Ice Tea Granita - Summer on a Spoon

To me, nothing says summer like ice tea.  When I was little, Mom always had a big glass jug of it in the fridge, or out brewing in the sun.  Most people probably have childhood memories of drinking Kool-Aid or even lemonade, but not me.  Ice tea was always my favorite.  Sometimes Mom would make it with lemon, sometimes with mint and lime.  However she made it, I loved it, and still do.  So when I thought of making granita, it was only natural to use ice tea.  When I told Hubby about my idea, he pretty much thought it was lame and wouldn’t look good for my post.  Well, that only made me want to do it even more, of course. 

Here’s what you’ll need:

6 cups water
¾ cups sugar
10 teabags
1 lemon
1 lime

Bring the water to a boil and turn off the heat.  Remove it from the hot burner and add the teabags. 

To make them easy to pull out, just drape the tags over the edges of the pan, just make sure they’re not touching any hot burners. 

So, let’s talk tea.  As you can see, I used Lipton.  If you can find Newman’s Own, it is, in my book, the best there is for ice tea.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any at my local grocery store, and didn’t have time to order some. 

That being said, Lipton will do.  I’ve found most fancy teas don’t make the best ice tea, but I’d stay away from generic brands, as well. 

So, back to our tea.  It needs to steep for 5 minutes.  Set a timer, because if it steeps too long, it will become bitter.  During those 5 minutes, you should be able to juice your lemon and lime.

I just have to rave about my juicer once more.  The first time I used it, I wasn’t sold, but I have really grown to love this thing. 

I was able to get ½ cup of juice out of 1 lemon and 1 lime.  If your limes are small, you may need to use 2. 

Back to our tea again.  After 5 minutes, remove the teabags.  It should be nice and dark.  We need strong flavors that will hold up during the freezing process. 

Pour in your sugar and stir, stir, stir, until it is completely dissolved. 

Now pour in the juice. 

Stir once more and go relax for awhile.  It needs some time to cool down.  When it gets to the point that it no longer steams when you stir it, go ahead and pour it into a glass dish. 

Don’t use a square pan, it’s not big enough.  Go with a 9x13.  Yes, I know I poured it into a square pan, but shortly after that, I realized it would have been much smarter to use a bigger pan because it would freeze faster and more evenly, and would also leave more room for what's to come.  Into the freezer it goes.  It’ll need several hours to freeze.  I actually left mine overnight. 

When it’s completely solid, remove it from the freezer and begin scraping the surface with a fork. 

Keep scraping until you have a nice pile of tea snow.

Spoon it into a dish, and serve immediately.  You can leave it in the freezer in its solid form for a few days, but wait to scrape it until right before eating it. 

So, what did Hubby say when he tried a bite of it this morning?  “That’s really good!”  Not sure which one I savor more… the ice tea granita, or the satisfaction of, once again, being smarter than Hubby thinks I am.  

Cookin it, old skool

It's still freaking hot, and I wanted cheesecake. Fortunately I have friends with recipes. Old Skool Recipes.

And zombie movies.

And what better to eat during a zombie movie than cherry cheesecake! Screw popcorn, chips, and nachos. If you're really going to get into things, you need to match the food to the flick. And we needed braaaaaiiinss.

Cherry brains!

On top of gooey, golden, lemony cheesecake.

No Bake Cheese Cake

What you need:

Crust:

• ~3 c graham cracker crumbs
• ~1/2 c butter

Filling:

• 1 8 oz block of cream cheese
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tin of evaporated milk
• 1 pkg of lemon jello (no, really!)

Topping:

• 1 c water
• 1 c sugar
• 1 c dried cherries

What you gotta do:

We started with the topping. Combine the water and sugar in a medium pot over medium heat.

 

Once the sugar has dissolved and the syrup has started to bubble, add the cherries.

 

The plan here is to rehydrate these fabulous little things (omg they are the tastiest most luxurious dried fruit ever) and let their deliciousness infuse the basic sryup. The plan. That's it.

While the cherries are simmering, dump the crumbs into a 9 x 11 pan and spread them out. Drizzle the melted butter over them and start mixing.

 

A spoon is fine, but you'll probably end up getting your hands in there eventually to press it down into the pan. You want no more than 1/2 inch thick.

So, these next steps get a little dishes intensive, but hey, we're not at my house so I'm okay with that. :P

Start with the medium bowl and pour in the evaporated milk.

With a hand mixer, beat the milk for a few minutes. I'm thinking that you could also use whipping cream here, but you wouldn't want to whip it too much. Just enough to fluff it up, but not enough that you get peaks.

Take that off to the fridge to chill while you dirty more bowls. 

Next is the cream cheese. Dump it in the big bowl with vanilla and lemon juice.

Works best at room temp, but an electric mixer will bring it into line pretty quickly. Beat it up with the vanilla and the lemon juice. We didn't have lemons on hand, but the bottle will suffice in a pinch.

And in the third bowl, combine the lemon jello with one cup of boiling water. I'm thinking that you could get a sharper, brighter lemon flavour in this step if you went with plain gelatin and some lemon zest, but as I mentioned, no lemon, so we jello'd it. 

And if you mix it with the spoon that you used to scrap the sides of the cream cheese bowl, you get all kinds of fun cheesey floaties in the jello.

Don't worry, it's all going to end up in the same place. Let it cool for a bit so that you're not adding boiling hot stuff to your cold things. Hm. This step maybe should have come a little sooner. Oh well, it all worked out in the end. The cheesecake did.

And in it goes.

Cooled lemon gelatine mixture, chilled beaten evaporated milk (or whipped cream, if that's what you opted for) into the big bowl of lemony, vanillay cream cheese.

And beat it some more! Power tools are fun.

Once you've got it all combined and whipped up into a frothy gooey mess, pour it onto the crust.

Oh crap, the cherries.

Remove them from the heat and let them cool while the cheesecake chills in the fridge for a couple hours. It will be just barely jiggly when it's ready.

The cheesecake layer ended up a little shallower than we were hoping,

so you could do this in a smaller pan to get a ratio weighted more to the cheesecake, just make sure that you decrease the crumb amout so you're still below the half inch mark.

Now, the plan for the cherries (you remember the plan, right?) was to have a nice gooey syrupy pile of brains to pour on top of our cheesecake. Um.

Yes, that is the spoon stuck to the pot.

I highly recommend not boiling the cherries for as long as we did. And I have no idea how long we boiled them. Don't do that.

We ended up with something more like toffee than syrup. Very stringy toffee.

But, a little more heat was enough to get it moving again and we were able to blob some onto the cheesecake. The rest, we poured into a gratuitously buttered pan.

Cherry. Toffee. Okay, some things are good ideas after all. Chewy, stick your teeth together good.

Of course, the warm toffee melted the cold cheesecake, but it sure tasted good and it really did look like... BRAAAAAAAIIIIIINS!!!!

 

Now that you've got your braaaaiins, thick and chewy braaaaaiiiiins, all you need is a copy of Dead Snow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-KQh87_V2Q

Watch for the cherry topping. It's there.

I once knew a guy who would eat baked beans out of a pot with a wooden spoon while waching westerns so he could get right into the characters. Me, I'm happy with cherry brains for my zombie cheesecake.

What's your favourite food and movie combo?