Thursdays with Wanda

Black Sesame Ice Cream

Ah, the end of April, the season of balmy weather, other people telling you that you should throw out your Christmas tree, and ice cream! Everybody loves ice cream, even chimpanzees; I was reading an article called, “Vocal and Gestural Responses of Cross-Fostered Chimpanzees” by Drumm, Gardner, & Gardner, which talks about how researchers taught chimpanzees sign language. The researchers then signed the chimpanzees the question, “You want ice cream?” One of them, Dar, signed back, “Ice cream hurry gimme,” while the other, Tatu, signed back, “Ice cream ice cream ice cream ice cream ice cream.” Completely adorable, right?

Adhering to tradition, all ice cream posts on Thursdays with Wanda should be accompanied by a short story. Today’s short story is about a zebra.

Zed the Zebra

Once upon a time, there was a zebra named Zed. When he was a small colt, a ravishingly hungry lion named Ryan came by and ate his entire herd family. However, by the time it was Zed’s turn to be eaten, Ryan felt a little bloated and decided to keep Zed as a pet.

As Zed grew up, Ryan became a little bored with life on the plains, as it was as plain as could be! He decided to become a concert pianist, but, as all of you know, there are no wild pianos to be found in the plains. What’s a pianist to do without a piano? Ryan thought, and all this hard thinking made him squint in frustration. And the more he squinted, the more Zed the zebra started to look just like a piano!

Ryan raised a pointed claw at Zed’s sides, and stabbed at a black stripe, and Zed said, “hee-haw!” from the pain of it. Ryan was so pleased that his zebra piano actually made noise (although far from being in tune), and vowed to become the best pianist in the plains. He soon learned to play Fur Elise on Zed, of which the first few notes sounded a bit like “hee haw haawwww heeeee.”

Sadly horrified to be mistaken as a piano, Zed the zebra sobbed himself to sleep that night. A dream came to him, and in his dream there was an old Chinese woman who told him that black sesame seeds make your hair blacker.

Zed excitedly woke up and promptly made himself some black sesame ice cream. He ate the entire batch of ice cream, and went to a nearby lake to check out his reflection. What he saw was this:

Ryan looked around all over the plains and never found his piano-zebra again. He had to give up his dreams of being a concert pianist, like many prospective concert pianists do.

But you don’t have to give up your dreams of eating black sesame ice cream, because I have the recipe right here! If you’ve never sampled the delicate flavor of black sesame before, it might strike you as a bit strange at first, and then strangely addicting.

When my friend Daniele tried it, I told him to guess what flavor he was eating. He said, “smoked? burnt? um….concrete?” While those might not seem like raving reviews for my ice cream, he kept asking for more and more samples, until he had an entire scoop’s worth, so that must mean it’s delicious.

Oh, and aren’t these photos so pretty now? I finally bought myself a good camera off Craigslist. It was super shady, I met this guy at a train station and he sold it to me out of the back of his trunk…

Black Sesame Ice Cream
serves 4 | prep time: 15 minutes | ready in:  4 hours
This is a super easy and raw recipe that will seem simple to even the greenest of cooks! Black sesame is thought to be very good for you and to make your hair blacker. I eat a lot of black sesame, and I have black hair, so it must be true.

Ingredients
-  2 cups black sesame powder*
- 2 cans (14 oz each) full fat coconut milk
- 1/3 cup sugar (you can add more if you like your ice cream to be sweeter)

1. Mix all the ingredients together. Put in the fridge for 2 hours, or until noticeably cold when you stick your finger in.
2. Dump it into your ice cream maker, and follow your ice cream maker’s directions. Scoop the ice cream maker into another tub and freeze for another 2 hours, then enjoy!

*If you don’t have access to black sesame powder, which you can buy at your local Asian grocery store, take some regular black sesame seeds and grind it up in your food processor. About 1 1/2 cups of black sesame seeds will yield 2  cups of black sesame powder.

30. April 2012 by Thursdays With Wanda
Categories: Dessert | Tags: black sesame, black sesame ice cream, ice cream, short story, vegan, vegan ice cream, zebra | 15 comments