Crusts On, Please

To be honest I don’t remember the first food I ever made.

It might have been a batch of Charlie Brown’s brownies from the Peanuts cookbook. That recipe stands out because I made it wrong the first time. I failed to mix the dry ingredients thoroughly enough and wound up with tiny, hardened, white clum

ps in the final product. My family was “nice” enough to label them artificial nuts.

It wasn’t pretty, still everybody ate them.

Perhaps I should have started with something a bit simpler, like Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwiches. That’s the first dish my own kids made all by themselves. It’s easy, has a fruity sweetness and a fair amount of protein too, so it practically qualifies as an entree. (Sure it does.)

What it definitely qualifies for is comfort food. For us Americans, it may be the ultimate comfort food.

Of course, not everyone shares this opinion. An instructor I once had in a table-waiting class thought Mac and Cheese ranked #1.  Jacques was at the tail end of his career as a maitre’d and was passing on the wisdom he had earned through the years. Did I mention he was French? Yes, he was. So his opinion might not really count.

Mac and Cheese is sort of a comfort food in our house. It’s comfortable to make, which the parents like. It’s comfortable to eat, for the kids anyway. But it doesn’t really have the soothing effect these foods need to have. My wife loves a baked potato. I love thick slices of crusty French bread, with or without butter. My dad’s comfort food is probably the ham with port and raisins my vegetarian mom still makes on occasion. (That’s love for you.) My mom’s favorites are confections from her Canadian childhood like maple candy, marzipan, or Mackintosh toffee (see my toffee ice cream here). The point is that comfort foods need to transport you to a warm safe place, a place that may not even exist anymore. That and it shouldn’t come out of a box.

If it comes out of a jar that’s just fine.

So PB & J definitely wins the comfort food battle, which is fortunate because I didn’t think anybody was going to want to hear about Mac and Cheese Ice Cream.

PB & J Ice Cream, however, arouses a certain curiosity, so long as you don’t put any bread in it. Not that a PB & J ice cream sandwich wouldn’t be delicious, but when was the last time you had an ice cream sandwich on real bread?

Anyway, the stage was set.

I made the custard then folded in the peanut butter. It tasted great.  Peanut butter ice cream would have been fabulous, but I wasn’t about to stop there. I had visions of a jam ripple against a base of peanut butter, so I drizzled the strawberry into the top of the ice cream freezer near the end of the freezing cycle. Alas it wasn’t near enough. The peanut butter and jam blended together less like it does on a sandwich and more like it does after the sandwich has been chewed a few times in a child’s mouth.

It still tasted great, it just wasn’t all that appetizing. My family was intrigued by the finished product but were quickly put off by the way it tasted. It tasted like a PB & J, but somehow that didn’t make it much of a favorite.

What I would recommend to the rest of you is to wait until the peanut butter ice cream  is frozen before you fold in the jam, and to do it by hand so it make a nice ribbon or red against the brown peanut butter base.

There is comfort in a PB & J. Maybe next time I’ll put it on ice.

PB&J Ice Cream
(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
½ cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup strawberry jam

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.
   
   HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.
3. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
4. Add the cream to the custard, stir in the peanut butter and let the flavor infuse in the refirgerator for a couple of hours (the longer the better).
5. Add the ice cream mix to the ice cream freezer then freeze for 30 to 35 minutes.
6. Just before the ice cream is done freezing, puree the strawberry jam and drizzle it into the frozen ice cream. If you’re lucky, this will give you a nice swirl of jam flavor and color. If you’re not, you’ll get a reddish brown ice cream. Either way it tastes very much like  a PB & J sandwich.
7. Put the frozen ice cream in the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “PB&Clipart,” Gratefully borrowed from MSWord. 

I must confess that I consider potato chips and French onion dip another of my primary comfort foods. And only the dip comes out of a box, the other parts come in a bag and a plastic tub. Am I playing a little loose with my definition here? Perhaps, but this combination takes me back to summer barbecues on the family picnic table. What are your comfort foods? Let me know in a comment.