Sunday, July 19, 2009

Pudding vs Custard, which one is it?

The search for the perfect pudding recipe began with some eggs. Our neighbor gave us eggs from her friend's chickens...these are chickens that scramble around her backyard and eat kitchen scraps. So these are good eggs, and I wanted to do them justice. Pudding was the perfect answer.

Pudding recipes are hard to find. I checked all the regular sources, Alice Waters' Simple Food, Women's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery. None of the recipes were what I was looking, a very simple pudding of milk, eggs, and sugar. And so many were called custards.

Unclear as to what exactly the difference is between a pudding and a custard, I decided a custard was definitely not what I wanted. A custard is served in dainty little cups and pudding is served in bowls. Really, I think there isn't much difference.

The recipe I ended up with was from Fannie Farmer and was was just what I was looking for...eggs, milk, and sugar cooked on the stove with vanilla added at the end. (By the way it was called a custard.) In any case, pudding or not, the result was absolutely heavenly. Creamy and rich, and totally unlike any box pudding anyone has ever had.

Sublime. It doesn't even matter what it's called.

Friday, July 10, 2009

I love kimchi. A good friend from school is Korean and she often cooked delicious Korean food. The combinations were foreign and exciting always with complex flavors that filled the mouth and delighted the taste buds--a perfect blend of salty, sweet, and umami. And kimchi, of course is the ultimate in Korean foods. So I tried my hand at it. A few adjustments needed to be made based on ingredients available. Daikon radish for instance had to be replaced with regular red radishes. The adjustments decidedly did not work, the result looked like kimchi but tasted so potently like raw garlic that it was totally inedible--such a disappointment. I hope to try it again with the true ingredients and a better result.