Okay, full disclosure: I've never had the real Dole Whip. But I caught wind of this icy treat online and it sounded absolutely scrumptious. So I decided to try making it at home using all natural ingredients (unlike the actual Dole Whip, which is not really made from fruit at all).

If you've never heard of Dole Whip, it's akin to pineapple-flavored soft serve that can be found exclusively at Disneyland, Disney's Polynesian Resort, Magic Kingdom, and at Dole's processing plant in Hawaii. According to the Disney Wikia:

Though a Dole Whip has the taste and consistency of soft-serve ice cream, the dessert actually gets its texture from ordinary food thickeners. Only a small amount of the milk derivative sodium caseinate accounts for dairy content.

So I did a little bit of poking around online, looking at how people were making their homemade Dole Whips, and I came up with my own little recipe using their experiences. A lot of people use the powdered mix of Dole Whip you can order online, some mix pineapple juice with whipped cream, and yet others use those machines that turn fruit into frozen desserts. My Dole Whip recipe is slightly more work intensive but good if you don't like whipped cream, don't own one of those machines (but own an ice cream maker), or just have a lot of pineapple lying around!

First of all, my recipe is closer to an ice cream than a sorbet. This recipe uses real pineapple (you can use canned), so there were pineapple fibers throughout the finished product. I also read that cooking or roasting fruit brings its flavor out even more (it can also intensify the color), so I started this recipe by cooking the pineapple. This is a step you can also skip. If you don't own an ice cream maker, you can definitely still use a version of this recipe -- instead of pureeing the pineapple and making the ice cream base, freeze it after cooking and toss the frozen chunks into your blender with the cream and milk and blend until it becomes creamy.

Homemade Dole Whip

When I was a preteen, "Girl's Life" magazine was my publication of choice. I'd sneak peeks at "YM," "Seventeen" and "Sassy" at the local library, but "Girl's Life" was the magazine I asked my father to pay for at Barnes & Noble. It also happened to be my first real foray into cooking.

One of my last issues of "Girl's Life" featured a summer picnic cooking theme, and for some reason, the potato salad screamed out to me. I approached my mother and asked her to help me gather the ingredients necessary to make the salad, and it was every bit as delicious as I'd hoped it'd be. And then I lost my magazine.

It wasn't until I moved last year that I discovered the recipe again. I had ripped it out and placed it with out sentimental magazine rip-outs. Recently I decided to make this potato salad again, after about 15 years, and it was still just as great as I remembered it. I did, however, alter the recipe as I'm sure I did the first time around. The original recipe calls for shredded carrot and parsley, but I find that the flavor of the two a bit too overwhelming to be paired with the rest of the salad's flavors.

It's so simple, but to this day, this is still my absolute favorite potato salad recipe.

Girl's Life Mustard Potato Salad

Happy Independence Day! If now isn't a time for strawberries and ice cream, I don't know what is. (Or watermelon sorbet, come to think of it.) But this is a story about leftovers. I had some leftover heavy cream from a previous ice cream making endeavor, and a lot of strawberries leftover from my strawberry haul at the start of strawberry season (installments one and two: strawberry pecan bread and strawberry pie).

If you know me, though, you'd know that I like putting a twist on "basic" flavors. And knowing that balsamic vinegar and strawberries often go together, I sought out a balsamic strawberry ice cream recipe. I found quite a few and settled on this one, offered by Closet Cooking, but as usual, I altered it a touch.

Roasted Balsamic Strawberry Ice Cream

2 cups of strawberries (cleaned and hulled)
2 tbsps of balsamic vinegar
2 tbsps of sugar
1 cup of heavy cream*
1 cup of full milk*
1/2 cup of sugar (white or brown)
3 egg yolks
Salt
*Alternatively, you could use 2 cups of half-and-half

Instructions
To roast the strawberries, preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Toss the strawberries in the balsamic vinegar and sugar and let sit for 20 minutes. Pour the mixture on a baking pan covered in foil folded up on the sides to capture the juices. Roast the strawberries until they start to caramelize, about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from oven, allow to cool, and place the strawberries and the juices into a container and chill in the fridge.

Heat the cream, milk and sugar in a sauce pan until it almost boils, about 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to low. Add one tablespoon of the cream mixture to the eggs to temper them. Add the egg mixture to the sauce pan. Cook at low heat until it thickens and coats the back of a spoon. You may want to strain the mixture at this point to remove any bits that may have formed while cooking. Add a pinch of salt to help the ice cream freeze, and stir. Chill the mixture in the fridge.

Mix the cream and strawberry mixtures and freeze according to the instructions for your ice cream machine. After removing the ice cream from the ice cream maker, you may need to freeze it for a couple of extra hours so it hardens to a firmer consistency (rather than soft serve).


This was really good. As you may have guessed, I don't typically pick up strawberry ice cream at the store, but this was much better than expected (and better than most strawberry ice creams I've had). According to Kevin, the author of Closet Cooking, roasting the strawberries just intensifies the flavor. I could definitely taste a bit of the balsamic vinegar, but only in that it gave the strawberries a bit of dimension. It wasn't sour, and if I hadn't been looking for it, I probably would've never known it was there. If you're looking for a good homemade strawberry ice cream recipe, this is one I highly recommend. Plus, it's easy!

In Part Two of my "Strawberry Season" recipeganza, I thought it would be nice to try making a strawberry pie. I'd never eaten a strawberry pie before this because they're just not readily available where I've lived. But thinking about strawberry pies reminds me of a guy I used to know (know may be an exaggeration -- we exchanged a handful of e-mails) who told me in one of our first exchanges that his mother baked an amazing strawberry rhubarb pie. That's the only thing I still remember about him, figures.

I used a number of different recipes to come to my resulting pie: Martha Stewart's double pie crust/pâte brisée recipe and I tweaked this AllRecipes recipe to the commenters' suggestions -- thank you, Internet!

Old-Fashioned Strawberry Pie

June is often synonymous with "strawberry season," though strawberries does seem more a spring fruit than a summer fruit. But it is in June that "Eton mess" was traditionally served at Eton College in England, and it is in June that strawberries and cream are served to welcome a new Wimbledon tournament.

With an abundance of strawberries at my disposal this year, I decided to whip up a few goodies based around strawberries, and this strawberry pecan bread is the first of these recipes. I'd gotten the idea while flipping through a copy of the Pensacola Florida Junior League's cookbook, which I'd been gifted last year. I sort of grabbed bits from the Junior League recipe and Saveur's to come up with this.

Strawberry Pecan Bread

3 cups of flour, plus more for dusting
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt
2 cups of sugar
1 and 1/4 cups vegetable oil
4 eggs
4 cups of roughly chopped strawberries
A handful of pecans or nut of choice, chopped
1/2 cup of strawberry or forest fruit jam (optional)
Unsalted butter, for greasing pans

Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease 2 loaf pans with butter and dust with flour; set aside. Whisk flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl, and set aside.

In a separate bowl, whisk the sugar, oil and eggs together. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients and whisk until just combined. Stir in the strawberries and pecans, and pour the batter into prepared pans. If you're using jam, spoon 1/4 cup over each loaf and swirl the jam into the batter with a knife. Bake until golden brown and a toothpick inserted comes out clean, or about one hour. Allow to cool for 30 minutes before slicing and serving.

In preparation for Memorial Day, I've had burgers on my mind. What kind of burger haven't I tried making before? And what burger can I make without hamburger buns (so annoying for small parties, don't you agree? What do you do with the leftover buns)? I had recently picked up a bag of tortillas and everything clicked -- why, quesadilla burgers, of course!

I'm pretty sure I've been lured in by Applebee's quesadilla burger (maybe even more than once?), but seeing as I can't even say I have with confidence, I'm willing to bet that it wasn't that great. After perusing the internet for an easy yet promising recipe, I ended up adapting a Food Network recipe.

Quesadilla Burger and Sweet Corn Salsa

Happy Belated Cinco de Mayo! Chicken tortilla soup is one of those things that took me forever to try, even though Mexican cuisine is one of my favorites. I've only had it once, but I was so pleasantly surprised by the depth of flavor that I vowed to someday make it at home. Aside from the grilled chicken (which you could totally substitute leftover grilled or rotisserie chicken for), the recipe really is quite simple.

I took my recipe from The Pioneer Woman because I loved her show when I had cable (and again when I had Netflix), and I'd never tried any of her recipes. This seemed like a good opportunity. As usual, I tweaked the recipe to my liking.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

I guess April, along with being Spring Cleaning month, is going to be Indian food month here at Maxine Writes HQ. In my last entry about Butter Chicken, I mentioned rarely being able to find someone to eat Indian food with. My entrée of choice when I do get around to having Indian food is aloo gobi.

If you've never had aloo (potatoes) gobi (cauliflower), it's a dish made with ... potatoes and cauliflower and garam masala sauce, along with spices. I tried out a simplified (a.k.a. fewer unobtainable ingredients) recipe from Food.com user chuckdarwin and made some minor adjustments. Since it's a vegetarian dish, it really is quite easy to make -- and tasted just as I remembered it from the last time I had it ... a long time ago.

Aloo Gobi