The tyranny of the blank page – and ice cream!

Welcome to my first blog post.  Actually, in a little while it may stop looking like my first blog post, because I have all sorts of recipes and articles squirrelled away that I intend to put here eventually, and I may backdate them to their original dates.

But right now, it’s my first post and I don’t know what to write about.  For someone who can’t actually shut up about food and cooking, I find I am strangely reticent now I have an entire blog in which to write about such things.

I blame this on the ice cream. 

You see, I got this ice-cream maker yesterday.  It is possibly the greenest ice-cream maker I have ever seen (not, I suspect, in the environmental sense , but rather in the who-skinned-Kermit-to-make-dye? sense), and it’s beautiful and pristine and perfect and I still haven’t made ice-cream in it. 

I’m waiting, you see.  Not very patiently, either.  I waited *quite* patiently overnight for the bowl to freeze (which it has), and I waited *exceedingly* patiently for the custard to thicken (which it did), and I have been waiting with absolutely unparalleled patience for more than three hours now for the custard to cool down enough for me to actually make the ice cream.

It hasn’t.

And I don’t want to post my lovely little I-can’t-decide-whether-I-want-chocolate-or-strawberry-ice-cream recipe until I know whether it has worked. 

Starting my new blog with a new recipe made in a new machine would be delightful and appropriate.  Starting my new blog with a recipe that doesn’t work… would be a bit sad, really.

So you will all have to wait patiently with me for the custard to cool down.

How about I go and check on it, and then come back?

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(asterisks represent a pause of ten minutes while I go and inspect my custard, verify that it is cold, and put it into the ice-cream maker)

I must say, it’s looking quite promising.  And tasting quite promising, if I say so myself.  If something goes horribly wrong with the freezing process, I shall defrost it and pretend I was planning to have chocolate custard for dessert all along.  You won’t tell anyone, will you, O my reader?

While we wait for the freezing to finish, I think I’ll write a bit more about what I plan to do with this blog.  Other than babble verbosely, which you’ve probably already gathered.  At a minimum, I plan to post at least one new recipe and one cookbook review per week, at least until I run out of cookbooks to review.  That should keep me occupied for few decades, at my current rate of cookbook collection.  I fairly regularly get to make wedding cakes or other outrageous confections or feasts (including my infamous themed Shakespeare feasts), and I will undoubtedly be unable to resist posting photos here, and bragging about what I have done. 

I’m also toying with an occasional column about altering recipes, and another about those terribly simple recipes which everyone allegedly knows how to cook, only they don’t.  I, for example, can make miniature croquembouches to go on top of cupcakes, but I have never successfully soft-boiled an egg.  I have exploded a potato in the oven, though.  It wasn’t my oven, either…

Also, I sometimes like to perform weird culinary science experiments, like making curd cheese or agar jellies.  I’ll definitely write about those.

In fact, it seems that I do have a fair bit to say about food, when it comes down to it. The question will be whether you get bored of reading before I get bored of writing…

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(a further pause in which ice-cream is churned, sampled, and reviewed)

Oh my.  That is really quite rich.  And quite, quite chocolatey.  Thank heavens for the strawberries…

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