Gosh, it feels like forever since I actually posted a recipe on this blog! The scary thing is that I have A LOT of them to post! With the New Foodie Blogroll launch over, I have accumulated a lot of recipes and photos of dishes I have been preparing this summer, that I haven’t had time to post (and scarily enough, posts I had written right before the wedding, that I still have to post Bad, bad, blogger!).

DISCLAIMER: So be forewarned that some of the upcoming posts aren’t going to be seasonal for most of my lovely readers. I see that there are Autumnal posts all over the blogosphere, and although the weather is a little less humid here, we are still very much in the throes of summertime, here in Florida! (OH HOW I MISS THE FALL!!!)

We are going to be heading to New England for our annual trip in October and my goal is to post all my backlog before then. So that when I come back, I have all fresh material!

So before this gets too out of date, here are the lovely ice cream recipes for you that I promised over a week ago! *blush*

Here are the next two installments of the Ice Cream Diaries…

Lemon-Ricotta Ice Cream

I had some leftover ricotta cheese in the fridge and I had seen Laurie from Dalla Mia Cucina make a Ricotta and Rum Gelato and I thought – there you go! That’s what I want to do with my leftover ricotta! I had about a cup left, so I decided to fill in the rest with whole milk and Greek yogurt.

A while back I had made some lemon-ricotta muffins that I found on Rosa’s Yum Yums that were awesome so I decided that I wanted to make lemon-ricotta ice cream. Also I have been trying to find a solution to the super hard ice cream texture that most of our ice cream has (to the point that we have to take it out of the freezer 40 minutes before we want to eat it!!!), and since I know vodka doesn’t freeze, I put a nice shot of vanilla vodka into the mix. Just for texture purposes! It worked really well! So now I know the trick to making softer ice cream!

Click through for recipe and for the Mango-Organe Sorbetto….AND the MEME!
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(NOW WITH PICTURES!)

I was so excited to see that this month’s challenge was for éclairs! We are at my mom’s this weekend, and unfortunately although we brought the camera to take the photos, we did not bring the cable to download them. So I will have to put pictures up on Tuesday when we are back!

Anyway, I have always wanted to make them, and although there were things the recipe called for that I had never made in the past – namely choux pastry and pastry cream, the process didn’t look too difficult.

I waited until this weekend to do the challenge, because I have a really small kitchen and not a lot of pastry equipment, like pastry bags and tips and the like. But my mom does, and she has made cream puffs many times before. This was a crazy month for me, and so I felt this challenge had a better chance of getting finished, if I had her help. So I waited until yesterday to do the challenge, so I could do this fun project with her.

When Roberto and I arrived here yesterday afternoon, I hadn’t even gotten the challenge ingredients yet. But I knew that I wanted to do vanilla pastry cream with some kind of summer fruits and the chocolate glaze on top. The only requirement for this challenge is that we use the recipe for the choux pastry and have one chocolate component – whether it be chocolate pastry cream or chocolate glaze on top. So we went to the store after dinner and there was an abundance of beautiful fruits. We got kadota and black mission figs, fresh blackberries and blueberries, and something I had never had before, fresh currants. They were very reminiscent of the lignonberries I had eaten when I lived in Norway, but again, I had never eaten lingnonberries Both the currants and blackberries were tart, so I decided to combine them with the sweeter fruits.

We made 3 different fillings. Regular vanilla pastry cream, pastry cream mixed with currants and blueberries and the other with pastry cream mixed with black figs and blackberries. We also made 2 different shapes – éclair and puffs. Of course, as per Meeta and Tony’s specifications, we made a chocolate glaze for the tops. Everything turned out beautifully, except that a lot of the éclairs and puffs fell. My friend Judy, warned me that this might happen in sweltering humid Florida heat, but the cream and fruit perked them right up, and they turned out really wonderful. We finished the project at 11:30 last night, but before retiring, we each tried one of each flavor, and it was really hard to pick a favorite. All I can say is that I am glad there are some left and I don’t think I will turn them into ice cream. Although I am not too sure what I am going to do with the extra pastry cream!

If you want to try your hand at éclairs, please check out the wonderful recipe that follows after the cut by Pierre Hermé.

Thanks to Meeta and Tony for this awesome challenge!

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These were the cookies growing up that really set our family Christmas cookies apart from the cookies you saw on other families’ tables. These are the cookies that my Nana made every year for my Pap who came here from Sicily when he was 3 years old because they were his absolute favorite. His most clear memory of his life in Sicily was sitting on the porch of his Nana, waiting for cookies. Perhaps the cookie he was waiting for was a Cuccidata, perhaps not. But I like to think it was. Sicilians are known for their love affair with sweets and make some of the best in the world.

The fig is so under-rated here in America. People just really don’t know what to do with figs. I am a huge lover of this sensual fruit. I have shown my adoration of it on pizza, on salad and even as a jam. It can be sweet, savory or in between. There are endless ways to use this beautiful fruit, but one of the best ways is in these cookies. Dried figs are mixed with raisins, a ground whole orange (peel and all) and walnuts to create a filling for one of the softest best smelling dough I have ever worked with. Then the fun part is in true colorful, Sicilian fashion, get crazy with the colors and decoration – colored icing, sprinkles and this year, chocolate really make each one of these cookies special. These cookies mean Christmas for the DiPiazza family. So I made these with my mom to honor the generations of DiPiazzas before us. Hope you enjoy!
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As everyone here knows, I am obsessed with figs and fig recipes. Their exterior beauty is exotic and captivating, while the soft, creamy sweet fruit on the inside is so unexpected. I just adore the fig and since summer is drawing to an end, I am posting two more fig recipes I think you will enjoy:
Parmesan Stuffed Figs with Balsamic Reduction and Drunken Figs.

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I saw a recipe for fresh fig pizza with blue cheese in Vegetarian Times years ago. I have a huge collection of recipes I have torn out of magazines and newspapers, printed from online, etc etc over the years. These are recipes that have given me inspiration on creating new flavors and dishes. Every time I move, which seems to have been quite a few times over these past few years, I go through the box and get rid of the ones I will never make or have lost their lustor.

This recipe has stuck with me over the years and I finally decided to try my version of it. As you know from my recent post about figs, fresh figs are finally in season and so I have been eating quite a lot of them! Since Roberto is always looking for a good ITALIAN pizza crust – (no New York style crust, here)– to no avail yet in a restaurant, we have been trying to devise our own. The secret to a great Italian pizza crust is of course the high temperatures in which they are quickly cooked. So I decided to finish the pizzas by grilling them off at the end, in a 600 F grill to get it to the right consistency. It definitely got the Roman’s seal of approval. I also drizzled the pizzas with olive oil and balsamic vinegar when they came out of the grill to give it a little something extra!
Buon Appetito!
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Now if this is not mouth watering, I really don’t know what is.
Have I mentioned how much I love figs? They are just so magnificent – They look like strange little pods from the outside, but when you open them up they are so lucious and delicate and gorgeous! They take my breath away! I love figs so much that to look at them in person makes my heart leap, my mouth water and my eyes to fill with tears…well at least that is what they did when I saw Sylvia’s Rocket Salad with Grilled Figs and Goat Cheese
a few weeks back. That was when I was beginning to despair about ever finding fresh figs again! Since we moved to Florida, it has been like acclimating to everything – the weather, the culture, the driving, and the availability of well-loved ingredients! I took for granted in the past the easy availability of certain favorite ingredients living in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast where there was always a plethora of ethnic markets, including Mediterranean. But having moved to Florida, I have had trouble finding things like, hazelnuts, pomegranate syrup and FRESH FIGS! So I began to loose hope of having fresh figs again and when fig season began and I saw recipes like the one on Sylvia’s blog I began to feel a little crushed and a deep longing for figs, glorious figs. My luck was about to change.
One day at the grocery store recently while I was perusing the tropical fruit aisle (one of the great things about moving to Florida – there is a tropical fruit aisle!) something I often do so I can try new and exotic fruits, I saw a little place card for fresh Turkish Figs and my broken heart began to mend! My beloved figs were there! Yes, they were $8 for about 10 of them, which I knew was ridiculous but at this point I was ready to throw caution to the wind, they were there and I wanted them! Once I brought them home I knew I needed to eat them fast – as they rot quickly! So I had two recipes in mind – Sylvia’s salad and Fresh Fig and Sage Grilled Pizza. Here is Sylvia’s Recipe as she posted it!
It is heavenly!

Stay tuned for the Pizza recipe!
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Prosciutto is a cured paper-thin ham. The most well known is the kind from the region of Parma in Italy. It can be used for sandwiches, in omelets, on pizza or in Antipasti (appetizers). In this recipe it is paired with fresh figs, a sweet, soft fruit found all over the Mediterranean region.
Serve this as an appetizer with some crusty bread and cheese, like a good parmigiano reggiano and a glass of wine.
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