Condensed Milk!
WE'RE BACK WITH ANOTHER INSTALLMENT OF FOOD YOU (STILL) DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH, IN WHICH YOU SEND ME YOUR CULINARY CONUNDRUMS AND MY SON, RUDY, AND I HANG OUT TOGETHER IN THE KITCHEN, TALK ABOUT STUFF AND TRY TO MAKE SOME SENSE OF THEM FOR YOU.
This time, the conundrum comes from Rudy's pal, Anath, who would like to know what to do with condensed milk. First, I love this ingredient because have you ever just stuck your finger into a can of condensed milk and then licked it? Delicious. I also love it because it connects me to other people who like my kid. So thanks, Anath! Hope you like the two recipes we came up with for you (plus a secret third that Rudy doesn't know about):
1. 4-Ingredient Condensed Milk Cake
2. Spiced Ice Tea with Condensed Milk
3. Double Chocolate Birthday Bread Pudding
We had fun with the audio portion in the last post, but this time, thanks to a comment from a Facebook friend, we made it just one audio file instead of several different links to click on. I'm going to be honest and say that it's not an expert rendering by any means! If I had the time/talent, I'd have edited out some of the filler and tried to make it a little punchier. But, on the other hand, this is a pretty accurate depiction of what it's like to have a conversation with my son, whisking sounds, oven beeps, mumbles and all! So enjoy and feel free to fast forward as necessary, or just jump past the Soundcloud link to read more.
Episode 2: in which we talk about: how to properly crack an egg, bougie kitchen implements, autism, turning 18, cowboy ribeye, Bobby Flay and the movies.
4-Ingredient Condensed Milk Cake
Because it was Rudy's friend who gave us this challenge, I challenged him to source the recipe. So thanks to The Cooking Foodie for providing a really simple way to use this great ingredient. You can find the recipe here.
Our version ended up using 5 ingredients because I forgot to buy self-rising flour, and I had to use a plain ol' cake pan instead of a springform like suggested. I was so happy that Rudy picked a cake for this because it gave me an excuse to use these beautiful (Ru calls them "bougie") new measuring cups that a friend gave me this summer:
Thanks, Julia!
The cake couldn't have been simpler and it's funny to me that we made a cake at all, considering Rudy doesn't even really like cake. Usually. This one we both agreed would be really lovely for breakfast with coffee. Not too sweet, despite the very sweet condensed milk (there is no other sugar in this recipe) with a dense crumb and elevated with a little powdered sugar and fresh blueberries.
Spiced Ice Tea
Well, here I go again, winging it--something my son doesn't feel super comfortable doing due, he says, to his autism (which we just had formally diagnosed this year) and the comfort he gets from rules, parameters and routine. But he lets me get away with it when we cook together which is nice.
This recipe was a riff on a Somali spiced chai that Rudy made last year during his own cooking-around-the-world project, and inspired by an image I have carried around from Stuart Dybek's short story, "Pet Milk," which begins:
Today I’ve been drinking instant coffee and Pet milk, and watching it snow. It’s not that I enjoy the taste especially, but I like the way Pet milk swirls in the coffee. Actually, my favorite thing about Pet milk is what the can opener does to the top of the can. The can is unmistakable–compact, seamless looking, its very shape suggesting that it could condense milk without any trouble. The can opener bites in neatly, and the thick liquid spills from the triangular gouge with a different look and viscosity than milk. Pet milk isn’t real milk. The color’s off, to start with. There’s almost something of the past about it, like old ivory. My grandmother always drank it in her coffee. When friends dropped over and sat around the kitchen table, my grandma would ask, “Do you take cream and sugar?” Pet milk was the cream.
Later in the story, the protagonist and his love slurp champagne out of oyster shells which I thought was romantic and sensual and Rudy dubbed "bougie." It's the word of the day, apparently!
Anyway, all we did was brew some strong black tea (I used Oolong because it's what I had on hand) and then steep it with a bunch of spices: cardamom pods and cinnamon sticks, slightly crushed, coriander seed, black peppercorns, star anise...I might be forgetting something and also I can't give you an measurements (see, "winging it" above), but I can say that mixed with condensed milk and poured over ice (with an extra little drizzle on top of the ice cubes) made for a very nice beverage that would be worth making again. My husband wandered into the kitchen as we tasted it and called it "interesting," but he also came back for seconds.
Double Chocolate Birthday Bread Pudding
Like I said, Rudy doesn't like cake, which makes it challenging to celebrate his birthday properly (where "properly" means "traditionally" which we don't actually give a hoot about in this house). We did reminisce fondly about the Grasshopper bundt cake I made for him a bunch of years ago--he has always been a fan of chocolate and mint--but I had to assure him that, no, it wasn't made with actual grasshoppers. (Though he did famously munch on deep fried grasshoppers from Oaxaca called chapulines when he was two.)
We've also done pumpkin bread a few years running, but this year for his 18th birthday, he asked for bread pudding which I was all too happy to create because I love it, too. Double chocolate bread pudding sounds decadent and birthday-worthy, doesn't it? And since I had lots of condensed milk left after making the iced tea, I figured why not guild the lily? 18 is a big one, after all.
You can easily find recipes for such a thing online, and I loosely followed a few, including this one from King Arthur Baking. I decreased the sugar because I was adding the condensed milk and chopped up a good semi-sweet bar instead of chips. Trust. Even the skeptical husband thought it was outrageously good.
Our birthday tradition is to start the day with cake bread pudding.
My son is 18. I am still getting used to this fact. He felt mixed about the milestone, and I get it. There's a lot in front of him that is unknowable and challenging. Over the next few weeks we're going to sit down and work on his college applications and soon I have to give him his first driving lesson. Whoa.
But there's also wonder and adventure and happiness and success and this smart, funny, sensitive kid of mine is going to have all of that in ab
But first he's going to visit a cat cafe with a friend this week, and start his senior year next week and soon he'll invite his pals over for pizza and movies in the basement to celebrate and maybe I'll make them some pumpkin bread and a big pitcher of spiced ice tea to wash it down.
Happy birthday to my my sous chef! The world is your (champagne slurped from a bougie) oyster (shell)!