Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Tasty pudding
I have internal nazis. If I eat fatty food, I get cramps which keep me up half the night. If I go more than a week without exercising, my lower back tortures me. And then there’s the guilt nazi, who keeps me on the straight and narrow about everything else.
So, no, I haven’t really tried out this panna cotta recipe, but I have it on the authority of my wife and son that this stuff is GOOD. Easy to make, too — that much, I can vouch for.
Adapted from this web page.
1 envelope of unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup milk
2 1/2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
1 vanilla bean or 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Yes, 2.5 cups of heavy cream. You’ll be making 6 ramekins-worth of panna cotta, but still, 2.5 cups is 2.5 cups. Of cream. HEAVY CREAM. Can you substitute nonfat milk? Sure. Substitute water for all I care; but isn’t dessert about indulgence?
This is the basic recipe. One of the delights of panna cotta is just how easy it is to customize it and make it your own . . . more on that in a moment.
1. Pour the milk into a shallow bowl and microwave it until it is warm. Sprinkle the gelatin over the milk and let it stand a few minutes. You’ll get a gelatinous “skin” over the milk. With a fork, you can flip this over so that the dry top side contacts the milk. This way, all of the gelatin begins to hydrate.
2. Meanwhile, place cream and sugar in a heavy-bottomed sauce pot and bring to a simmer, stirring frequently to dissolve the sugar. If you are using vanilla bean, scrape out the vanilla-y guts and add it to the milk. Add the scraped bean to the milk, too. Hey, add extra vanilla extract while you’re at it. Vanilla is a good thing.
I hate it when I channel Martha Stewart.
3. Add the milk and gelatin to the simmering cream and whisk to dissolve. Pour the mixture through a sieve to get rid of the undissolved gelatin and any stray bits of vanilla bean. Yes, you can use plain old vanilla extract. It’s not a big deal. Anyway, I pour it into a 4-cup measure, which makes the next step a good bit easier.
4. Pour the hot mixture into six ramekins, pop ’em in the fridge, and let them cool for at least three hours.
5. Serve with fresh berries, sauces made from fresh berries, custard sauce, whatever you like. Enjoy!
Additions and Variations
Savvy dessert chefs will realize you can substitute other flavorings for vanilla:
- citrus zest: simmer it with cream and let the sieve do its thing.
- nut-based liqueurs like Amaretto or Frangelico
- fruit-based liqueurs like Chambord
Be careful you don’t overdo it! An alcoholic panna cotta might be nasty.
You can also make substitutions for all or part of the cream: buttermilk, for example, or coconut milk. I haven’t tried either of these.
For the last panna cotta I made, I added 1/4 cup of white chocolate chips to the simmering cream. As you might imagine, this made for an extra-rich panna cotta. If I do this again, I’ll reduce the sugar from 1/2 cup to 1/3 cup.
I’d like to try this with dark chocolate, too, but my wife and son aren’t chocaholics. No one has shown much interest in this variation.
Let me know how you like it! I can’t emphasize enough how easy this dessert is. Not quite as “special” as creme brulee, but it’s a good deal simpler to prepare. And since panna cotta is egg-free, I suspect its refrigerator shelf life is much longer than that of creme brulee.
***
Writers: where do you get your character names?
When I went to the supermarket today, I happened to notice that one of our local businesswomen has the exact same name as the protagonist of my WiP.
What a coincidence, I thought . . .
D.
Re: names. I think I have a factory in my head that pops out names when I need them. It gathers up odd names that it sees and throws them into the hopper (like ‘Reiny Grin’ – a person who worked at a company I once worked for), to be retrieved at some future time.
I don’t know how this works. Throwaway characters get throwaway names, like ‘Joseph’ or ‘Brad’. Important characters get names that have assonance, permanence, weight.
Or do they? Hmm.
i want it with dark chocolate. except for the whole i-cant-have-milk part. you’d have to make it with lactaid milk, lol. but it sounds yummmmmmy.
Names: When I was a teenager, I came up with a villain’s name by taking the first name of a recent prime minister and combining it with the last name of his finance minister. Later I found out that Brian Wilson is/was in fact one of the Beach Boys, and that name just wouldn’t quite fly. By then, though, I’d abandoned that story, and so it hasn’t really come up again.
I’ve got protagonists named Yakoub, Edward Riley, and Lady Schrone, among others. One villainess of note has a name that sprang from misreading a sign: there’s an apartment building in Edmonton called Natasha Manor; I read it as Natasha Noir, and suddenly I had a name for my zombie lawyer antagonist in my (stalled) online serial novel project.
I find names to be easy. It’s the rest that’s hard.
Love the blog and I definitely want to keep track of your commentary about the writing process. But I can’t figure out your RSS feed.
Can you give me a URL address I can plug in to my feedreader?
P.S. My favorite character names are the ones that I made from scratch, working backwards from the emotional response (in myself, anyway) I wish to elicit. If my character, for instance, is a shy yet arrogant academic, a balding man who’s adult children don’t think much of him, I start rattling off invented names (using the phone book if necessary) until something “sounds” like it fits.
For side characters I sometimes use baby-name sites (they usually give you the meaning behind the name). This is especially true if I need ethnic names (e.g. I just named an Indian character Gopal).
Occasionally I name the character after the fictional character, or real life person, that inspired them. In every case, what’s most important is that the name elicits, for me, the emotional chemistry necessary to “write” them.
P.P.S. I have an easy and fabulous recipe I just discovered for cream puffs (also includes plenty of heavy cream).
Um. I have an RSS feed?
I’m asking someone who knows about this stuff. Bear with me.
Um. I have an RSS feed?
I’m asking someone who knows about this stuff. Bear with me.
Dish on the recipe!
I’m not sure, but I’m betting you have one and maybe it’s not activated? I’ll bear with!
Easy cream puffs (for easter and valentine’s day I added various food coloring to make it festive):
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cream-Puffs/Detail.aspx
Yes, Doug: an RSS feed, you has it! As far as I know, it’s part of every WordPress installation. I think Jim’s confusion comes from the fact that this template doesn’t have an icon for it… all the link does is point to the RSS page. RSS stands for ‘Real Simple Syndication’, I think. All it really is that blog content gets published in a simple format, no links, sidebars, widgets, gadgets etc. This makes it so that an aggregator (Chris uses one) can come in and read multiple blogs and add them all to one interface.
Near as I can tell, your RSS feed is at http://ballsandwalnuts.com/?feed=rss. That’s what I’ve subscribed to in my aggregator.
Yes, I’m a big nerd.
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