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Food recycling? Doing a month of no food shopping and learning to use what i have instead of what i think i need...

I cant use my turning yogurt for something fresh, but sure can cook with it and boy am I learning to hoard the milk for my morning cappuccinos. My aunt -bless her- instead of sending us the dreaded hickory farms gift basket as usual, sent us three kilos of coffee from a roaster near us in the languagedoc region (see local can catch on!) so we will be jittery for months to come.

Milk shortage, what do you do? you can use up other things to achieve some delightful dishes that you didn’t think were possible. Exhibit A: found in the freezer some strawberry ice cream that I made two years ago from fresh strawberries. It was my first foray into ie ream making so its not that great tasting and after two years with no preservatives it hasn’t fermented into anything better either, no strawberry hooch or strawberry cider. Just a block of not bad but not so great ice cream.

Sugar, milk and eggs and of course all those strawberries. What better to do then make it into a red velvet cake? And along the way I came up my new should be patented “vanilla spanking” I can just see all the celeb chefs right now writing it on post it notes for their telepromters… what fun it can be, “vanilla spanking tm” your cakes, muffins and waffles!

1/2c. + 1T. Shortening, that means butter or lard, I used leaf lard and duck fat
1 1/2c. sugar

2 eggs

2T. cocoa powder
1/4c. red food coloring

1 cup of buttermilk or yogurt that is about to go bad or if you use ice cream like I did reduse the sugar by a fourth of a cup
Dash salt
2 1/2c. flour

1t. baking soda mixed into one tablespoon of hot water
1t. vinegar
2 1/2c. flour

Vanilla bean, spliced

Preheat oven to 350F

•Cream shortening and sugar until light and fluffy.
•Add eggs one at a time and beat well after each one
•Stir cocoa and red coloring together.
•Add to creamed mixture and beat well, about four minutes. it will look curdled and that is ok, dont worry!
•Put salt into buttermilk or past date yogurt or old ice cream in my case and add to creamed mixture alternately with flour *tiffany this is where you can add those mushed up kiwis and the kids will get an extra dose of vitamins from them and not know any better! Just compensate with a little extra flour. I have been know to add mushy bananas, persimmons and other fruits to cupcakes like these.
•Mix after each addition, just until incorporated. (Overbeating will toughen the cake.)
•Stir in baking soda and water mix
•Add vinegar to mixture and combine
•Pour into muffin tins

This is where I found that the vanilla bean innards that I scraped into the bowl didn’t really make it into the bowl but onto the floor and crusted onto my house slipper as I reached down to put the muffins in the oven. I examine the opened vanilla pod (which didnt fall) and it seemed to have some seeds left, so I whipped the sticky battered tops thrice each until I saw vanilla remnants on their red velvet tops. Spanking the vanilla out! You heard it here first.

Bake for 30 min. cool on a wire rack and frost as you please. I will be doing a chocolate and sour cream frosting, but a butter cream would be heavenly—I don’t have a lot of butter left so I am hoarding that as well for my morning toasts.

8 oz dark muscovado sugar
3 1/2 oz butter
1 1/2 pints piping hot milk
4 egg yolks

Actions:

Put the milk on to heat up so that it is simmering in the background, not boiling.

Melt butter in to a decent, solid saucepan and put in the sugar, as lump free as possible.

It's well worth getting hold of a Delia Smith mini-whisk (they come in packs of two from Lakeland.co.uk) to help whisk the sugar in to the butter, and keep stirring the hell out of it as it begins to bubble. Let it bubble as long as you can possibly dare to make it caramelise (it's bloody difficult to tell because it's so dark, so the best way to do it is by smell really).

Start to gingerly pour in the milk. the first milk will splutter and erupt terribly, which is where the whisk comes into its own. You really need to whisk the thing fast and evenly, and start to pour in the rest of the milk either on a slow stream or in smallish increments. Once you've got approx a coffee mug of the toffee and milk whisked together you can pour a lot quicker. Taste with a teaspoon, and then say "Oh, my word". Put the lid on the pan, and leave to cool for a good hour. More if poss.

Whisk the four egg yolks in to a bowl (remember the set of two whisks? This is when you use the other one). When creamy looking, ever so gently start to pour in the lukewarm butterscotch milk. I tend to put it in using a table milk jug and pour it in along the inside edge of the bowl. Keep whisking and whisking to prevent premature-egg-cooking.

When your custard is completely mixed, put the bowl (or change to a heatproof one if you need to) over a simmering, not boiling saucepan of water. Whisk basically continually until when you put a spoon in to the custard, the mixture coats the back of it. If you've not done that before, make sure you put the spoon in before it starts to cook, so you know what it looks like when it *isn't* coating the spoon. It only takes ten or fifteen minutes, to be fair. Cool the custard, but keep coming back and giving it a whisk to prevent a skin forming. A different technique for that which I've not tried is apparently to put a circle of greasproof paper on the top of the custard.

What I tend to do is stick it in the fridge to go completely cold overnight, and make the ice cream the next day. Our ice cream maker is extremely weird, having been bought working, but borked, from Ebay for ?5. So I switch the ice cream maker on for a while before we need it, so the drum is freezing cold, then I put the mixture in the bucket, put the bucket back in and voila. You need it to keep going for at least 25 minutes but basically check it out. If it's looking seriously granular in there, the job's done.

Stick it in a tub and in to the freezer pronto.

Given that this has no cream in it, it's really not too bad for you and OH GOD it do taste like heaven. Damned easy to do as well.

Please note - this will scoop straight from the freezer. Don't put it in the fridge beforehand.