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The eggnog experiments
Jan. 5th, 2024 07:18 pm[maybe I should make a cooking icon that isn't a summer compost bowl]
The knitting group I attend (I don't knit much, but people are OK with that) meets on Zoom the first Wednesday of the month. One of the conversations on Wednesday was about a knitter's recipe for eggnog. I remarked that eggs and milk and sugar sound like the basis for baked custard - would eggnog work?
In the spirit of Scientific experimentation (sort of), I bought a carton of Stop & Shop brand eggnog and did some tests. The first answer is that just baking it at 325 F for an hour in small Pyrex dishes in a water bath didn't make anything resembling custard, just hot eggnog with a cooked skin on top. I added leftover cooked white rice and flaked almonds into one of the dishes of hot eggnog and ate it that way, but it wasn't really like rice pudding either.
Into the other dish I dumped a bunch of cornstarch. Nope, not like boxed pudding mix. I set that one aside in the fridge to deal with later.
I poured some eggnog into a shallow dish and froze it uncovered for an hour. After stirring, it was a pretty good facsimile of ice cream.
I soaked some oat bread in eggnog and fried it in butter, making French toast. No syrup needed at all, because the factory-made eggnog is very sweet. I know I was jumping the gun a little instead of waiting until Sunday for this, but we are already under an elevated French toast alert*
https://www.universalhub.com/french-toast
After supper I got the cornstarched one out of the fridge and added a couple of tablespoons of misugaru powder. It was more bulky after that but *still* not custard thickness
https://kimchimari.com/misugaru-korean-multi-grain-powder-drink/
Now I am feeling over-saturated with S&S eggnog and have lots left, because the only size in the store was half a gallon.
* the predictions for snow overnight Saturday into Sunday for my area range from 3-9 inches. I was planning to skip service ringing and allot the daylight hours to moving snow, but if I am skipping service ringing I don't have to drive the car until at least Tuesday, when I have an appointment to get the oil changed. If I had been thinking clearly I would have called the mechanic today and postponed, because it's supposed to be rainy and warm on Wednesday, so maybe the driveway will clear itself. I could call first thing on Monday. The driveway neglect plan would be to just do the sidewalk and the neighbor's walk (if he doesn't beat me to it) a couple of times during the storm, and clear the storm drain in the street. Hmm. Also, I could take some fresh snow and pour eggnog onto it, because why not? My mother used to make something she called snow cream, and that wouldn't be a bad version. Weird Cold War childhood thing: My mother had a firm rule that nobody was allowed to eat snow from the first snowfall of the year, because it cleansed nuclear fallout (from tests) as it fell. Subsequent snows were non-nuked. Did she make this up? I don't think there were annual nuclear tests in my childhood. Or were there?
The knitting group I attend (I don't knit much, but people are OK with that) meets on Zoom the first Wednesday of the month. One of the conversations on Wednesday was about a knitter's recipe for eggnog. I remarked that eggs and milk and sugar sound like the basis for baked custard - would eggnog work?
In the spirit of Scientific experimentation (sort of), I bought a carton of Stop & Shop brand eggnog and did some tests. The first answer is that just baking it at 325 F for an hour in small Pyrex dishes in a water bath didn't make anything resembling custard, just hot eggnog with a cooked skin on top. I added leftover cooked white rice and flaked almonds into one of the dishes of hot eggnog and ate it that way, but it wasn't really like rice pudding either.
Into the other dish I dumped a bunch of cornstarch. Nope, not like boxed pudding mix. I set that one aside in the fridge to deal with later.
I poured some eggnog into a shallow dish and froze it uncovered for an hour. After stirring, it was a pretty good facsimile of ice cream.
I soaked some oat bread in eggnog and fried it in butter, making French toast. No syrup needed at all, because the factory-made eggnog is very sweet. I know I was jumping the gun a little instead of waiting until Sunday for this, but we are already under an elevated French toast alert*
https://www.universalhub.com/french-toast
After supper I got the cornstarched one out of the fridge and added a couple of tablespoons of misugaru powder. It was more bulky after that but *still* not custard thickness
https://kimchimari.com/misugaru-korean-multi-grain-powder-drink/
Now I am feeling over-saturated with S&S eggnog and have lots left, because the only size in the store was half a gallon.
* the predictions for snow overnight Saturday into Sunday for my area range from 3-9 inches. I was planning to skip service ringing and allot the daylight hours to moving snow, but if I am skipping service ringing I don't have to drive the car until at least Tuesday, when I have an appointment to get the oil changed. If I had been thinking clearly I would have called the mechanic today and postponed, because it's supposed to be rainy and warm on Wednesday, so maybe the driveway will clear itself. I could call first thing on Monday. The driveway neglect plan would be to just do the sidewalk and the neighbor's walk (if he doesn't beat me to it) a couple of times during the storm, and clear the storm drain in the street. Hmm. Also, I could take some fresh snow and pour eggnog onto it, because why not? My mother used to make something she called snow cream, and that wouldn't be a bad version. Weird Cold War childhood thing: My mother had a firm rule that nobody was allowed to eat snow from the first snowfall of the year, because it cleansed nuclear fallout (from tests) as it fell. Subsequent snows were non-nuked. Did she make this up? I don't think there were annual nuclear tests in my childhood. Or were there?
