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Earlier this summer my husband and I drove into Cambridge on a Saturday afternoon to catch a film. Afterwards, we were vaguely hungry, but not knowing for what, we prowled the neighborhood. We found ourselves in Inman Square at East Coast Grill, where we were told there’d be a half-hour wait. No thanks. So we stepped out onto Cambridge Street and there was Christina’s and suddenly I had to have an ice cream. My husband wasn’t too hungry, so he said to go ahead (he doesn’t eat ice cream … yeah, can you believe it?) and he’d wait to get something at home.

I got a small dish of mango ice cream. It was perfect. Creamy, a pale chiffony yellow, and the right balance of sweet and tropical. In the late afternoon heat, we wandered down Cambridge Street past the Brazilian churrascarias and Portuguese social clubs, then turned toward MIT and Kendall Square when I was done scraping out my bowl. “I have to make mango ice cream when I get home,” I said. My husband smiled. He’s heard this all before.

It took me a couple months, but here it is. Not quite like Christina’s, but damn good — even if only got around to it after the summer weather turned.

Mango Ice Cream
Yield: 1 quart

The flavor of mango here is subtle, tantalizing — your guests may even find it difficult to place the flavor. If you’re looking for more mango flavor, try a mango sorbet. Here, because of the cream and vanilla, you just get a whisper of the tropical fruit. Of course you can use fresh fruit — it’s just that good frozen mango is easier for me to source.

1 cup whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
1 whole vanilla pod, split, seeds scraped out and reserved
16-oz. frozen mango cubes, slightly thawed
1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
6 egg yolks

In a medium saucepan set over medium heat, heat milk, cream, and sugar until just about to boil. This will take about 5 or 6 minutes. Remove pan from heat and add scraped-out vanilla pods and seeds. Let sit for 10 minutes to steep.

In a heavy-duty blender or food processor, puree the slightly thawed mango until perfectly smooth. Stir in the lemon juice and set fruit aside.

In a small bowl, stir the egg yolks together. Then take about a cup of the hot milk/cream and stir it into the eggs quickly. This tempers them so that when you add the yolks to the cream/milk on the stove, they don’t curdle. Ok, now slowly stir the tempered eggs into the hot cream mixture.

Turn the heat under the saucepan to medium and stir the mixture until it starts to coat the back of your spoon (or spatula). Do not stop stirring, or else you chance your ice cream base turning into scrambled mango-flavored eggs. If you’re unsure of what the base should look like on your spoon, attach a digital thermometer to the side of the pan, and stir/cook until the mixture hits 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool for 10 minutes or so, stirring occasionally. Stir in the mango mixture.

Place a fine-mesh strainer over a clean bowl and pour the base into the strainer. This will get rid of any stray bits of cooked egg or mango fiber. Pick out the vanilla pod from the strainer and when cool enough to handle, rinse and set aside to dry. Stick the used pod in some sugar to make vanilla sugar; or cut it up and add it to a bottle of vanilla.

If you’re meticulous about food safety, chill the ice cream base in an ice bath. I’m not religious about this, so what I usually do is cover the surface of the ice cream base with plastic wrap and stick the bowl in the bottom half of the fridge overnight. I haven’t lost anyone yet, knock wood.

Process the mixture according to your ice cream maker’s directions.

This afternoon my mother-in-law and I took a cooking class down here in Houston. Since we don’t have such great Mexican or Tex-Mex food in Boston, I’m all about eating as much as I can of it while I’m here. This class focused on Mexican breakfasts, a meal I don’t normally associate with Mexican food. (That said, one of my favorite egg dishes is huevos rancheros and I pour hot sauce on my scrambled eggs. Huh.)

We took the class at Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen, just south of my in-law’s home. Sylvia Casares is in her 50s, although she looks more like 40. Hailing from Brownsville, Texas, down on the U.S./Mexico border, Casares learned to cook from her mother and grandmother.

I was curious to learn the difference between Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine. As I suspected, I’m more of a fan of Mexican food than I am of Tex-Mex, after I learned Tex-Mex includes more beef, flour tortillas, and yellow cheese. (Mexican food is generally more pork, corn tortillas, and white cheese.)

Casares made a half-dozen breakfast recipes for our group: atole, which is like Cream-of-Wheat made with corn flour and flavored with cinnamon (yum!); flour and corn tortillas; gorditas, which were absolutely delicious on their own, but are typically filled with beans; salsa ranchera; quick refried beans; a tomatillo-based salsa; and migas con huevo. At the end of the demonstration, students could practice their tortilla-making. I’d not planned on doing this, but when I could see students eating their practice tortillas, I went for it. Afterwards we were served a delicious lunch that included some of the dishes “we” created, along with some potent margaritas. (I had to take a nap when I came home — I can’t hold my tequila like I used to!)

Here I am, rolling out a flour tortilla.

It was a fun afternoon, and it rekindled my interest in cooking more Mexican dishes. I’ve been reading Discover Your Inner Economist, and one of the things I agreed with is that one should learn to cook a cuisine that’s not readily available in one’s neighborhood. His example is LA — it would be best to learn to cook German or Scandinavian cuisine if you lived there, since great Asian and Mexican foods are readily available. Thus in Boston, learning to cook fabulous Mexican food is a good investment of my time. Hey, I’m game!

My son and I are flying to Houston in a couple days, so I’ve been trying to empty out the fridge before we go. This weekend I made several quarts of chicken stock with the assorted chicken necks, backs, and gnawed over bones in our freezer. This also got rid of a 5-lb. bag of organic carrots, a bag of ramp trimmings, and assorted onions. Then I had to figure out how to preserve two weeks of CSA veggies. I turned the broccoli, red onions, and kale into soups and will shred zucchini and kohlrabi for vegetable fritters. We have about three pounds of beets in the veggie bin: if I have time, I’ll turn those into beet jerky. (Don’t knock it — I can put away a pound of beets this way in about ten minutes, flat.)

Tonight I served up a humble meal. We had a pound of grass-fed beef in the fridge, which I mixed up with a pre-made seasoning mix for tacos (my 6-year-old’s favorite meal). These were served with shredded lettuce (from CSA), chopped beefsteak tomatoes (ditto), and shredded Mexican-style cheese (Trader Joe’s — cheese needs to disappear by Wednesday!). I boiled up four ears of corn (today’s CSA basket), and sliced up chilled watermelon and Asian melon, both from last week’s basket.

It was a simple meal, but delicious. The melons were sweet and juicy, the corn flavorful, and the tacos, well, what can I say, were beautiful because I didn’t have to slave over a hot stove for too long.

Sorry I haven’t posted much — I got another case of nasty strep, my third infection this year, and am only recently starting to feel back to my energetic self. My mother-in-law has some food-related sites mapped out for us while we’re in Texas, so I plan to blog during our trip.

I alluded that we get a lot of greens in our CSA pickup each week, especially at the beginning of the season. And yes, being that I’m in New England, mid-July is still considered early season. Over the next few weeks, the composition of our basket will become less green, and more red and yellow.

And although I love greens, even the bitter ones, it does become tiresome eating them the same old way, which around here is sauteed in either olive oil and garlic, or bacon and onions. So Sunday night I flipped through one of my favorite recent cookbook acquisitions, Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food, and settled on a kale and potato soup. It was perfect because it also happened to use up some pantry items. My walk-in pantry and chest freezer are heaving with food and I really must empty both out this summer to make room for the winter.

Have I mentioned how much I love Alice Waters? I know it’s fashionable in some quarters to make fun of her. Like, “Oh, who do you think you are, Miss Fresh, Local & In Season … Alice Waters?” Screw those folks. Alice rocks. Her recipes are simple, and as long as you use fabulous ingredients — not hard to do in the summer — you’ll be rewarded with a dish that’s flavorful, good, nourishing, and totally non-pretentious, so I don’t know where these anti-Alice people get their ideas.

Alice’s kale and potato soup is one of those recipes. It’s so hearty, a meat lover would enjoy it, and although it contains few ingredients, its taste is complex — definitely more than a sum of its parts. I happened to have two quarts of fantastic homemade chicken stock in my freezer, which elevated the soup flavorwise. It would be just as tasty with a homemade vegetable stock — barring homemade, a good quality packaged chicken or vegetable stock would make a decent base. The other winning flavor component is the real Parmesan Reggiano cheese garnishing the soup. It has a nutty, salty flavor that lacks in domestically produced Parmesans. Were I not to have the $15/lb. cheese on hand, I’d probably skip it and garnish with bread chunks fried in garlic oil.

This soup makes the perfect Sunday night supper, even in July.

Kale and Potato Soup
Adapted from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 onions, sliced thin
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 bunch of kale, tough center stem removed and leaves sliced into thin shreds
1 lb. Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and sliced into 1/4″ rounds
2 quarts homemade chicken broth
Kosher salt, to taste
Fresh nutmeg, to taste (optional)
Shaved Parmesan Reggiano cheese, for garnish

1. In a heavy soup pot or enamel cast iron Dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onions, stir to coat with oil, and cook for 10 to 12 minutes, until soft and just starting to caramelize. Stir in garlic and cook for another minute. Add kale and potatoes, and stir to coat with oil. Cook for a couple minutes, then add broth. Bring broth to a simmer, reduce heat and cook for 30 minutes, or until potatoes are cooked through.

2. Taste the broth. Does it need salt? I don’t salt my homemade broths, so here I add a teaspoon or two of salt, tasting as I go. Store-bought broths tend to contain lots of salt, so taste first! Serve soup in large bowls, scrape some fresh nutmeg over each dish, and top with shavings of Parmesan cheese.

Friday is our pickup day at Bear Hill Farm. We’ve been CSA members for three or four years … can’t remember the exact number of years. But I can’t imagine not being members.

The first few weeks are a little slow, which I actually appreciate. It gently acclimates me (and my refrigerator) to the preparation and storage of vegetables. Tender lettuces must be quickly washed and chilled, lest they wilt — not to mention that having washed greens ready to go for my lunchtime salads makes life pleasant. By mid July, harvest time hits and I appreciate having a system in place for all the greens, squash, beets, kohlrabi, beans, tomatoes, corn, and more … so much more.

So this week our share started to look substantial. In my basket there’s a pound of beets (plus their greens), a head of lettuce, a bunch each of rainbow chard and curly kale, 4 summer squash, 3 kohlrabi, and 2 bok choi. Something else, too, but I forget. (ETA: collard greens! How could I forget my beloved collards?)

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After I finished filling our basket, we noticed a beautiful bird making a loud racket in the field. Anne, who owns the farm with her husband Mike, told us it was a Guinea Hen, a native of Africa. They’re feral and roam the farm at will. This hen had chicks with her. Can you see the one by her leg? “They’re terrible mothers,” Anne said. I guess the mothers kind of wander off, letting their chicks fend for themselves. Already this mother has lost one of her babies. I felt kind of sympathetic toward this hen, because not five minutes earlier, I’d lost track of the Oyster, who’d been sitting quietly at the picnic bench while I dithered about buying some local cheeses available from a local cheesemonger.

On Fridays we clean out our fridge and bring past-due foodstuffs to feed to the pigs, chickens, and goats. This week we didn’t have anything for them. When the animals figured this out, they refused to pose for photos. However this ameraucana hen did deign to pose for us. Ameraucanas are the hens that lay the lovely blue-green eggs I call “Martha Stewart eggs.” I once heard someone at a farmer’s market ask a vendor if the yolks were green. When I spoke to the vendor later, he said he got the question at least once at every market.

When I get home, I sketch a rough plan for our week’s supply of veggies as I wash and bag them. The beet greens were sauteed with garlic for our Friday side dish, and I made a marinated beet salad, which I’ll eat throughout the week. The bunch of kale was earmarked for a kale and potato soup for Sunday night supper. The lettuce — a no-brainer. That’s for my lunch salads. The squash I’d julienne and toss with warm garlic- and rosemary-infused olive oil, a recipe I’d tested from Carol Field’s Italy in Small Bites. The kohlrabi would be shredded and mixed with shredded Yukon gold potatoes for a latke dinner. Still haven’t figured out the swiss chard or bok choi. Any suggestions?