Tag: milk

Vanilla Bean Panna Cotta with Strawberries

Vanilla beans, strawberries and cream make this luscious dessert worthy of a standing O!

Panna cotta is one of my FAVORITE desserts when prepared properly. It’s such an easy dessert to make and it can easily be adapted with many different flavor profiles. Although it’s usually made very rich with heavy cream, I’ve been able to play around with the ingredients through the years to give this dessert that same lusciousness, yet using much less cream.

If you need a dessert this Holiday season to impress your guests, I promise, this one is it! And since it needs at least four to five hours to set it’s the perfect dessert to make a day or two ahead.

I’ve tried so many panna cotta recipes from blogs through the years that looked so beautiful, only to be disappointed. Perhaps I’m a bit of panna cotta snob, because I know what a good panna cotta should taste like. It shouldn’t have the texture of jello, instead it should be creamy and smooth, almost pudding like in texture. I’ve tested this particular recipe FIVE times to get it perfect, so if you plan on trying this – don’t change a thing!

For diabetics, yes, this will work with Splenda or other sweeteners, and of course cut back on even more calories. So go grab a spoon and savor each spoonful of this vanilla treat.

Vanilla Bean Panna Cotta with Strawberries
Servings: 6 • Size: 1 panna cotta with 1/4 cup strawberries • Old Points: 4 pts • Points+: 4 pts
Calories: 158 • Fat: 7 g • Protein: 5 g • Carb: 20 g • Fiber: 1 g • Sugar: 19 g
Sodium: 48 mg • Cholesterol: 25 mg
Ingredients:

1 1/3 cups fat free milk
1 vanilla bean, split open
2 teaspoons unflavored powdered gelatin (Knox)
1 1/2 cups half and half cream
5 tbsp sugar
Pinch salt
1 1/2 cups fresh strawberries, hulled and halved
1 1/2 tsp sugar

Directions

Place the fat free milk in a medium heavy saucepan with the seeds from the vanilla bean. Sprinkle the gelatin over the milk and let it stand for 10 minutes to soften the gelatin grains. In the meantime, prepare an ice bath in a large plastic bowl.

After 10 minutes have passed, heat the saucepan and stir over medium heat just until the gelatin dissolves but the milk does not boil, about 3 minutes. Add the half & half cream, 5 tbsp sugar and salt. Whisk well and and leave until the mixture is hot, but do not let it come to a boil, about 4 to 5 minutes.

Remove from the heat, then transfer the liquid into a clean, metal medium-sized bowl. Place the bowl in the ice bath to cool for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally until the mixture begins to thicken.

Divide the mixture evenly, about 1/2 cup each between 6 small dessert bowls or glass parfait glasses, then cover each with plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about 4 to 6 hours or overnight.

1 hour before serving, combine sugar and halved strawberries in a medium bowl, tossing to coat. Cover and chill, tossing strawberries occasionally. Drain strawberries before serving.

When ready to eat, spoon the fresh strawberries over the panna cotta and serve.

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Skinny Chocolate Parfaits

A rich, creamy chocolate treat made from semi-sweet chocolate, fat-free milk, vanilla and cornstarch. Layered with a little whipped topped, it’s a perfect ending to a special dinner.

I don’t have dessert every night, but once in a while, on special occasions, I like to enjoy a sweet treat. Valentine’s Day is certainly one of those nights. What’s great about this dessert is that you actually make the pudding the day before, so it’s easy to assemble just before you are ready to eat.

I love these little glass dessert cups, they are actually from the salvation army but a champagne glass would also work great too.

My light whipped topping of choice is Truwhip^[1] – I love that it
contains all natural ingredients, no HFCS, hydrogenated oils, transfats
or GMOs. They also have a light version, but I can’t always find it. There’s a store finder^[2] on their website if you want to find a store near you that sells it. I also heard Trader Joe’s sells their own brand with the same ingredients.

Skinny Chocolate Parfaits
gordon-ramsay-recipe.com
Servings: 6 • Size: 1/3 cup pudding, 3 tbsp Truwhip • Old Pts: 5 pts • Points+: 6 pts
Calories: 217 • Fat: 10 g • Protein: 5 g • Carb: 30.5 g • Fiber: 1.5 g • Sugar: 22.5 g
Sodium: 73 mg

Ingredients

3 cups fat free milk
2 1/2 tbsp sugar
1-1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp cornstarch
1 large egg yolk
4 oz (4 squares) Semi-Sweet Baking Chocolate Squares
18 tbsp Tru Whip

Directions:

In a medium non-stick saucepan, combine milk, sugar, and cornstarch and simmer on medium-low heat, whisking constantly until mixture has thickened.

In a medium bowl whisk egg yolk. Slowly add about a cup of the hot milk mixture to the yolk, whisking in about a tablespoon at a time to temper the egg so the egg doesn’t cook. Once the egg is tempered, whisk into the saucepan with the milk mixture.

Melt the chocolate squares in the microwave 20 seconds at a time, up to a minute, stirring in between until the chocolate is melted. Pour melted chocolate into the sauce pan, whisk well. Add vanilla; simmer on low for 12-15 minutes, whisking constantly.

Transfer the chocolate pudding into a large bowl, cover with wax paper, touching the pudding so that it doesn’t allow a film to settle on top. Refrigerate for at least two hours or overnight. Makes about 2-1/4 cups.

When cold, place 3 tbsp pudding into each glass, then add 2 tbsp of truwhip in each, then 2 tbsp more pudding and top with a dollop of Truwhip.

References

^{^} Truwhip (www.truwhip.com)
^{^} store finder (www.truwhip.com)

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Mushroom cappucino

I hope you realise how lucky you are to have me. How hard I work on your behalf. Do you know how much washing up there is involved in this little jig? I mean, I could just eat takeaway every night but I don’t. I slaaaave away! Over a stove! Barefoot and pregnant! Just so you don’t make a mess of recipes.

This is the sort of mood I’m in at the moment. Vile. Self-pitying. Martyrish. Rather than just doing whatever it takes to keep myself in a decent mood, I am tiring myself out, trying to do certain things, tick certain boxes and then snapping at everyone because I have run myself ragged or not had a nice time.

I’ve got to stop this. That way misery and divorce lies. I realised at some point last year that if you are a wife and mother, you control the mood in your house. It’s not your husband, or your child, it’s you. If you are in a rat, everyone suffers; if you are depressed, everyone suffers. Happy wife, goes the saying, happy life.

Take yesterday. I decided on a whim to cook a three-course meal for my husband from things picked out of Celebrate, by Pippa Middleton. They all looked tasty to me and I haven’t been doing many new things recently, so I thought I would. The menu went as follows:

Mushroom cappucino
Gravadlax
Raspberry souffle

P-Mid did not, I ought to point out, put this menu together herself – these are just things I picked at random to make up a dinner.

And I ran myself absolutely flipping ragged doing it. By 8.30pm I was basically asleep on the sofa but hadn’t yet finished the raspberry souffle, which was unbelievably complicated (although in the end a terrific success).

Anyway I recommend each of these dishes to you individually, (my husband said he had never eaten such good food in a domestic kitchen before, which makes rather a mockery of the last five years), but maybe don’t do them altogether.

It would be too much to post all three recipes here, so I’ll do each one in turn. Today it’s mushroom cappucino, which is basically a little cup of delicious mushroom soup garnished with a froth. Giles says this is very early Nineties – Gordon Ramsay invented the soup cappucino apparently. But in 1993 I still hadn’t been to a restaurant that wasn’t McDonald’s, so it all rather passed me by.

Generally-speaking I don’t like soup, but what I mean by that is that I don’t like a huge bowl of sloppy soup that you have to plough through. I’m always delighted with a little shot-glass amuse bouche of incredibly tasty soup that you gulp in one or two goes and go “yum yum”. So this is what this is.

Mushroom cappucino
Serves 6

300g mixed mushrooms – chestnut/portobello mushrooms, for example
300ml milk
100ml double cream
dried mushrooms – wild or portobello or whatever
1 pint chicken stock
salt and pepper
4 spring onions
1 large clove garlic
butter and oil for frying
salt and pepper

1 Wash and roughly chop the mushrooms and spring onions. Melt about 40g butter with 2 tbsp groundut oil in a large pan and then sautee the mushrooms, spring onions and sliced garlic very hot for 4 minutes. Keep an eye on the time and keep everything moving around the pan. You do not want the garlic to catch and burn because it will taste filthy.

2 Now pour over the chicken stock and bring it all to a simmer for a minute.

3 Blend this however you can – with a stick blender or in a whizzer or whatever. Add 200ml milk, a long sloop of double cream and then season generously with salt and pepper.

4 To make your sprinkles, grind a palmful of dried mushrooms with a pinch of salt and about 10 turns of the pepper grinder in a peste and mortar if you have one. If not, you could probably just about get it all chopped up in a whizzer.

5 To serve put a ladleful of soup in a cup, topped with the froth off some frothed milk and a sprinkling of your dried mushroom powder.

To froth your milk, put about 100 ml in a pan and heat it gently then using one of those stick frother things, froth the milk in the pan over the heat. You will probably have to hold the pan at an angle and heat the cornered milk up over the flame.

(I am grateful to my sister Harriet for this tip as I had always tried to froth milk just heated up in the microwave and it doesn’t work – at least, you don’t get a foam.)

If you don’t have a stick frother thingy, it’s perfectly okay to just drizzle on top of the soup some more double cream and add your sprinkles to that. I’m sure you could still call it a mushroom cappucino. I won’t tell Gordon.