Franzcooks.com The "Flava" Doctor is IN!
 

 

 

Appetizers

Soup recipes

Sides and Pasta

Entree recipes

Veggies

Desserts

Drinks

Shortcuts

I'm not much of a dessert person.  I like to eat some of them, but I really like to make them.  Like everyone else, I find a recipe and add my "special" touches to them.

 

This is my recipe for Crème Brulee.  It is based on Wolfgang Puck's recipe from his book Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen.   I've added an extra egg, 1/2 cup of sugar and two more vanilla beans.  If you buy vanilla beans in quantity off of EBay, they're not THAT expensive.  I pay about $1 a piece for them.  If you have friends who cook, you can get together and buy a 1/2 pound.  OR, you could buy the half pound, sell half to your friends at $2 per bean and yours are free!  Anyway, without further ado, here is the recipe.

Creme Brulee

It occurred to me that vanilla ice cream is kind of like a defatted version of crème brulee.  I took out half of the cream and substituted an equal amount of whole milk.  I also took out the butter.  I made up a batch and tested it out on my son.  His eyes lit up like a light bulb.  He prefers mine to any store bought ice cream.  I'm not sure it's cheaper, but who cares!

Vanilla Ice Cream

I was watching one of my favorite Food TV shows, "Good Eats", one night.  Alton Brown was making tapioca pudding.  Well, I knew that my wife LOVES tapioca pudding so I decided to whip up a batch.  She thought it was GREAT.  There were a couple of things that I wanted to change about it.  First, while the fat content was about right, the sugar was low.  Also there was no vanilla.  I fixed that part of it, yet one problem remained.  The problem is not in the recipe but the scarcity of one ingredient.  That ingredient was pearl tapioca.  We have some great grocery stores here, but finding pearl tapioca was difficult.  I then took it upon myself to come up with the new version of my recipe, hence:

Quick Tapioca (Taste Tested and Mother Approved)

PS, If you can find pearl tapioca, use his cooking technique with my ingredients.