(Photo of food blogging group by Elise Bauer)

I’m back from BlogHer and I have to say that it was a wonderful event. I was able to meet a number of food bloggers, as well as a few people who were interested in getting started with food blogging. It is fascinating to hear people talk about why they blog and why they love it, and I’m glad that I was able to be a part of it this year.

The first day, we listened to some more technical talks about things like building traffic and photo blogging. I was inspired to try making a video or two, so if things work out, I might put up a short cooking clip on here sometime in the future. The second day, we all talked about the content of our blogs, why we blog and where our blogs are taking us. For me, one of the best things about blogging is being part of a community of wonderful people (commenters included!) and I was lucky enough to meet with a number of them on day two of the conference. Among the bloggers that I met were, Shuna from Eggbeater (who had some great t-shirts for sale), Pim from Chez Pim, Erin from Erin’s Kitchen, Fatemeh of Gastronomie, Meg Hourihan of Megnut and Cheryl of Cupcake Bakeshop.

Saving the best for last, I also spent a lot of time with Elise from Simply Recipes and Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen. I can’t say enough good things about the two of them, as they are wonderful women. The three of us, along with our conference friends Teri and Allison, all went out to dinner on Saturday night - taking a break from the rather appalling conference food - to an amazing Japanese restaurant in San Jose’s Japan Town. We all kept on taking so long, that the restaurant workers were halfway through their meal at the end of the night before we noticed, offered our thanks, and left!

Overall, it was a great experience. I heard, while I was there, that the next BlogHer will be next summer in Chicago. I highly recommend that you come and join us, if you can make it, regardless of whether you are a blogger or simply enjoy reading blogs. We’re keeping our fingers crossed for a whole food panel, which would make the conference even better.

Take a look at Elise’s post to see some pictures of all your favorite food bloggers, or look at the whole Flickr group from the conference to take a peek at some of the speakers and other activities. Kalyn has a list of all the food bloggers who were able to meet up with us on Saturday, too.

I know that I’ve been doing a lot of ice cream posts lately, but with the temperatures getting to over 100F on a regular basis here over the last month, it’s hard not to want a lot of cold food. Besides, I tend to make small batches of ice creams - not to mention that Sarah’s chosen theme for this month’s Sugar High Friday was cold desserts!

So, I’m not going to apologize for not doing a lot of baking lately, but I do promise to back of the ice creams for… at least a day or two. In the meantime, I encourage everyone to buy and ice cream maker.

Anyway, I wanted to do something a little bit different. I had heard the idea of rice pudding ice cream mentioned by a few people in passing and, the more I thought about it, the more appealing it sounded. I tried it and I loved it. It’s just as easy as making rice pudding, chilling it and dumping it into an ice cream maker. This means that you could actually buy some rice pudding and do the same thing, if you don’t want to make it yourself.

I made my favorite rice pudding recipe, which I like because you don’t need pre-cooked rice for it to work. I used milk, instead of cream, because I felt that the starchiness of the arborio/short grained rice that I used would serve to add a thicker, richer texture to the final product. Skim milk or low fat is completely fine for this recipe, and soy milk will work well, too. If you want to make the ice cream richer - by which I mean more fattening - and lighter in texture at the same time, fold 1/2 cup of unsweetened whipped cream into the pudding before putting it into the ice cream maker.

The ice cream is very creamy, with some texture and a bit of chew from the rice. Think of it as having sprinkles (uh, very tender sprinkles) mixed into the ice cream - and that texture really sets it apart from plain ice cream and makes for a nice change. I used a lot of vanilla in my pudding, but you can add cinnamon or other flavored extracts, too.

This recipe also makes fantastic pudding pops.

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Gelato is Italian ice cream. While in composition it is not that different from other frozen treats, there are a couple of things that set it apart from a standard ice cream. First, it is generally made with milk and not with cream (some recipes do call for a small amount of cream). I’ve had many shopkeepers try to impress this upon me as a selling point, since it makes the gelato lower in fat than ice cream is (for the record, it works as a selling point). Second, gelato tends to be more dense than ice cream, with less air churned into it and fewer tiny ice crystals suspended in the mixture. This gives it a rich taste.

The final thing that sets it apart is that gelatos usually tend to have much stronger flavors than other ice creams. I won’t go so far as to say that this is a standard feature of gelato, but in my experience, it tends to be true.

It is certainly true of this chocolate gelato. The recipe is from Bittersweet by Alice Medrich. While many chocolate gelato recipes call for melted chocolate, this one only uses cocoa powder to chocolatiness. The gelato is very smooth and very, very chocolaty. You can probably only eat a small amount at a time. I added to the chocolate - not that the incredibly rich flavor needed it - with some chopped chocolate. I opted to go for the varying sizes of chocolate chunks (and shavings) instead of chocolate chips because I thought they would blend better into the gelato. I used a chocolate chipper, which looks like a tiny pitchfork, to get the job done, but your can use a sharp knife to shave off pieces of chocolate.

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I have a lot of knives. From no-name knives I’ve had forever to Henkels and Global knives, mine run the gamut from inexpensive to premium. But I think it’s safe to say that I like my newest knife, a 6 1/2 inch Shun Santoku, the best. I love everything about it, from the look, to the feel, to the impossibly sharp blade.

Knives are a vital part of the kitchen and, unfortunately, too many people “make do” with sub-par knives. If you think about how much you need knives in cooking, it only makes sense to get one that performs well and will last a long time. Of course, you should always choose a knife based on its size, and how comfortable it feels in your hand, not just based on someone’s recommendation (though I highly recommend a knife like this one or another high quality knife). By the way, Williams-Sonoma is a great place to check out knives because, unlike some retailers, they will let you test out all the knives in-store. They wil actually bring out a cutting board with a few things (potatoes, onions, etc), for you to chop up to get a feel for the knife.

In other news, posting will be a little bit slow over the next several days because I’m going to be going to the BlogHer conference this weekend. Anyone else going?

For some reason, yeasted pancakes don’t seem to be quite as popular as yeasted waffles. This might have to do with the fact that pancakes are not supposed to be quite as “light” as waffles and that you can usually lighten the batter by beating the egg whites separately, if you simply want to get a puffier pancake.

I wanted a yeasted pancake recipe just to add to my collection, so I turned to this recipe from Bob’s Red Mill, which is known for its various whole grain products, mostly sold at natural food stores. I added fresh blueberries and topped them off with some more of the blueberry syrup that I made earlier this week, leftover from dumpling making.

The pancakes themselves were delicious, light and fluffy. The baking soda stirred in at the end really raised them up. I would consider cutting the butter back to 1 tbsp in the future, but given that this recipe makes 6 generous servings (with blueberries), the overall fat content isn’t really too high to be concerned by.

I will make a note about adding blueberries to pancakes. Once the pancakes have cooked on one side, put the berries in by hand and lightly dot each of them with batter. This will not only secure the berries in the pancakes, but the less time they spend on the griddle, the smaller the odds of them popping and discoloring the pancakes are. Some moisture will come out of the berries no matter what you do, so the pancakes will take longer to cook than berry-less ones .

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Unless you live in California, you might not know that we are having something of a heat wave. Sure, it gets hot here in the summer and I do technically live in the desert, but when the temperature is consistently over 106F, it takes a toll on your desire to do things. Like cook and eat.

Fortunately for me, I still feel like cooking. The thought of eating hot foods is another matter entirely. For an energy boost that took neither heat nor effort, I made a simple milkshake.

The classic American definition of a milkshake is a blended mixture of ice cream, milk and some sort of flavoring or fruit. This is known as a “thick shake” in countries like Australia and in the UK. There, milkshakes are traditionally cold, frothy flavored milks. I tend to view a milkshake as the latter, but this particular shake sort of spans the two types.

I blended partially frozen bananas with a bit of vanilla soy milk, then added chocolate to half of the batch. The shake isn’t too sweet, especially the chocolate side, as I didn’t add any extra sugar to it, but you can easily add in a few teaspoonfuls of sugar or a tablespoon of honey to sweeten it up and change the flavoring a bit. By pouring them into the glass simultaneously, I ended up with a neat swirled effect.

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