The Happy Homo Homemaker

Ladies & gentlemen, I give you... my balls!

Now that the last recipients have received their Christmas gifts, I can now present you with My Balls: 28 handcrafted Christmas ornaments made by yours truly and gifted to friends and family.  The pride I feel is overwhelming--with barely six months of glassblowing experience under my belt, I just can't believe I've achieved what I have.  

Ta-da!

Hot from the annealer. 

I'm overflowing with pride.  :-D 

Now, onto Glassblowing 1B! 

First vessels

The fruits of my studies: results from weeks 3 and 4... however will week 5's turn out??  Tune in to see... 

Last night, I completed Public Glass' 5-week introductory course on the basics of the ancient art of glassblowing.

Yes, it's as intimidating as it looks. Mastery of the basics is hard enough--gathering the proper amount of glass, popping the bubble, marvering it to the right shape, getting your punty on center, figuring out how long and how deep to heat your piece in the glory hole so that it gets neither too hot nor too cold...and that's before you even start shaping your vessel!!   But then, there's the heat.

Oh my god, the HEAT.  It's impossible to overstate just how intense the heat is.  How can I describe.... it's like face planting onto the sun or perhaps like stepping into the depths of hell, either way, seriously,  you have not experienced heat until you stand in front of the open door to the 2100-degree furnace for too long and all your arm hair gets singed right off.  The intensity of the heat on my face was enough to take my breath away a couple of times.

I also cannot overstate how TOTALLY ADDICTIVE hot glass is!  The sense of accomplishment in popping your first bubble, of forming your first vessel, in learning how to break that first vessel off your punty without shattering it or sendng it crashing to the floor, is overwhelming.  And the pride in turning out an attractive, usable vessel is.... well, we will see when I pick up the finished piece from the studio tomorrow.  [YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!!]  

By popular demand...

Ever since I gushed about my Salted Caramel Ice Cream on Facebook, I’ve gotten numerous requests for the recipe. So I thought I should finally get around to posting it.

Let me preface this by saying that I do NOT have a good track record with ice cream. I literally only have a 50% success rate. At least half of all my attempts at making the frozen treat wound up dumped down the drain. I have lamented this problem for several years, and sought advice from experts. I’ve blamed it, at various times, on the recipes, my freezer, my ice cream maker, and of course my own error and/or lack of skill. Has anyone else had these problems with making ice cream at home?

Anyhoo, while I still haven’t figured out the problem, I have found at least once recipe that has turned out perfectly every time: Salted Caramel Ice Cream. Triple bonus points for the fact that it’s so delicious it makes me swoon.

The original recipe is by Aida Mollenkamp and can be found on Chow. I’ve made few changes to it so far, but the recipe is a work in progress for me. Most recently, I swapped out kosher salt for the tasty flakes of Maldon sea salt, which I think gives the ice cream a slightly saltier taste even at the same ratio. Next time, I will experiment with adding the kosher salt into the unfrozen custard, then stirring in the Maldon flakes while it’s processing in the ice cream maker, the goal being to get little crunches of delightful sea salt with each spoonful.

So, experiment away. Just keep me posted on your successes!

Salted Caramel Ice Cream

2 cups heavy cream
1 cup half-and-half
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, scraped, and seeds reserved
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup water
6 large egg yolks
1 teaspoon Maldon sea salt (or good old kosher salt if you want)

Prepare an ice water bath by filling a bowl halfway with ice and water; set aside. Combine cream, half-and-half, and vanilla seeds in a large bowl and set aside.

Combine sugar and water in a large saucepan (make sure it’s stainless steel or at least light in color, so you can monitor the color of the caramel) and stir until mixture resembles wet sand. Place over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Let boil until mixture turns dark amber in color and smells toasted, about 5 to 7 minutes. Immediately remove from heat and slowly add cream mixture, whisking until evenly incorporated. Return the saucepan to the stove and place over medium-low heat to keep warm.

Meanwhile, whisk egg yolks in a large bowl until pale yellow, about 5 minutes. Whisking constantly, slowly pour about 1 cup of the caramel sauce into the eggs. Pour the egg mixture back into the saucepan with the remaining caramel sauce, stir in salt, and cook over low heat, stirring constantly until it is as viscous as melted ice cream and coats the back of a spoon, about 5 minutes. (When you draw your finger across the spoon, it should not run back in on itself.)

Remove from heat and strain through a fine mesh strainer into a large heatproof bowl. Place the bowl into the ice water bath to chill, about 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Once the ice cream base is cold, cover and place in the refrigerator to chill completely, at least 3 hours or overnight. Once it’s chilled, freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The ice cream will keep in the freezer for 1 week.

Knock, knock... anybody home?

I’m baa-aack! I know, it’s been way too long since I posted anything on this here blog thing.

Those of you who’ve bellyached about the lack of HHH in their lives have heard this before: I’ve been busy! Busy with work, busy making glass things, busy traveling to NYC, busy raising a boatload of money for Public Glass. I was been so busy that I had become estranged from my kitchen. My appliances weren’t speaking to me. They felt left out because I was spending all my time with the microwave. It was scandalous.

Well last weekend, I decided we all needed to hold hands and sing Kum-Ba-Ya, so I busted out the ice cream maker and turned out a batch of Pink Grapefruit sorbet.

Now, one thing you should know: making frozen treats is a precarious act for me. It is fraught with the possibility of emotional devastation and self-ridicule. It’s a crapshoot, a shot in the dark. Why is this, you ask? I don’t know if it’s my crappy Cuisinart ice cream maker or something I’m not doing right, but sometimes the custard just refuses to thicken up. That damn machine can whine and whine and whine all it wants, but no matter how much I get my hopes up, no matter how much I try to will its success, there’s a 50% chance that the unfrozen slop will just get dumped down the drain and I will storm out of the kitchen in a huff. (yeah, I know, I’m probably doing something wrong. Whatever.)

Luckily, my track record with sorbet is nearly perfect (except for the Splenda Debacle, but we won’t go into that). And this recipe in particular is one of my favorites, sweet, tangy, very refreshing. Perfect for a summer day… at least in parts of the world where you actually do have a summer, unlike the arctic tundra that is San Francisco.

The original recipe is from Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” but I made some tweaks. I found her version to be a little too tart; I think mine is just right.

Pink Grapefruit Sorbet

1 Tb finely grated grapefruit zest
3 cups pink grapefruit juice (3 or 4 ruby grapefruits)
Juice of 1 lemon
¾ cup sugar
½ cup water

Special equipment: ice cream maker.

Pour the juices into a bowl, add the zest. Put the sugar and water in a saucepan and simmer, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat and pour the syrup into the juices. Cover and chill for several hours (overnight works too – must be good and cold before placing in the ice cream maker). Just before placing in the ice cream maker, pour the mixture through a fine strainer to remove the zest and any pits and pulp. Process in your ice cream maker until the sorbet reaches the desired thickness. Once its reached proper consistency, pour into airtight containers and freeze. (Note: do NOT fill the containers all the way to the top; leave room for the sorbet to further expand as it continues to freeze.)

Finding a passion

"Blo-ow, Gabriel, Blo-ow!": my instructor Manigeh looks on as I try desperately to 'pop the bubble."

So....

I was going to try writing this deep, witty, expressive post about how finding a passion in my mid-late-30s was a profound moment in my life... about how, after a decade and a half of being focused solely on my work and my career in PR, the realization that I have a passion outside of theatre, outside of food, outside of retail, shook me to my core and brought me to tears of joy as I sat explaining what I was feeling to Tom and Ami as we tried to get through the Oscars.

But then I thought, oh screw it. I BLEW GLASS FOR THE FIRST TIME AND I LOVED IT!

Last Sunday, my good friend Phil and I took a one day workshop in "hot glass" at the studio I belong to, Public Glass. I must say, it was intimidating from the get-go. But we quickly got past the fact that opening the door to a 2000-degree furnace full of molten glass is like face-planting on the Sun, and we just went with it. The whole process of learning how to work with hot glass, and how to mold it and manipulate it into something beautiful, is incredibly thrilling and awe-inspiring. I still can't believe I took a blob of molten glass and, on the first try, turned it into this:
 


 I can't WAIT to get back in there for more. 

My gallery debut

Can you tell how many Hot Glass Cold Beers Ed has been to? 
 
Well, sort of.

A few days ago, my good friend and fellow glass artist Dave asked me if I would be willing to put together a small selection of my work to be displayed during tonight's fundraising event for the studio, Hot Glass Cold Beer. It's a pretty cool event -- for $25 you get to choose a hand-blown drinking vessel of your choice (all created by Public Glass artists, natch), have all the cold beer and nibbles you want, and watch some of the incredibly talented glassblowers do their thing for a few hours.

While the glassblowing process is exciting to watch, it's not all the studio offers. There's also fused/kiln-formed glass (what I do), lampworking, kiln casting.  It's just that watching a warm glass artist at work is like watching paint dry. It's nowhere near as exciting as seeing a lump of molten glass become a beautiful vase before your very eyes.  I describe the difference between making hot glass (blown glass=very high temps) and making warm glass (kilnformed glass=lower temps) as the difference between stove-top cooking and baking. One is very active from start to finish, and you have to keep stirring and turning it to make sure it cooks evenly and doesn't burn; with the other, you do all your prep work at your own pace, put it all together in the oven, and bake at the correct temperature for the correct amount of time. Which is often like 15 hours or more. Sounds exciting, huh?

So to give tonight's guests a taste of what we warmsiders do without causing them to nod off, the idea for the gallery display was hatched. Alongside my pieces will be a one-sheet I've written up to tell my story, explain what inspires and what the pieces on display represent.  Not surprisingly, I spent more time writing and tweaking and editing and retweaking and tweaking this one-sheet some more than I have on most of my glass art.  

  

Photo of the Day - 25th Street

I know, I know... more clouds!  But the winter weather here in the Bay Area makes for such spectacular natural sights that I just can't help myself.

Photo of the Day - Clouds over the soon-to-be-closed Dolores Park

Can you tell I have a thing for clouds?

The relentless rain we've been getting pounded with lately has had at least one fabulous result: some utterly spectacular cloud formations floating over the city.

I took this yesterday from what is arguably the best view in all of San Francisco: from the top of Dolores Park, favorite sunning spot for the Castro gay boys, Mission hipsters and just about everyone in between. Gasps were heard 'round the city earlier this week when it was announced that the entire park would shut down for a year and a half for a major $12 million renovation.

They say it's because the irrigation system needs to be replaced and all the trails need to be redone. But I'm not buying it. I think they're afraid they might dig up some corpses left behind from the days the park was a cemetery.

Photo of the Day - Clouds Over Seal Rock