Tony's Floral and Spicy Liqueurs and My First Attempt at a Boozy VFD

The other day, I made my first frozen dessert in South Florida: a vegan one that incorporated the essence of fresh mint ...

... from our apartment complex's community herb garden:

The mint, of unknown variety or varieties, completely fills the middle bed. Several other types of herbs, including rosemary, dill, parsley, and basil, reside in the other beds.

When my husband, Tony, and I lived in Hunterdon County, New Jersey—for about a year and eight months, after having left Manhattan in August 2015—I started up a company called Huge Hound Frozen Desserts LLC. (The website, which I put together myself, is here.) By that time, I'd been whipping up dairy ice creams for more than 15 years, first using the kind of ice cream maker that utilizes a chemical-filled metal canister you have to store in the freezer and then using the more-advanced, self-contained kind that needs only to be plugged in.

My friend Dan once referred to me as an "ice cream maven." I'm using a variation of that description above in the tag line for this website.

I began making dairy-free FDs after I met Tony, because he can't eat milk or cream (or gluten or legumes). The first year we dated, I focused on sorbets. My favorite was Concord grape, but I also remember making (two) very good ones from mint and watermelon. Later, I whipped up some delicious FDs using coconut milk as the base, including one flavored with lime basil.¹ (Like I wrote in my first post and will no doubt write in many more posts here, if you want the password to my other, long-running, personal blog, which would allow you to read the two linked posts above, just shoot me an email at bill@billhawley.net.)

I've never been the hugest fan of coconut (though I'm not a hater), and I didn't necessarily want that flavor mixed in with the chocolate or lemon verbena or whatever I intended to be my primary flavoring ingredient(s), so when I started Huge Hound, one of my main goals was to create a vegan-frozen-dessert base that was as neutral tasting as possible.

And I did it. My ingredients were hemp and flax milks; refined coconut oil, which had had its coconut flavor removed during processing; agave syrup; and small amounts of lecithin, xanthan gum, and arrowroot, which thickened and emulsified the fatty-and-sweet mixture. Plus a pinch of salt. On principle, I would have preferred to avoid using the much-trifled-with RCO, but I found I really needed the boost of fat it provided; the nondairy milks on their own weren't rich enough to produce a creamy-textured product.

After I'd been selling my VFDs and ice creams for a while, I began thinking about ways to cut costs, so the last time I made a Huge Hound VFD, which was flavored with chocolate and ginger, I used only flax milk, because hemp milk is significantly more expensive. Hemp milk is also more strongly flavored than flax milk, so eliminating it as an ingredient improved the neutrality of my base.

I was somewhat sorry to ditch the hemp milk, though, because I think hemp is an amazing plant that we should be using in many different ways, including in foods, paper, and plastics. But I just learned when I was buying my ingredients to make my Chocolate-Mint VFD that I have another good reason for giving it up: One of the two major makers of hemp milks, Pacific Foods, is now putting a warning on its labels telling its customers that its hemp-based nondairy beverages shouldn't be considered gluten-free:

I had been using Living Harvest's Tempt-brand hemp milk for my Huge Hound VFDs, and its packaging contains no such warning. Maybe Living Harvest is confident in its ability to prevent cross-contamination with wheat, but I didn't want to take that chance, so when I made this latest VFD a couple weeks ago, I again used only flax milk.

I applaud Pacific Foods for erring on the side of caution at the risk of losing customers. People like Tony who have serious dietary issues need and appreciate candor from manufacturers and restaurants so they can make informed decisions.

Once at the Union Square outpost of Whole Foods, a woman standing near me complained that the package of dried fruit she was holding was labeled as being gluten-free. "How stupid do they think we are?" she asked. I just wanted to get in and out of the store and wasn't really in the mood for a teachable moment, so I didn't explain to her that manufactured foods can be contaminated with things like tree nuts, peanuts, dairy, and gluten based on how they're processed, not only by the ingredients they obviously contain.

A case in point: Tony and I just got back from our local supermarket, and we had to go with the third brand of walnuts we picked up because the first two said they could contain traces of gluten. (He's making Chicken With Walnut Sauce for dinner tonight.)

The other day, at the same store, I put a bag of pine nuts back on its hook because the packaging said the PNs were "produced on shared equipment with peanuts, tree nuts, milk, wheat, soy & egg." The only things missing from the list of the big eight food allergens were fish and shellfish.

OK, let me reel myself back in *sound of fishing line being respooled* and post a photo of my finished VFD:

Our dinner guests three nights later—Tony's longtime friend Marchéta and her wife, Uli, who live in the next county north of here—went back for seconds or thirds. I hadn't lost my touch.

¹In that same linked post, you can see I still made dairy ice creams for my own enjoyment, including the Gooseberry With Gooseberry Swirl that was one of my favorites of all time. And I kept experimenting with sorbets, culminating in the Chocolate-Blackberry that may be my favorite FD ever.

An UPDATE the next day:

That's the out-of-this-world dinner Tony made last night, with the chicken-and-walnut stew served over GF pasta with additional, chopped walnuts. The herb on top is cilantro—from the grocery store, because there's none growing in the community garden.

An UPDATE two days later: My friend Desirée sent me a link to this New York Times story about vegan frozen desserts, which has a sidebar on a VFD base that uses hemp (or cashew) milk, coconut cream or milk, and agave (or corn) syrup.

I'm starting this new blog so I have an outward-facing space to highlight my writing, editing, and frozen dessert–making skills.

Since September 2005, I've been regularly writing Hawleyblog, which, depending on the individual post, has maybe been about food, current events, theater, music, and/or other topics that interest me but has also always been a diary of the events in my life. And I've enjoyed having that record to look back on. For instance, if I want to relive the time I took my then-13-year-old identical-twin nephews to the New York Hall of Science museum in Queens, I can reread one of my favorite Hawleyblog posts, from December 2011. (And you can read it, too, if you request the password I've recently protected that blog behind. Just send an email to bill@billhawley.net.)

That's me pretending to pet a (much-magnified) water flea at the Hall of Science.

The main purpose of this new blog is, frankly, to sell myself to potential employers and clients. I'll use it to demonstrate I can write and self-edit and to tout some of my accomplishments as a copy editor, line editor, and small-business owner. And I'll no doubt also run the occasional photo of my cute dog and my cuter husband.

I also plan to discuss matters of English-language grammar, diction, and punctuation. And now *cracks knuckles* I'm going to write about how I like to use the hyphen's longer and less-well-known punctuation-mark friends: the en dash and the em dash.

I used an en dash in the first sentence of this post, in a compound, attributive adjective in which one of the components of the compound ("frozen dessert") consisted of two words. Some editors would prefer two hyphens ("frozen-dessert-making") to the en dash, and I don't necessarily think that's wrong. It's just not my preferred punctuation method.

Just about everyone agrees on using an en dash rather than multiple hyphens when a proper noun is involved. "National Book Award–winning author" looks so much better than "National-Book-Award-winning author"; the former construction respects the integrity of the multiword proper noun.

As for em dashes, I prefer using them to set off a fragment of a sentence that reads like an important but ultimately omittable¹ aside. Here's an example from the November 2009 issue—the final issue²—of Gourmet magazine that also features a classic, proper noun–incorporating en dash:

Our Pennsylvania Dutch–inspired Thanksgiving menu brings together all those things—savory and sweet, new and nostalgic—that make any Thanksgiving an occasion to remember. (p. 24)

(By the way, I would have deleted the first Thanksgiving in that sentence.)

I don't like using em dashes in a situation where a semicolon is the obvious choice. At my last full-time-with-benefits job, as a senior editor who oversaw a team of copy editors at a business-and-finance magazine, I coined the term em-dash fault³ for the joining of two complete sentences by an em dash. Here are two examples from copy that was routed to us back in the day:

It comes apart easily no matter how cold the metal gets—even a novice won't spill a drop.
"I think there's still a measure of skepticism that exists toward Wall Street—that's not going to change."

In both cases, we replaced the em dash with a semicolon, whose main job is to separate two sentences that are deemed worthy of a closer connection than a period provides.

And the other night, in my bedside reading, The Queen of the Night, by Alexander Chee,⁴ I came across these two examples of an em-dash fault in rapid succession:

All that would be required was for her to find something I'd forgotten about, some incontrovertible proof—much as I knew her kind, I was sure she knew mine. (p. 305)
Each day I was to begin at the piano, and to begin with my posture at the piano—I was to sit erect, head slightly lifted. (p. 315)

In between, I found this dash-filled mess of a sentence:

He was quite small in stature by comparison to Turgenev, who kissed him on both cheeks—Louis looked a bit like an old fox in evening dress, his whiskers and sharp eyes quizzical as he took me in—all of his weight was in his eyes, his gaze—all of his body raised up so he might see. (p. 311)

If I'd been this novel's copy editor—and I wish I had been, because it seems like it would have been a great project to have been involved with—I would have put periods after cheeks and took me in. And I would have worded and punctuated the last part this way: "All of his weight was in his eyes, his gaze. And all of his body raised up so he might see."

Though it might be seen as inconsistent, I take no issue with a complete sentence being plunked down in the middle of another complete sentence and being set off by em dashes. Here's an example of what I mean from that same Gourmet magazine:

Here are six sweet, seasonal breaks from the norm—fig crostata, anyone?—engineered to add a little variety to your dessert offerings. (p. 42)

I could also easily see those three words inside parentheses, another fine option when you're inserting a sentence inside another one.

Thanks for reading this first post of mine.

¹Some believe the old-school omissible is preferable to omittable.

²I'm reading that old magazine now because I had stowed it away, still sealed in its plastic bag, back then, because I thought it would be fun to treat it like a mint-condition comic book. I opened it up to start reading it just prior to our move to Florida, when I was going through a lot of old crap I wished I'd recycled or thrown out years ago.

³The only reference to an em-dash fault I found online when I searched just now was on the last page of this pdf that includes the postscript and a list of corrections for a book called Bad Medicine. I'm curious to know whether the person who compiled this list has the same definition for an em-dash fault as I do.

⁴I got a little carried away with footnotes in this post, but it gave me some practice at creating superscripts in Squarespace's markdown mode. I finished The Queen of the Night last night. It was a great read, with oodles of period details and a captivating main character.