

Kalanithi ponders the question "What makes life meaningful enough to go on living"? and I was thinking about this book for several days after I read it.

A book of true crime: Columbine by Dave Cullen. Ironically and sadly, I started reading this book the day before the latest school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. I was still living in India on April 20, 1999 and have no personal recollection of the Columbine massacre. But later, the very word Columbine came to be a symbol of school shootings and I do remember going to see Michael Moore's documentary, Bowling for Columbine, in NYC. Cullen's investigation runs wide and deep. His narrative does not follow a linear timeline but goes back and forth between incidents but it is engaging and makes sense as he talks about the two teenage killers and their thirteen victims, plus the others left with serious lifelong injuries.

The reigning theory of Columbine was that these were two bullied teenagers who lashed out in a horrific way at the people who hurt and bullied them. In contrast, Cullen's book portrays the mastermind, Eric Harris, as a psychopath bent on indiscriminate destruction. The "why" of Columbine quite possibly was a combination of the two. What is left unanswered is how to identify kids going down this spiral- which they do on a regular basis, with horrific consequences. I came away with a better understanding of what psychopathy means and it truly is jarring to realize what a poorly understood mental condition this is, and that these charming, manipulative people are a substantial proportion of the population. 

A comic written and drawn by the same person: Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier. This is a middle grade graphic novel and after seeing it displayed in the school library, public library and book fairs everywhere, I finally read it myself. Catrina's kid sister Maya has cystic fibrosis, and to help with her breathing, the family moves to a foggy, ghostly small town by the sea. The book describes their adventures there. The illustrations are full of color and life and the story revolves around themes of family heritage, sisterhood and confronting fears of death. It is worth mentioning here that the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration is a major theme in the book and the author has been criticized for not portraying it in an accurate way.

What are you cooking, eating and reading this month?