Avocado Ice Cream and Popsicles
I was rather amused by the amount of reader reaction 
to my earlier post on avocados so the first chance I got, (zooming by a Batangas roadside fruit vendor–the ones nearer the actual fruit trees, not the ones in Tagaytay selling Divisoria sourced fruit) I bought 4 kilos of avocados and set out to truly re-create the avocado a la pinoy concoctions (including the avocado popsicle pictured here) that everyone seems to be reminiscing about. In the process of making avocado mash, avocado popsicles and avocado ice cream, I was trying to figure out what made it so memorable. Perhaps it was that as kids we were somehow fooled into consuming something nutritious under the blanket of milk and sugar, or that it was something cold on hot summer days, or the inherent creaminess of the avocado gave the popsicles that certain texture or quality. I don’t know… but I do know that the flavors still appeal to me as an adult. I like the mashed avocados, I liked the blended shakes, the popsicles were tasty and the ice cream gone. So here are a bunch of photos to keep you thinking of the good ole days…
7 Comments Send this post to a friend
Take leftover ingredients or unused ingredients and use them up. Three cups of leftover coconut milk from the second pressing of coconuts (first pressing used for an incredibly spicy Bicol Express) and some sliced saba bananas were thrown into a pot with some sugar and stewed until we got this: a yummy creamy and sweet stewed banana dessert that was good warm or the next day, served cold. I have always liked minatamis na saging which is essentially saba and a sugar based syrup slow cooked over a low flame, but this coconut cream version was also really good, really simple and used up what I had lying around. It had all the right hallmarks of familiarity, flavor, mouth “feel” that I look for in Filipino comfort food. If you used first press coconut milk, it would have been creamier and richer I imagine…
Here is one of the simplest dishes I can think of to make but it is also incredibly delicious. Start with very fresh squid and clean out the “bone” or the long clear plastic looking structure inside the squid’s body. Wash out the “stuff” in the body so you don’t have any squishy, squirty feel when you bite into the squid. Marinate the squid in a mixture of soy sauce, kalamansi (or limes), sprite or 7up (for a little sweetness and a nice glaze) and some cracked black pepper for about 1 hour before you put them on the grill. Right before cooking, string them onto barbecue sticks that have been previously soaked in water (so the stick doesn’t burn up completely).
Squid is one of the most plentiful creatures and sources of food in the ocean; billions of them are munched on by fellow ocean dwellers while humans harvest an incredible amount to eat as well. Perhaps the biggest consumer is Japan, where an estimated half of all squid is consumed. Archipelagos such as the Philippines and Indonesia also enjoy these cephalopods. Squid that are edible for humans come from two main families: Loliginidae or squid from inshore areas and Ommastrephidae or ocean going squid, according to the Oxford Companion to Food. Locally, we have lots of varieties of squid and sizes range from tiny say 2-4 inches in total length that are excellent in stews with the squid’s own ink to much larger specimens. These stunningly fresh squid in the photo you see here were about 6-8 inches long and just too good to pass up at a Batangas market recently.
soups that have taken hours and hours to develop really deep flavors but just a satisfying soup that can serve as a meal in itself. Here is a really easy recipe for a soup that I always find satisfying… kundol soup a la Marketman. Growing up I always noticed the special attention given to winter melon soups served in good Chinese restaurants around the world. I only recently realized that winter melon was in fact, the very readily available and highly affordable kundol. The light to dark green skin of a winter melon has a powdery film and the meat when sliced glistens. Kundol appears to be almost entirely made up of water but if you pay attention, it does have a pleasant and mild flavor. My soup has just a few ingredients and is wickedly easy to do.
I wrote about a few days ago, I had a fridge full of about 25 orange peels – and the best thing I could think of to make with them was candied orange peel. Candied orange peel is absolutely delicious, and actually, really easy (if a bit time consuming) to make. From the 20+ oranges we were able to make about 800 grams of candied orange peel rolled in caster sugar and another 800 grams of peel that were dipped into dark chocolate. We gave them away at the end of a dinner party, to friends, and ate a lot as well…yum. Little cellophane bags with about 80 grams of the candied orange peel were the little “pabaon” that we sent home with dinner guests.
than usual with this composed salad that followed a cold seafood plate appetizer and preceded some beef tenderloin. I got the basic concept from a lunch at Café Daniel in New York last month. The plate was made up of a beet salad marinated in good vinegar and a touch of salt, baby arugula leaves tossed in good olive oil, thin slices of pear, a small chunk of goat cheese and a few salted walnuts. The plate had the sweet/sour flavor of marinated beets offset by the mildly peppery arugula, sweetness of pear, sharpness of cheese and the saltiness of the walnuts. Overall, I would say it was a nice mixture of flavors, textures and color… “fancy” but not hard to make at all. Garnish at the center of the plate is a roasted baby beet that was also edible.
ube jam or haleya, whichever you prefer. And our ube jam was always a tad less purple than anything we purchased in a grocery, ate in a restaurant as part of a dessert, etc. In fact, I always thought our jam needed a tan. So last year I started on a quest to make an ube jam that not only tasted good, possessed a smooth and light texture (mind you, some prefer solid bits in it) and had a vibrant color… After trying several types of ube (from Bohol, Batangas, Baguio, rounded, longish, humongous, smallish) I began to despair as nearly every one yielded a sallow looking jam. So finally, I added just a touch of purple food coloring (the good stuff that looks like syrup, not the watery grocery stuff) and voila! perfection achieved… so what’s the point? The point is this… do I really believe the nuns at Good Shepherd aren’t using artificial food coloring of some sort???