Asian Pear Ginger Froyo + Lemon Ginger Macarons, and "on the nickname 'Froyo'"

Sometimes, I wonder what's wrong with me.  (Okay, wait, I wonder that all the time.)  Like the time my mom showed up at my house, bringing with her two beautiful Asian pears for me.  The pears were so big I could hardly hold them both in my hands at once, and they had been part of a special gift box that someone had given her.  But here's where I ask what's wrong with myself, because the first thing I thought when I saw the pears was... "Oh my god, those would make the most amazing Asian pear frozen yogurt."

So being the slightly deranged me, I chopped up those gorgeous pears in a food processor, adding a healthy kick of ginger (which seems to be becoming a definite trend, given my previous posts here and here), and folded them into thick and yummy Greek yogurt.  The end result was delicious, so I suppose I can't complain too much about my insanity.  What made the yogurt even more delicious was the addition of lemon ginger macaron shells.

These macarons are super gingery with a little kick of lemon zest to them, and they are the perfect complement to the Asian pear frozen yogurt.  Together, the froyo and macaron shells make for a terrifically snappy, spicy, and refreshing dessert, perfect for the super warm (70+ degrees F) afternoons that we've been having in the Bay Area lately.  Summer's coming way to fast, but it's okay.  I'm armed with a tub of pear and ginger frozen yogurt, so bring it on.

(P.S.  "Froyo" = frozen yogurt, which is an awesome example of something linguists call "Aggressive Reduplication," discussed at length in a terrific paper by Kie Zuraw, a linguist at UCLA.  At Stanford, there is this incredible culture of super-aggressive aggressive reduplication.  Those Stanford kids do the craziest things, and I don't think I've even learned all of them yet:


"Coho" = Coffee house
"FloMo" = Florence Moore dorm
"FroSoCo" = Freshman Sophomore College

At Berkeley, we were far more practical about our aggressive reduplicating.  We really only had two that were commonly used, both of which pertained to frozen yogurt: "Froyo," which you know already, and "YoPo," referring to Yogurt Park, a famous froyo shop a block from campus that is particularly enjoyed and frequented by Berkeley female athletes and jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman, amongst others.)


Read on for recipe...

The Basil and Macadamia Nut Double Feature! or, Dinner AND Dessert

Today's post has been a long time in coming.  A year ago last week, I was in Berlin, Germany, on a stop of my first Grand Tour of Europe (I spent last St. Patrick's Day in Athens, Greece!).  My roommate was at the time studying in Berlin, so we hatched this awesome plan in which I would stop by through my traversing of the Old World and say hi.

Nollendorfplatz, our stop in Berlin

It was wonderful (and cold), and, while she was dragging me from one end of the city to the other, we managed to walk by this random Australian restaurant, where she had once eaten macadamia nut pesto.  We made plans to return to the restaurant to try this fascinating pesto creation, but my time in Berlin was just too short and we ended up getting side-tracked by this amazing thing called pesto gouda.  (P.S. If you're in Germany or the Netherlands and would like to mail me some pesto gouda, I will be forever in your debt! *hint hint*)  Anyways, at last, a few weeks ago, I got down to replicating macadamia nut pesto, and, the results, I have to say (and according to my roommate), were fantastic:

Because of the macadamia nuts, this is seriously the richest, smoothest, most buttery pesto that I have ever tasted.  Creamy.  That's the word for this pesto.  It was awesome.  My roommate and I slathered it on all sorts of pastas--gnocchi, spaghetti, penne--and gobbled it all down.  We might even try it with pizza at some point.  That could potentially be epic.

The pesto is actually quite different from the basil pesto that I normally make, which has more basil than pine nuts.  This pesto, as I was instructed by my roommate, has more macadamia nuts than basil, so you get just a hint of the light freshness of basil coming out over the rich creaminess of the macadamia nuts.  Add some really good parmegiano reggiano cheese, garlic, freshly ground black pepper, and salt, and voila! an excellent (and exceptionally fast) dinner.

Of course, being me and this being a dessert blog, I couldn't really stop there.  As I was gathering the ingredients for the macadamia nut pesto, it struck me: chocolate would also be amazingly good with the same combination of flavors.  Plus, I needed to do *something* to use up the big boxes of organic basil that I bought.  (The sales girl did ask me quizzically what I was doing with all that basil.)  So, I present to you, the Basil and Macadamia Nut Double Feature:

That's right.  I took the same ingredients from dinner (save the tomatoes) and ported them over to a dessert, a basil-macadamia nut dark chocolate tart, to be exact.  There's even olive oil and generous flecks of sea salt in that tart:

The combination of basil, macadamia nut, olive oil, sea salt, and dark chocolate came out beautifully.  The crust is made of macadamia nuts and home-dried basil--buttery, flaky, and fragrant.  I whisked olive oil into the dark chocolate ganache, giving it this incredible sheen and subtle fruitiness.  Topping it all off with liberal amounts of sea salt really made the chocolate pop when you took a bite.

The overall result is a delectable dessert that's rich yet light at the same time and not at all overly sweet or saccharine, making it a perfect post-dinner treat that doesn't leave you completely, belt-bustingly full.  One person who tried it couldn't stop congratulating me on it for a few days.  And, the slight green color of the crust adds an air of mystery to the tart (yet, it doesn't look unappetizingly like kryptonite).  I took the finished product to a department dinner, and it was a great conversation starter: "What is that?  Mint?  Avocado?  Apple? Leprechaun?"

So, what started out as a long-awaited fulfillment of a promise in Berlin turned into a wonderful experiment of using the same ingredients in both dinner and dessert and ended up with an awesomely delicious chocolate tart recipe!  But, that's not to say that I wouldn't want to go back to Berlin to try the actual restaurant... or for more pesto gouda, which is, incidentally, startlingly kermit-the-frog green.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, all!

Read on for both savory and sweet recipes...