Pineapple guava ice cream

Well, we are still buried under a mountain of pineapple guavas, aka feijoas. I ate a bunch of them plain. I gave a big bagful to my friend Jen, and put another couple bags on the curb with a FREE sign. Those vanished overnight. But I still have a backyard completely carpeted with pineapple guavas, and hear the thumps of even more falling from the tree in the dead of night when I should be asleep.

So I made pineapple guava ice cream, and it is good.

I've had this ice cream recipe from Laura at Hungry and Frozen in the back of my head since April, when it's pineapple guava season in the southern hemisphere. Now that we've reached the right season in the northern hemisphere, it's time to go to town. All you need is pineapple guava, condensed milk, Greek yogurt, and lime juice. There is no custard-making of any kind involved. Super simple.

Also, look how beautiful the top of my condensed milk can was!

Pineapple guava ice cream, aka feijoa ice cream
by Laura at Hungry and Frozen.

15 ripe pineapple guavas, aka feijoas
1 14-oz can condensed milk
2 tbsp lime juice, aka the juice of 1-2 limes
1 cup plain Greek yogurt

Start by halving your pineapple guavas and scooping the insides out. Chop them up, either by hand or in the food processor. I don't have a food processor, so I just used a knife. This worked admirably.

Put your pineapple guavas in a bowl and add your can of condensed milk, lime juice, and yogurt. I actually decided to use labneh--Middle Eastern yogurt cheese--instead of Greek yogurt, because 1. I love labneh and 2. I had a container of it already. Since it has the same tart flavor as plain yogurt, and an even thicker consistency, it worked very well indeed.

Once you have everything mixed well, all you need to do is freeze your ice cream. I put mine in our ice cream maker, but you can also just freeze it as-is in a container. It's all good.

When your ice cream is all frozen, eat up! The result is very smooth, and packs a deceptively strong pineapple guava punch. This recipe makes about a quart, although I can't say I actually measured.

I had my ice cream in a bowl, like you do, but I think what I really want to do is make some ice cream sandwiches. Ginger cookies or lime meltaways sound like they'd match with the tropical-floral-pear-pineapple flavor, but I also think a simple butter shortbread would work admirably.

I hope everyone is doing ok in the wake of the hurricane! I would feed you all plenty of ice cream (in sandwich form or otherwise) if I could. That obviously won't put the power back on, but still. Good thoughts!

Angel hair pasta with tomatoes, eggplant, and artichoke hearts

In current garden news, tomatoes! Tomatoes for all!

It took until October for our Purple Cherokees to really ripen, but now that they have, they're pretty amazing. The plants are huge, productive, and still going strong. It helps that it's 78F outside right now, of course.  I suspect that we have about two to three good weeks left.

This guy was growing around a branch of the plant--look at the gouge it made when I picked it!--so I needed to get it inside and into my mouth as soon as possible. Okay! How about a batch of pasta?

I found a head of garlic, a jar of artichoke hearts, and an eggplant on its last legs, and got to work.

Angel hair pasta with tomatoes, eggplant, and artichoke hearts

garlic
olive oil
eggplant
artichoke hearts
tomatoes
angel hair pasta
oregano, basil, red pepper flake, salt, pepper

Before you make the sauce, put on a pan of water for the pasta. Heat it to boiling, covered, and turn it off (if you need more time for the sauce to cook). That way it'll be hot & waiting whenever you're ready to put the pasta on.

Start by warming olive oil in a wide saute pan. Smash a bunch of cloves of garlic with the flat of your knife, peel them, and mince them up. Then throw them in the pan, stir it up, and let cook over medium heat. Add some sprinklings of basil, oregano, and red pepper flake, so the oil gets all infused with their flavors.

Peel and dice as much eggplant as you want to eat. I had a long, skinny Asian eggplant, so I only ended up with maybe 2/3 cup of half-inch-square eggplant bits. That was all good. Toss your eggplant in with the garlic, mix it up, and keep cooking.

Drain and roughly chop as many artichoke hearts as you want to eat. I love artichoke hearts, so I used six or eight quarters just for me. After the eggplant has had about 5 minutes to cook, add your artichoke hearts and stir everything up again.

Next, core and dice your tomato. I used just the one tomato, which worked admirably, since it was pretty gigantic. If your tomato season is over, you can use canned tomatoes, puree, or whatever works for you. It's all good. Add your tomato to the pan, salt and pepper, stir, and let cook. Here's what my pan looked like at this point:

So that's what one tomato can look like in a 10-inch frying pan. Hooray!

At this point, you just want to cook the tomato and veg down to a sauce consistency that you like. It'll probably take about ten minutes if you're starting from fresh tomato, and a bit less time if you're using canned. Put your pasta on to cook whenever it's most appropriate. I used angel hair, obviously, but pretty much any pasta shape should work with a mildly chunky tomato sauce like this one.

When everything is done, drain your pasta and add it to your pan of sauce. Give it a minute over low heat, so the pasta can absorb a bit of the sauce. I usually wash the pasta pot and then serve.

Eat your delicious pasta with some fresh parsley scattered over the top. Grate some cheese over it if you want to. It's your pasta; do what you want!

NOM WITH IMPUNITY.

Vegetarian baked beans

It's raining! Rain in California! Fall is actually here! HOORAY!

This is clearly the best possible time of the year to make a gigantic pan of delicious, hearty, warming goodness. I'm talking about baked beans.

Baked beans are traditionally made with navy beans or similar small white beans, plus onion, bacon, and a molasses-heavy sauce that would probably be excellent on barbecue. (Mental note: make a batch of actual barbecue sauce soon.) But the real essence of baked beans is the bean itself, or maybe the bean plus molasses. So, since our household is half vegetarian, we took out all the meat components and added in some liquid smoke and lemon juice. The result was more than satisfactory.

These take hours upon hours to cook, so they are excellent to make on a grey weekend when all you want to do is putter around the house. Nothing is better than a bubbling pot when it's cold and damp out, right? Soak the beans the night before, boil them in the morning, bake them right after lunch, and you should be all set by dinnertime. Bonus: delicious baked bean fumes delicately wafting through the house all day!

Vegetarian baked beans
Based on Boston Baked Beans

2 cups dry white beans
bay leaf
an onion
3 tbsp molasses
1/2 cup ketchup
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
1 tsp mustard powder
several good shakes of liquid smoke
juice of 1/2 lemon
butter/olive oil

Start the day before you want to eat by sorting and soaking about two cups of dry white beans. Leave them overnight, loosely covered. The next day, change out the water and simmer the beans with a bay leaf until tender. Depending on the age of your beans, this can take up to two hours. When done, drain your beans, reserving the broth. You can also cook your beans in advance and refrigerate them, or substitute canned beans.

When you're ready to make the beans, preheat your oven to 325F/165C.

Break out a dutch oven or other large, deep, oven-safe casserole dish. Chop up a large yellow onion. Fill the dutch oven with alternating layers of beans and onion, ending with beans.

Next, make the sauce. In a pan, combine the molasses, ketchup, brown sugar, salt, pepper, mustard, liquid smoke, and lemon juice. Smoke seasoning is really potent, so be careful with it! Add a little at a time, and definitely don't drop the bottle.

Bring the pan of sauce to a boil, stir to dissolve any recalcitrant lumps of sugar, and pour it all over the beans. Then add enough of your bean broth to cover the beans entirely. (Freeze the leftover bean broth and use it in soups later.)

Dot the top of your bean dish with chunks of butter or a scattered drizzle of olive oil. Don't skip this--the fat in the oil or butter is going to carry the flavors of the sauce and onion to make the whole dish meld together. It's taking the place of the bacon fat in the original recipe.

Bake your beans, covered, for about two hours. Then take off the lid, check your liquid level, and continue to cook for another hour or two, or until the beans are amazing and delicious. It's done when you think it's done.

Hooray! Baked beans!

We had our baked beans over bowls of rice, but I would definitely be up for a biscuit and gravy or cornbread application. Hearty greens, either steamed or sauteed, would be perfect on the side.

What dishes do you love to make when it's dank and rainy out?

Pineapple guava time

Guess what started falling out of our gigantic backyard tree this week?

That's right. Pineapple guavas, aka feijoas.

I had never even heard of pineapple guava before we moved into this house. But! For two years, we've been caretakers to one of the biggest pineapple guava trees in the state of CA. No, seriously--ask our landlord. And now it's October--harvest time--and ripe pineapple guavas are falling off the tree and thumping into our yard all day.

Pineapple guavas are a tropical fruit. You cut them open and scoop out the pinkish-yellow insides. The texture is seedy and gelatinous in the middle and gritty and pear-like as you get closer to the edges. The taste is only sort of like pineapple--it's more heady and floral than anything else.

Last year the harvest completely overwhelmed us. I ate lots of individual pineapple guavas with a spoon. I infused pineapple guava schnapps. I failed spectacularly at dehydrating them, mostly due to an oven that won't run below 170F. Then I brought bags of pineapple guava to all my friends and neighbors, and left a big box on our front curb with a FREE sign. We still had a massive amount left over.

This year? I don't know. What am I going to make?

I'm planning to try a recipe for pineapple guava ice cream that I found on Hungry and Frozen 6 months ago--which makes complete sense, since the New Zealand feijoa harvest is in April. Yay, opposite hemisphere!

This does require that I dig out enough freezer space for our ice cream machine bowl, but I think I can handle that.

It would still be a good idea to make jam. I certainly have the right volume of fruit available--or I will in a week or so. Does anyone have a pineapple guava jam recipe kicking around?

What do you guys make when you get a windfall of exotic fruit?

Migas are delicious

This Saturday I made Stella's migas.

Then the next day I made Stella's migas again.

I think you guys should make some of Stella's migas, is what I'm saying.

OM NOM.