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Thanks to our chairman Liquid Communism for this prompt. It's open-ended-ness made really think about what summer and food mean to me. I didn't come up with a single answer, but I think each dish pays homage to the season in it's own way. I hosted a party to share my food with again, and it was a whole bunch of fun. Dish 0 Drinks Course - Seaquench Ale This one might be cheating a little as I had nothing to do with its creation, but Dogfishhead is a wonderful local-ish brewery who's reach is getting wider. But what could be better on a hot summer day that a tall glass of beer in a chilled glass? Got a growler full of this when we were at the beach last weekend at their brewery in Rehobeth, DE. Dish 1 Appetizer - Scallop Ceviche Sometimes it's too drat hot to cook, time like these, dishes like ceviche can be a god send. The way the acid of the citrus and the sea-y goodness of the scallop play off of each other is refreshing. Ceviche is so very easy to make, and people think it is fancier than it is because of the uncooked preparation. The acid does definitely cook it though, so it is a cooked preparation, but not a heated one I guess. Start with your mise, forget the Cilantro and Onion in your picture, but dice them up too.  Dice your scallops, I had decently sized ones, so I cut them in half before dicing them, then drop them in lime juice, you want it coated, but not swimming.  I went with habanero for heat as well as onion and cilantro for flavor, and just a touch of salt. Let the scallops sit in the lime for at least 2 hours before you are ready to serve, and up to 24 hours. I added in my cilantro right before serving so it didn't get pickle-y but that is a preference thing. More than that they can get tough and chewy, less than that means the acid doesn't have time to cook the fish.  Serve with something crunchy to dip in the ceviche, I made some chips with some extra pasta dough I use later in the meal.  The chips were fine, and great as a vessel to shovel more ceviche in your face, but the ceviche was the star. Dish 2 Soup - Corn Gazpacho Gazpacho is another great summer dish, this one was cooked and then chilled. Using the freshness of sweet corn in season made a sweet dish with a nice bite of heat. This is the only dish I was unhappy with how it turned out. It had good bones, and if I tinkered with it a few more times I'm sure I could get it to be a thing that is worth making, but the recipe as stated here left something to be desired. Ok, first, did you know that if you boil corn husks you extract an amazing corn stock from it? Just the husks. I had always assumed that the flavor was from the kernels, but there is yellow gold in those leaves. So, do that. Separate the corn cobs from their husks, wash them, then boil and reduce the husks until you get a liquid that looks very much like urine. Try it and be amazed how corny it tastes.     Add some salt to taste and this corn stock could be the base to something great. I boiled off the ears of corn I had dehusked earlier, and took the kernels off of the cob, then threw it in the corn stock and the juice of a few limes and hit it with an immersion blender. Threw in some red chili flake and some adobo seasoning to taste.     The flavor was good, but the texture was off. The corn didn't blend all the way, the pericarp was super present. It couldn't decide if it was a soupy soup or a chowder-y soup. I think I would lean more in the thick direction if I did it again. I did add some dairy to try to help, but it didn't really change much. But anyway, this was meant to be a chilled soup. Throw it in the fridge, then serve it up.  It wasn't bad. The flavors worked really well together. The corn, the citrus and the heat from the red pepper flakes played really nice with each other. The soup being chilled worked well too. It was all in the texture I think. Dish 3 Entree - Pigs in a Blanket Hotdogs. What else can I say except Hot Dogs, grilling out back is almost part of the very nature of summer. Wrapping those hotdogs in croissant ties to the season in a special way for me though. When I got married, over a decade ago at this point, June '09. Pigs in blankets were my only non-negotiable. All of the other food could be whatever my wife wanted, but I wanted little hotdogs in croissant blankets dipped in spicy mustard. They were delicious then, they are delicious now. So, I made hot dogs from scratch. I do not recommend this. It worked, I got hot dogs out of it. But the effort and time I put in to make them does not make of for the ease of buying a pack of hot dogs from the grocery store. Start with your meat. I used a combination of chuck steak, center cut pork chops and some applewood smoked bacon since the other two cuts didn't have enough fat in them to work. I think I went for 75/25, but I mostly eyeballed it. Give your meat a rough dice, then pass it through every plate of your grinder. You want meat mush, if you still see definition in your meat paste, you haven't ground it enough. Mix in your hotdog cure with some water according to the instructions.    Then fill. Fill casings for what seems like hours. After what felt like hours of grinding. I think I ground meat and stuffed casing for a total of 3 hours that day and made 6 pounds of hot dogs. A lot of that could be attributed to it being my first time using a grinder or stuffing my own sausages, but it felt like a lot of time.  Smoke your dogs until they hit an internal temp of 165oF. This takes longer than I expected, like 5 hours on the smoker at 200oF. Then plunge those suckers in an ice bath to stop the cooking.   6 pounds of hot dogs are too many. Freeze some, give some away. Eat some for snacks. What you do with your extra dogs is your business. But the once for ICSA, you are going to wrap in Croissant dough. I used canned dough. I was going to make home made croissants, but decided not to. I kept putting it off until it got to a point where I wasn't sure if I had the time to fix it if something went wrong. So I just bought the canned stuff. It tasted like nostalgia, so no regrets.  Pics of the cooked final dish is with the next dish as they were served together. Dish 4 Side Dish Summer Pasta Someone once told me that there are no rules with summer pasta. But here I wanted to showcase fresh and local ingredients. It's like a pasta primavera but for Summer, not Spring. First off I wanted to make flavored, colored pasta. I went with red and green. The red was made with sun-dried tomatoes (which is like the summeriest ingredient, because tomatoes are summer fruits and duh, the sun), the green with parsley from my herb garden. I was surprised how much the flavor came through on both. Store bought colored pastas always felt gimmicky, and just tasted like pasta to me, but these tasted like the ingredients that colored them. Ok, first part is to make sun-dried tomatoes. In your oven, because we have been getting a lot of rain here and I didn't want to try to time the sun drying with when the sun was out. Start with tomatoes. Halve and deseed/depulp them. Lay them on a parchment paper. Season with some salt. You want the salt, but keep in mind these suckers are gonna shrink and concentrate, so don't over salt them. Once they are shriveled and little umami bombs, pack in olive oil if you aren't going to use them like that day. They are so good just plain though, I had to stop myself from eating too many.        Much easier process for the green. Get a bunch of parsley, chop that poo poo up.     Now that you have your colorants ready, time to make some pasta. Before this, I had always made my dough by hand, but the addition of stuff to my dough made me want to use my mixer instead. Since I was going to be using it to roll out the pasta anyway, might as well. So I added 450 grams of plain flour, 4 eggs + 1 additional yolk to the bowl of the mixer, some salt. That is the recipe I use for pasta dough usually. Everything I looked at online for colored doughs didn't really have a good agreement on how much adding stuff to the dough changes proportions, so I just added it in. Like a cup of the chopped parsley I think, after weighing out the flour and eggs, it shot everything to poo poo by not measuring the herbs I was throwing in there, but I did it based on how the dough looked and felt, I added a glug of olive oil because it didn't look quite right and wasn't coming together like I wanted, but if I mixed longer it might have fixed itself. Either way, it all worked out and I had a beautiful green dough that I wrapped in cling film and refrigerated for at least half an hour.     Do the same thing with the tomatoes. I used about half of them, and diced them, before adding them to the same dough recipe as above. I didn't need to add any extra oil here as it was already on the tomatoes.   Now that your dough has chilled out, get a chunk of it and roll it into sheets using your pasta roller. Mine is numbered 8-0. I pass it through the 8 size a couple of times, folding the dough back on itself until it is a happy rectangle. Then once it's basic shape is good, I send it through on 6 and 4 once each, skipping 7 and 5 entirely. If your dough is shaggy going through, maybe don't skip those steps. Oh, and make sure to flour your surfaces so things don't stick. Once the dough is thickness 4, I cut it in half because it's getting long and harder to work with. Then send each half through settings 3, 2 and 1. I skipped 0 for this shape because I wanted it a little thicker. But, once you have your pasta sheet rolled out roll it up. Cut your cylinder into many smaller cylinders. Then hold up your spiral cylinders and let gravity unroll them. Congratulations, you made something fettuccini adjacent. Wrap your noodles around your hand to make a nest and put on a baking sheet with parchment for storage. If you dry them you can store them but I was going to use them the next day, so no drying for me.      Do the same with you red pasta.  Now prep your veggies. I went with orange and yellow bell peppers, sugar snap peas, asparagus, and the rest of the sundried tomatoes. Make batons out of everything except the tomatoes, you'll throw them in whole (or halved, but you already halved them before making them, so no more knife work there). You want them all roughly the same size. Throw them in boiling water to blanch them for 3-4 minutes. then transfer immediately to an ice bath to shock them, stopping the cooking and keeping them nice and crunchy. Drain the veggies. You can do this an hour or two in advance. The pasta dish comes together really quickly if you did the prep before hand.     Boil some water for your pasta. Once it's at a boil, throw in your pasta for 2ish minutes. Fresh pasta doesn't need long to cook. Once you start your pasta melt some butter in a sautee pan. Once it's foaming throw in your blanched veggies. Your pasta should be ready to pull now. Drain it, saving a cup or so of pasta water for your sauce. Throw your drained pasta in with your veggies, toss to combine. Add a splash of milk or cream and a little of your reserved pasta water. Season with salt and fresh cracked pepper and serve on a plate that is too large.   Dish 5 Dessert FREEZE POPS! I don't think I need more explanation for why these fit the theme, Summer is basically in their name. Continuing the theme from the pasta dish, I went with two flavors/colors of freeze pops. Strawberry Lime and Blueberry Ginger. Roughly halve some strawberries, get the zest and juice of 4 limes. Throw that poo poo in a pot. Reduce it until it tastes good. Know that when things are cold, they taste less sweet, decide not to add extra sugar anyway. Hit it with an immersion blender. Painfully use your vacuum sealer and vacuum bags to make little tine bags, snip off the ends so you can fill them with a funnel. Then reseal them on your vacuum sealer, getting juice everywhere. Freeze until frozen solid.         Similar steps for the blueberry ginger pops. Blueberries and about an inch of grated ginger. Mine weren't gingery enough, I would up that ginger content. Either double the grated ginger, or maybe just some crushed ginger in the mixture to leech out all of its gingeryness into the syrup and be removed before hitting with the blender. Transfer to a squeeze bottle this time for filling and realize it doesn't make it easier at all. Get it all over your kitchen before going back to the funnel and slowing down.      Both of these flavors turned out great. The lime really balanced out the strawberry. It had the right amount of tart. It was definitely an adult dessert, neither were cloying, but the flavors were excellent. I don't think I'd use this form factor again as making and filling those little bags was a pain in the rear end, but I would make standard popsicles using this recipe in a hearbeat. The only downside with them really was that they didn't cut the poo poo out of the sides of your mouth, so it lost some of that nostalgia factor you would expect from Otter Pops/Freeze Pops. So here are all my finished dishes again, just so they are all in one place. Dish 0 Drinks Course - Seaquench Ale  Dish 1 Appetizer - Scallop Ceviche  Dish 2 Soup - Corn Gazpacho  Dish 3 &4 Entree - Pigs in a Blanket Side Dish Summer Pasta Dish 5 Dessert FREEZE POPS! I had a wonderful time with this summer feast, can't wait for the next one!
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Aug 7, 2022 03:25
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 10:08 |
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That is one hell of a summer pasta. Someone told you right. And that someone is even more proud of that perfect Baja style mixto ceviche.
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Aug 7, 2022 05:27
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Holy poo poo, this is one Hell of an entry. Huge kudos for making your own coloured pasta, but I just can’t believe you made your own hot dogs. Just brilliant. Every course had something I just thought was great. And those freeze pops are inspired, what a cool (haha) idea. 
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Aug 7, 2022 06:40
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making your own hotdogs seems totally insane, I love it. And now I really want pigs in a blanket; I don't think I've had in like decades but I (obviously) loved them as a kid. those hot dogs reminds me of when I used to volunteer at the food bank; there was an oscar mayer plant nearby and they would donate all their unsellable (broken or ugly or w/e) hot dogs every day in these huge waist-high blue bins, just a mass of writhing hot dog bits. My least favorite job by far was taking handfuls of hot dogs from the bin and stuffing them into plastic bags for distribution. so gross. great entry!
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Aug 7, 2022 07:40
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That's amazing. I don't think I've ever had a desire to make hot dogs before but it was interesting to see. Also know what I'm doing with the husks from our corn on the cob today. Neat!
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Aug 7, 2022 14:30
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marvelous! it all sounds delicious, gonna have to do something like those freeze pops.
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Aug 7, 2022 18:29
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I rarely talk to anyone about ICSA entries, but I was so inspired by those freeze pops that I told my daughter. I didn’t even know she knew the word “whimsical” and she is now forcing me to make them.
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Aug 7, 2022 19:52
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I'm comin' over for dinner Grandi
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Aug 7, 2022 21:33
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Sandwolf posted:I'm comin' over for dinner Grandi I introduced Grandi to ICSA, I get first refusal
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Aug 7, 2022 22:37
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Hot drat, well done.
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Aug 8, 2022 02:54
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Scientastic posted:I introduced Grandi to ICSA, I get first refusal Sci, would you like to fly across the pond for the next ICSA? I'd be happy to have you.
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Aug 8, 2022 02:56
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I just got done stuffing sausages for my entry. I don't have a sausage stuffer. Spoiler: I agree with the OP that the whole process is a PITA. Especially when you lack the proper equipment for the task. Great entry. I love the idea of making your own high-quality freezer pops especially.
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Aug 8, 2022 21:10
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 10:08 |
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All of this rules and looks amazing.
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Aug 15, 2022 18:14
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