Pistachio Ice Cream and an Ice Cream Birthday Cake, How Emotions are Made

It is getting to be late August and summer 2025 is fading away. The one summery thing I wanted to do this year before the season ended was to make ice cream at home. My kids love ice cream and my parents love ice cream too. While the grandparents were visiting, my daughter made a ritual of eating a small serving of ice cream with them every night at 9 pm. It was their special time together. We went through so much ice cream this summer- all of it store-bought. 

Meanwhile, my ice cream maker has been sitting on a shelf untouched for years. I also own a great ice cream recipe book that I've flipped through but never used- Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer. It was published in 2011 and given to me by a dear friend before we left St. Louis the following year. It has clung to my kitchen bookshelf through many rounds of cookbook decluttering. Last weekend, I cracked open the book and looked for a recipe to try, for real this time.

Jeni's is a famous ice cream store that started in Ohio and now has branches all over, including one close to our house. It is very good ice cream, and the last time I ate a lavender ice cream there that I still dream about. 

The two things that stand out about Jeni's ice cream- the texture and the flavors. Unlike most ice creams, it is made without eggs. Instead, the custard is thickened with a bit of cream cheese and a thickener like cornstarch, making the ice cream smooth and creamy without being overly airy. Jeni's is known for its wacky flavors. There are very few standard flavor recipes in the cookbook. Instead what she shares are elevated versions of classic flavors, and a plethora of ice cream recipes with unusual ingredients such as peanut, celery, goat cheese, earl grey tea, sweet corn...

I knew just the recipe I wanted, though, the roasted pistachio ice cream. Pistachio is my very favorite ice cream/ gelato flavor, and it is quite difficult to find good versions of this flavor. Often, what you get is a lot of green food coloring and a strong taste of almond extract. I was diligent in following Jeni's recipe very closely- it looked like exactly what I was looking for in this flavor. There's nothing difficult about the recipe, but there are a number of steps and some require precise timing. The ingredients are all common ones that can be found in practically any supermarket. If you want to glance at the recipe, it has been posted on some blogs, like here and here. 

First, the flavor mixture. I used store-bought roasted pistachios and ground them to a smooth paste in the food processor. This takes quite a bit longer than you would think, and I added a couple of drops of oil to help it along at some point. The pistachio paste is mixed into softened cream cheese and a touch of salt. 

Second, make a ice water bath by filling a large bowl with some ice and water.

Third, the custard made by boiling together milk, cream, sugar and a bit of light corn syrup, thickening the custard with cornstarch. 

The custard is whisked into the pistachio mixture. Then, I placed the bowl into the ice bath to cool a bath (I preferred this method to the one in the book, which recommended pouring the custard into a ziploc bag to cool), followed by refrigerating for a few hours to get it very cold. 

Finally, I added the cold ice cream mixture to the ice cream maker bowl (with a few drops of almond extract for flavor) and spun it into soft serve, then transferred to a container to freeze solid. 

I was overjoyed with the results, to say the least. This is the best ice cream I've made in my life and probably the best pistachio ice cream I've ever eaten. It is a beautiful, doable recipe that any home cook can use with excellent results. Like I said before, it is not an airy ice cream but with a dense texture, like kulfi or gelato. It has almost a savory quality and is not cloying in its sweetness. 

Another surprise (given the modest quantity of ingredients) was that a batch of ice cream is quite generous and makes 10-12 servings, as this is a rich ice cream and very satisfying in small quantities. 

I served the ice cream when we had friends for dinner. None of them are particular fans of pistachio ice cream, but every single person, child and adult, ended up loving it. I know I will make this again and again. 

It would be fun to add cardamom or saffron or rose water instead of almond extract to switch up the flavors and really take it down the kulfi route. There are a couple of other recipes I want to try from this book, especially the salted caramel ice cream (V's favorite flavor) and the roasted strawberry one (too bad berry season is over). 

Other ice cream (or adjacent) recipe on OHS- I had completely forgotten about these until I did a search for this post: Pistachio kulfi, Cardamom rose kulfi, Fig walnut kulfi, No-cook strawberry ice cream, Tender coconut ice cream. 

* * * 

My son celebrated his ninth birthday over summer, and in the weeks before, we considered a few ideas for his homemade birthday cake. He had decided on a candy cake, the kind where you bake a round chocolate cake, surround it with a border of individual kit kat bar sticks, and load it with M&Ms. You will see this all over Pinterest and such. To me, it honestly sounds awful and over-sweet with all that candy, but on par with what a nine year old would love, and I agreed to it.

But at the last minute,- and much to my relief, I will confess- he changed his mind and requested an ice cream cake instead, with three specific flavors- vanilla ice cream, mango sorbet and raspberry sorbet. I bought all of these at the store and used a tube cake pan as the mold to assemble the cake, softening one flavor at a time and layering them in. 

When it was time to serve the cake, I pulled it out of the mold and topped the cake with a few flourishes of whipped cream and some maraschino cherries. The combination of flavors worked beautifully and all in all, this was an easy and tasty birthday cake, much enjoyed by all. 

* * * 

Here are some recent recommendations from my bedtime reading--

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck (published in 2011) is an amusing and very readable novella that touches on themes of horror and existentialism. It is inspired by the famous 1941 story “The Library of Babel” by Borges. This story describes an infinite library made up of hexagonal rooms, each containing shelves of books that are filled with every possible combination of letters, punctuation, and spaces. Thus it contains every book ever written or that could be written, but these books are randomly hidden among infinite nonsense in the library of Babel. 

The premise of A Short Stay in Hell is that a man dies and is sent to hell, and hell is basically the library of Babel. The book describes the narrator's existence in this hell, an infinite library filled with unreadable books, and how he copes. Written in simple language and without any overt gruesome themes, this novel nevertheless filled me with existential dread. If you're looking for a short and off-beat read, I highly recommend this book. 

The library had a book display of bestsellers from the 1990s. This is where I picked up this short but powerful book- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (published in 1996), a non-fiction account of a famous missing person mystery. Krakauer is a gifted author of narrative non-fiction. His other book, Into Thin Air, is one of the only books that I've ever stayed up half the night to finish. (I love reading but I love sleep more; however, this book was an irresistible page-turner for me.) 

Anyway, Into the Wild tells the story of a young man who rejected the norms of affluent society in which he grew up, and was endlessly enamored by the idea of living in the wilderness. He decided to spend a summer living off the land in Alaska, an adventure that had fatal consequences for him. The book does a deep dive into the life of this person's life, and also narrates stories of the lives of other people like him, who were irresistibly drawn to undertake adventures in inhospitable wild locations. The author feels a special kinship with his subject as he himself was a young man with a strained relationship with his father and a penchant for crazy (in his case, mountaineering) adventures. This sort of book is surreal for me (whose adventures extend only as far as challenging recipes) and a glimpse into a different world. I highly recommend this book if you want to immerse yourself into a fascinating story. 

* * *

A few posts ago, I summarized a book called Being You. This book mentioned another book on new theories of how the brain creates emotions- How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett (published in 2017). I knew I had to look for it. 

So many times- especially during busy periods like this summer when I was pulled in different directions- I feel like emotions get the best of me. Too much of the damn day is spent being pushed around by emotional upsets- mine and everyone else's. I am a prime candidate for learning more about emotions and getting some pointers for better emotional regulation. 

The book is a very interesting one, written by a psychologist and with a neuroscience approach. I don't know enough about the field to review the book critically, but the author presented several intriguing ideas and I'll try to summarize them here. The book centers around a emerging theory of emotions that is different from the classical view:

• There is a classical, time-honored view of emotions as universal, built-in reflexes that come on quickly and automatically. 
• However, there is abundant evidence that in fact emotions are not built in, that they vary from culture to culture, and that our brains create them.
• This is the "theory of constructed emotion". Emotions are real, but not in the way molecules and neurons are real. They are real in the same way that money is real- hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement. 
  

How the brain works: Brain activity is not reactive, lying dormant until stimulated. Intrinsic brain activity continues from birth until death. Intrinsic brain activity is millions and millions of nonstop predictions. (Intrinsic networks are considered one of neuroscience’s great discoveries of the past decade.)

The brain is entombed in a dark box and can only make predictions based on scraps of information plus past experiences. Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain’s primary mode of operation. The brain is always predicting and its most important mission is predicting your body’s energy needs so you can stay alive and well. The author calls this the body budget.

Your body budgeting regions make predictions to estimate the resources to keep you alive and flourishing, using past experiences as a guide.

• You spend resources to move, run your organs
• You replenish resources by eating, drinking, sleeping
• You reduce your body’s spending by relaxing

Withdrawals from the body budget don’t require actual physical movement. If you see a family member or co-worker walking towards you and you believe they judge everything you say or do, your brain predicts that your body needs energy and makes a budget withdrawal, releasing cortisol and flooding glucose into your bloodstream. Any event that significantly impacts your body budget becomes personally meaningful to you. 

Where do feelings come from? There is an ongoing process inside us called interoception- the brain’s representation of everything going on inside us, such as noticing thirst, feeling hunger or fullness, or sensing a racing heartbeat. We experience interoception as a general sense of feeling called affect. In everyday use, the word “affect” (verb) means “to influence”, like, “The weather affects my mood”. But in psychology, the term affect (noun, pronounced AH-fect) has a very specific meaning. 

Affect (simpler than emotion) is the general sense of feeling that we experience throughout the day, made up of two features

• Valence: how pleasant or unpleasant you feel- sun on your skin, taste of food, discomfort of a stomachache
• Arousal: how calm or agitated you feel- jittery/excited or weary/low-energy

Affect is a fundamental feature of consciousness, like brightness or loudness. Affect is a simple summary of your budgetary state. Why we experience interoception as affect is a great mystery of science. 

Anyway, usually we experience interoception only in general terms of affect- pleasure, displeasure, arousal, calmness. Sometimes, however, we experience moments of intense interoceptive sensations as emotions. 

How do sensations turn into emotions? The brain’s job is to predict sensory signals before they arrive, fill in missing details, find regularities when possible, so that you can experience a world of objects, people, music, and events, and not the blooming, buzzing confusion that is really out there- to achieve this amazing feat, the brain employs concepts. When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation, and herein lies a key to how emotions are made. 

At one time (say, waiting for an old friend at the airport), you can experience a host of emotions (happiness about seeing them, nervousness about whether you will still feel connected, anxiety about driving back in the dark), your brain weighs all sensations and makes predictions using concepts, and the most probable prediction becomes your perception. Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are our constructions of the world. 

The two main ingredients that the author suggests for improving emotional regulation are related to body budget and concepts.

• If you maintain a balanced body budget, you feel better in general. This is difficult to do because everything is modern culture is designed to mess up the body budget. The main things are obvious and well-known lifestyle factors: eat healthfully, exercise regularly and vigorously (yoga is especially good), get enough sleep, spend time in nature, perform mental excursions (books and movies), engage in hobbies, practice giving and gratitude
• If you develop a rich set of concepts, you’ll have a toolbox for a meaningful life. Become more emotionally intelligent- collect experiences and perspectives, improve your emotional granularity (words and categories for emotions), keep track of positive experiences and focus on those, write about your experiences.

With your kids, be a tour guide. Talk about what causes emotions and what are the consequences to others. Your detailed explanations help your children build a well-developed conceptual system for emotion. In general, children with richer conceptual systems for emotion are poised for greater academic success.

Other tips from the author:

• Recategorize your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as physical sensations. 
• Cultivate and experience awe to get some distance from the self- develop an awe-inspired concept of being enveloped within nature and feeling like a tiny speck to take comfort in your insignificance. 
• When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal.

Perceiving emotion intelligently in people around you: Let go of assumptions that emotions have classic fingerprints that you can detect. You cannot know how others feel, they are just guesses. If you want someone to know what you’re feeling, you need to transmit clear cues for the other person to predict effectively and for synchrony to occur. 

The author speculates about the link between emotions and illness, both physical and mental. One interesting connection she makes- Anxiety sufferers, for whatever reason, have weakened connections between several key hubs in the interoceptive network, including the amygdala, which likely translate into an anxious brain that is clumsy at crafting predictions to match the immediate circumstances, and that fails to learn effectively from experience. You might predict threats needlessly, or create uncertainty by predicting imprecisely or not at all. Very intriguing. 

Overall, this is a very interesting book and I am glad I read it. It did give me some important insights into improving emotional regulation and why it gets so difficult during stressful times.

If you make ice cream at home, do you have a favorite recipe? What have you been reading this week? How do you cope with emotional regulation ;)? 

Adventures in Paratha-Making, Comfort TV, Meditations for Mortals

It is mid-August and summer break- camps, pool-time, excessive popsicle consumption- is now over. The highlight of the past week was the start of the new school year. The kids are adjusting the their carpool schedules, new routines, new teachers in 4th grade (upper elementary) and 8th grade (last year of middle school). 

Another highlight of the week was that V and I went line dancing! It was a fundraiser for a local org, and my friend who is on the board talked me into buying tickets. I had no clue what line dancing was (other than it is a country thing) and now I know. An enthusiastic dance instructor taught us three different dances; there was a DJ and everything. It was great fun and I'd definitely do it again. 

Our youngest turned nine last month (I'll share his birthday cake next week) and V and I are giddy with new-found freedom because he's officially old enough to occasionally stay home with his big sister and play video games while we go out in the evening. It feels like a new phase of life. 

* * * 

I consider myself a fairly proficient Indian cook, but with one glaring gap- I am unskilled at making any of the Indian flatbreads like rotis, chapatis, naans, parathas, phulkas. Considering how iconic and central these breads are to most Indian cuisines (one's livelihood is literally called "rozi roti"), this is quite irregular! 

I wrote about my attempts in this post but 18 years later, roti-making remains elusive. To the consternation of several blog readers, I put rotis in the "buy it" pile in this post. I pleaded a lack of time when I used whole wheat tortillas to make kati rolls. You can see this has been an ongoing issue. A few tries over the years resulted in unpleasantly chewy rotis, and it just did not inspire me to keep trying. Lack of success leading to lack of attempts- vicious circle and all that. 

Last month, my sister (an expert roti maker) visited us for four days, and when we found ourselves with a free evening, she selflessly offered to spend the time making a couple dozen aloo parathas to stock my freezer. 

The parathas were great and we enjoyed them over several meals, and now I have a good bit of atta (fine whole wheat flour) left over from that episode. Time to give roti-making another go to use this flour up. I vaguely remembered reading that you can make very soft rotis by using boiling hot water to make the dough. And I also now own a stand mixer which is very convenient for kneading dough. Those were the two new things I tried.

This is the recipe I used, following the instructions quite closely but with much less oil in the dough. The dough came together quickly in the stand mixer (although I was unsure how to tell when it is kneaded enough- is there a trick?), and after resting the dough, I divided it into 12 balls and started rolling them out. 

Because I'm not good at rolling out perfect (or even imperfect) circles, I made a triangle paratha which I feel is a more forgiving shape. I lightly roasted the parathas on a cast iron griddle on my electric stove. They were incredibly soft and tasty. This feels different from all my previous attempts. I am sold on the boiling water dough. (There's some neat chemistry behind how hot water reacts with gluten in flour to make the resulting dough less chewy.)

We froze the extra parathas. At subsequent meals, we just pulled out a frozen paratha, sprinkled it with water on both sides (important to get a bit of a steaming effect) and put it into the air fryer at 350F for just 2 minutes. It puffed up and reheated beautifully, and was soft and flaky and fresh. I couldn't be happier with the results. I'm in disbelief, as a matter of fact. This is definitely the best flatbread I've produced in a long time. The question is, will I get these results consistently? Stay tuned, and please keep me and my rolling pin in your thoughts. I will report back. 

* * *

Our neighborhood poem-of-the-week disseminator sent around a poem recently that I loved. It is called Prayer for Uninteresting Times by Brian Bilston (read it here.) It was written during the pandemic but boy, does it resonate today. 

A line in this short poem invokes the comfort of "a re-run of Murder, She Wrote". And I am definitely the kind of person whose idea of a perfect evening involves an adult beverage and a quiet evening of watching that exact show. (You can watch Murder, She Wrote free on the Tubi app). 

This is just one (but I must say, a particular favorite) of many cozy mystery shows I've enjoyed over the years. Other notable mentions: Midsomer Murders, Father Brown, Death in Paradise, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

Another one was Rosemary & Thyme- two women, Rosemary Boxer and Laura Thyme, meet as strangers, each reeling from a shattering life event, and quickly become friends and co-owners of a gardening and landscape design business. In episode after episode, they travel around as visiting gardeners, transforming picturesque gardens and solving murders. This show first aired during 2003-2006 and I remember watching it on PBS then or shortly thereafter, but I haven't seen it again for decades. Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon it on the free Tubi channel (it is also on the free Roku channel). It has been a joy rewatching this show. 

The other recent great comfort show discovery was The Great British Sewing Bee. This one is also free to watch here on the Roku channel. While my mother was visiting, she and my son and I happily watched many episodes together. This show is like Project Runway in the sense that it is a garment sewing competition with contestants eliminated in each round, but different in the sense that it is much more focused on home sewers and practical garments, and not on fashion designers and couture garments. It is like the Great British Bake-off in the sense that there are three rounds and different themes for each episode (round 1, you follow a pattern; round 2, you alter a garment; round 3, you design and sew a garment for a model), and in the grace and camaraderie of the participants, but different in the sense that you won't get a mad craving for sugary baked goods while watching it. 

I did get a mad desire to start sewing my own garments. I am starting very small. I've owned a sewing machine for years but have never progressed beyond simple projects. The Great British Sewing Bee is sparking dreams of doing more. So far, all I have done is tidied up my sewing space and altered two T-shirts that were too long. (Thanks to the great little video from a Tik-Toker who showed a neat trick to hemming T-shirts beautifully with a home machine.) 

Over the years, I have amassed a small collection of cotton block-printed fabrics and would love to sew simple little tops or skirts with them as a start. But garment sewing is intimidating. If you have any tips or resources to share, I'd love to hear them! 

* * *

While browsing in the library new books section, I found the recently published Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I like the author's work (he is a recovering productivity guru who now lectures about living in the moment), so I borrowed it and breezed through it. The book comprises a series of 28 chapters (designed to be read as a daily contemplation for 4 weeks, and not the way I binge-read it), about Burkeman's philosophy of imperfectionism or, in the author's words--

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out...

This book is relatable and fun and inspiring. The one confusing chapter for me was on looking for the life task. "A life task will be something you can do only by effort and with difficulty, the kind of endeavor that enlarges you rather than makes you feel immediately happy". I guess in my heart of hearts I feel like I have some kind of life task that I haven't identified yet, and this chapter is not helping me find it (LOL).

The book mentions something called "scruffy hospitality" and I realized that I practice this already! It means inviting friends into your home just as it is, without necessarily cleaning it any more than usual or cooking anything special; just letting them visit you and partake in whatever you happen to be making that day. 

Here's a taste of some other things from this book:

• We have limited time and limited control over that time. Once you stop struggling you get to relax and “play in the ruins”.
• We would prefer a sense of control, as captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, but in fact, to be human is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time.
• Insecure overachievers feel like they begin each day with a productivity debt which they have to pay off over the course of a day to justify their existence on the planet.
• Worry at its core is the activity of a mind attempting to picture every bridge that might be possibly crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it. But most bridges we worry about never end up needing to be crossed at all.
• The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is to think of them as a series of small deliverables.
• If you want to get good at something, you should do it a lot, preferably more days than not.
• The point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for rules to serve life.
• We unconsciously assume that at some point we will make it to the phase of life when we won’t have an endless list of things to deal with. But life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one. Aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life of ever more interesting and absorbing ones.
• Be the kind of person who gets on with things, regardless of how inspired or fired up you happen to feel.
• Other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them, and you have to allow people their problems.
• People-pleasing isn’t even an especially effective way of pleasing other people.
• A commitment to clearing the decks leads inexorably to a life spent unendingly clearing the decks.
• You don’t matter much, yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. 

Do you practice scruffy hospitality or are you a more polished host? Do you have roti-making or garment-sewing tips for me? What have you been reading and cooking?