A Hit and a Miss

So, My first Tuesday discussing adventures in cooking. I have two for you, one of which is truly an adventure if you think of cleaning ice cream of a ceiling as adventurous.

First, the hit. We made the Chicken with Vinegar and Onions from Fine Cooking. Huge hit, all around. Not too much work either, bar the slicing of the onions. No dicing, just slicing. And yes, I went out and bought Champagne vinegar, so everything was exactly as asked for. Our only complaint was that I may have over-salted the chicken prior to browning. The skin wasn’t crisp, but The Boy – who insists the only chicken worth eating has to have crispy skin – loved it, mainly because of the wine/vinegar/tarragon/butter sauce. Amazing what a basic sauce can do to a dish!

It may have been as good as it was because we had onions from the garden for the onion component (the chicken was served with carrots and fingerling potatoes, the former from someone else’s garden – and purple to boot! – the latter from our own little slice of veggie heaven) but I suspect that they only gave the dish a slight nudge. The onions got eaten – they’re served as a side – but it was the sauce the chicken poached in that was poured over for serving that made the dish.

So, a miss. And naturally, because that’s the way we ride, it was quite the spectacular miss. I had read a recipe for Toasted Marshmallow Milkshake from The Good Stuff cookbook. I’m not really into milkshakes, despite The Girl being the best milkshake maker I’ve ever encountered. But…I do like the flavour of toasted marshmallow. Or at least I used to: cutting so much sugar from my diet has made things on the super-sweet end of the scale far less appealing than they used to be. Anyway – it sounded good so I printed out the recipe and put the book itself on hold at the library.

The Girl really is great at milkshake making and not adverse to trying something new so we did this one together. We halved the recipe(whole recipe meant to make four milkshakes), which meant toasting 8 ounces of marshmallows. Notice they name, they’re not called marshleads, are they? I was at twenty something marshmallows and still not at eight ounces, so I quit. It was just too many. Anyway – toasted them all, and set aside two for a garnish as requested. You are then supposed put the marshmallows, milk, ice cream and a spoonful of sour cream into a Hamilton Beach milkshake maker. They seemed pretty insistent on that, so we that’s what we did. Why have the gadgets if you don’t use them? So in it all went, and on went the machine.

The thing is, the laws of physics and thermo dynamics are not suspended in my kitchen. So a huge amount of hot melt-y marshmallow combined with milk and ice cream tends to gel up into one big glob of sticky sweetness. And when said glob starts spinning furiously around a comparatively small container filled with milk and ice cream the outcome is a shower of cream and milk. Over the counter, over the flour, the dogs, myself and The Girl and, yes, a bit on the ceiling. We cleaned it up (because magic cleaning pixies don’t exist in my kitchen either) and put the glob’omallow into a blender with fresh milk, ice cream and sour cream. It was less messy, of course but it was also just…meh. The toasted marshmallow just added a strange cinder tone to what was otherwise an overly sweet vanilla milkshake. If this appeals to you by all means give it a try. Just keep a lid on it, ok?