Mango ice cream and mocktails 🥭
Plus a cheesy corn and scallion strata, and a ginger breakfast cake.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we eat some cake and cheesy strata for breakfast. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Cheesy corn and scallion strata at home
I made this up!
A strata is basically an excuse to eat stuffing for brunch, which I’m very, very, on board with. A cheesy, crispy-tender stuffing, that is. I woke up one morning at a surprisingly reasonable hour, and saw a day-old baguette lying in the bread drawer, and made this baby up on the fly, so feel free to improvise, too. For this baby, I cubed one pound of crusty bread (in this case, a bigass baguette) into 1 inch cubes. Then I sauteed half a sweet onion in butter until it was nice and browned, added two ears of fresh corn kernels (a pain to slice off the cob but very worth it), with generous pinches of salt and pepper and let the corn caramelize a little. Meanwhile, I beat half a dozen large eggs with 2 cups of whole milk, 1 tsp salt, and a big pinch of smoked paprika, and thinly sliced 4 scallion stalks. Then I tossed the bread cubes and veggies (plus scallions) together in a 9x13” pyrex pan, poured the eggs over, and topped it with 1 cup of grated cheddar. Bake the whole shebang at 350F for about 45 minutes. The top of the strata will toast into the crispiest croutons, with a soft, custardy center. Enjoy!
Apple Sheet Cake With Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting at home
Recipe from NYT Cooking
A few weeks (months? What is time?) ago, I got really sick with what I really could’ve sworn was COVID, but I was left with no detectable antibodies and a very, very large amount of applesauce. It turns out even when I haven’t eaten in days, I still don’t want to eat applesauce. But I do love me some apple cake. This recipe from the New York Times is not only delicious, it’s incredibly easy to put together, and the most moist sheet cake I’ve ever come across. I tweaked the spices a bit, adding a pile of grated fresh ginger to the batter; I recommend it. A weeknight cake that tastes like the weekend.
Custardy miso-broiled salmon at home
Inspired by Just One Cookbook
This is the crème brûlée of fishes -- broiling the miso-marinated salmon gives it a lovely, caramelized top and a soft, custardy interior. Unlike crème brûlée, It's possibly got the highest ease-to-elegance ratio of any recipe I've made recently, and you don’t need special equipment. I loosely glanced at this recipe from Just One Cookbook (an excellent blog!), but didn’t follow any of the directions. I used a pound of BBQ-cut salmon from Trader Joe’s, which amounted to three strips and about two servings for me. (I like non-wild salmon better, even if it’s probably worse for you, because it’s so much fattier.) I whisked 2 big spoonfuls of white miso with 1 big spoonful each of mirin, soy sauce, and mijiu(clear Chinese cooking wine) and a dash of toasted sesame oil, covered the fish strips in it, and let it marinate in the fridge for 1-2 hours while I took a Zoom workout class. When ready to cook, line a baking sheet with foil and turn the broiler on in your oven. Take the fish out with tongs and place on the sheet, skin side *down*; spoon leftover marinade on the top. Broil for 10-12 minutes; in the first 10 minutes everything will be unexciting and then in the last 2 things will rapidly go from caramelized to burnt, so watch carefully. Oh, and enjoy.
Mango seltzer mocktail at home
Spindrift is always overpriced, but slightly cheaper at Trader Joe’s.
I was on several rounds of antibiotics for some kind of god awful itchy skin problems for pretty much all of July. The curse of life is that the minute you are not allowed to consume alcohol, you will crave a beer like you never have before (I rarely want to drink beer, aside from the heat of summer!). Anyways, that means that I’ve been spending my pocket change on overpriced seltzer-y drinks to make mocktails, and I’m pretty proud of my latest creation. To make it, you must first obtain a case of orange mango Spindrift. If you can’t get store-bought, homemade is fine, which will probably amount to a can of ice-cold seltzer mixed with a drop of mango juice. Now take a fancy rocks glass (this is key to feeling like you’re drinking a cocktail), and gently insert one giant ice cube into it. I used a mold for cubes about 2 inches across, similar to this one, except I’m not sure what brand it is because I stole it from my partner and he doesn’t read this newsletter. Now slowly pour the cold Spindrift into the glass, add a drop of Angostura bitters* (my bar staple!), and gently swirl with a spoon. Enjoy.
*Bitters are very high in alcohol, but I use a tiny amount, just a drop. But if you are allergic to alcohol please don’t make this.
Insetto sour ale with mango Häagen-Dazs ice cream, at the kitchen table
You can get the Insetto from Drizly and local stores. You can get the Häagen-Dazs anywhere.
When the world starts again, but not the premature Florida kind, I dream of hosting a beer and ice-cream pairing party. I know it sounds funky, but beer goes really well with ice cream if you choose the right ones, sort of like a boozy root beer float but with actual beer and no floating (unless you want to). Most people would probably jump to something that sounds chocolatey, like a dark stout with vanilla ice cream (which is indeed good!) but there is nothing more satisfying than returning home from a sweaty errand-running trip on a hot New York summer evening and cracking open a tart sour beer and scooping out mango ice cream straight from the pint container. The Insetto sour ale is dry-hopped (no idea what that means) with Italian plums (I know what that means) and it is tart and refreshing but not sweet in the slightest bit (which is important to me!). It pairs perfectly with the Häagen-Dazs mango ice cream, which has chunks of mango in it, which delights me.
Stay safe,
Soph