A Quick Ice Cream Fix

Home made ice cream is always a treat but a chore to make.It's getting the salt, making a large batch and then waiting for hours for the finished product. However there's  a gadget that will remedy it.  The Zoku  Ice Cream Maker is a neat - yes, neat and fun addition to any ice cream lover's kitchen.

Zoku not only makes this ice cream makers, it manufactures other fun household items from their Hoboken,, New Jersey offices and factory. The company basically started with a simple idea - how to make popsicles freeze faster. The answer was the Quick Pop Maker which gives a perfectly formed, perfectly frozen pop.(they've since expanded it to make stenciled pops and a pop kit where you can make multi flavored popsicles).The company has won several design awards and have even been included in the Henry Ford Museum as well as in  the Chicago Athenaeum Museum For Architecture and Design. Their dino-Pop Molds are cute enough with Lucy the Cavegirl along with a mini T  Rex
an other dinosaurs. Zoku also makes deep sea ,polar and outer space themed molds,perfect for parents who want their little ones to have healthy treats. They have truly cool slushie makers that can even give you a great iced coffee. I bought the ice cream maker that can also makes Italian ice as well.I  bought it off Amazon  but they can also be found at Sur La Table, Williams & Sonoma along with the Zoku website itself.

Is the Zoku easy to make? Yes, if you;re making ice cream. The actual bowl, (there's two, an exterior  sleeve that's plastic and you could put the ice cream in it after it's been made) and an interior bowl. This is where it happens.It's composed of a plastic exterior and a metallic inner one. filled with a refrigerant liquid.

Place the inner bowl in the fridge overnight  for twelve or more hours. I made a non dairy sherbet  with almond milk, pureed strawberries and agave syrup. I had started out with the idea of ice cream but the almond milk was too thin. It did make for a nice fruity dessert that fluffed up nicely when shaved. I then tried that summer classic.Italian lemon ice. This was a bit more involved to make.  The recipe had to be amended to  suit the bowl's size. Three lemons were peeled (yes, peeled, which resulted in bloody fingers surprisingly ) cut up and then pulverized in my mini processor. A simple syrup had to be made with white sugar and water. Then the lemon mash has to be strained to get rid of the pits and pulp .It's added, cooked for a few minutes in a soupy kind of mix and then poured into the bowl. It has to be cooled in the fridge for two hours before it's poured in the inner bowl. I didn't stir it with he accompanying paddle spoon. I let it freeze overnight  to look like

It wasn't white. It wasn't fluffy. It was too tart. In other words  better luck next time.


The Zoku Ice Cream Bowl screams to be tried out again. Next time.I am going to try the traditional vanilla ice cream one. Should be easy. and a true treat to make.

Hudson County Jersey's Foodie Paradise

Everyone  thinks of Manhattan as the culinary capital of the world. That may be so in some eyes however there's another foodie paradise just across the Hudson - appropriately in Hudson County. This Garden State county is chock full of interesting and well known eateries. It's a gamut of different tastes and flavors for any one.

New Jersey's most metropolitan area was the subject of an article in today's New York Times Dining section. The  piece, written by former Hudson County resident, Helene Stapinski, explores  the various cities like Jersey City, Hoboken and Union City and the culinary gifts they have to offer. Of course, Hoboken is the best with over three hundred restaurants , thanks to the town being a yuppie paradise.  However the most famous is the Biggie's Clam Bar that feature's the earthy  littleneck clams.It started as a simple pushcart in the 1940s and grew into a restaurant famous for it's clam cakes and those littenecks.There is also the Italian influence there too (after all Hoboken is the birthplace of Frank Sinatra) which is shown in Fiore's Deli, home of the creamiest mozzarella and Piccolo's ,a classic .

Jersey City and Union City also have excellent restaurant and both cities cater to the groups who live there. There are the standard Southern Italian restaurants Puccini's and Laico's. Both have dishes that outshine any  of their counterparts across the river. There is also a big Filipino population and there are some good Filipino restaurants such as the Fiesta Grill. It  features such traditional dishes as chopped milk fish with red onions and chilies. Union City also has very good eateries. One is Mi Banderas, reflecting the town's majority of Central and South Americans,. Here you can get heavenly chicarones, nuggets of fried pork skin and tostones, plantains stuffed with tiny shrimp.It's also known for its churrasco steak which comes with heaping sides of yuca along with rice and beans. Dessert is lush tres leches cake.

Forget Manhattan. Try the culinary treasures right across the river in Hudson County. There's the new and traditional but all four star worthy.Every restaurant is a true treat.