Orange Creamcicle Ice Cream: or, Condensed milk makes everything better

Sometimes, things are better when you don't try so hard.

Orange Creamsicle ice cream 1 (14-oz) can sweetened condensed milk 1 cup orange juice concentrate 2 cups half-and-half 1 tbsp vanilla Orange food coloring if desired Mix all ingredients, then freeze in ice cream machine. Note: If your ice cream machine's manual tells you to chill the mixture before freezing, wait until you're about to pour the mixture into the machine before mixing in the orange concentrate. Adapted from Borden's Eagle Brand Magic Recipes, 1964

I've been flipping through the recipes in my new ice cream machine's manual. Most of them are surprisingly reasonable. I always thought Cuisinart in the 1990s was a high-priced brand for the sort of people who could afford to impulse-buy a Jenn-Air stove. (These days the trendiest of kitchens use massive stainless stoves that look like they should be in restaurants. But in the 1990s, a Jenn-Air was the stove to show your neighbors.) Therefore, I expected to see a lot of impossibly expensive ingredients and unrealistic recipes. 

But it seems the Cuisinart people actually wrote recipes that we can make at home. Some of them are downright cheap even with today's prices. For example, the recipe for "Slushy Kool-Aid" is literally "make Kool-Aid and put it in the ice cream machine."

Someone had to typeset the nutritional content of a packet of Kool-Aid for this.

For this manual, I can't help borrowing our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker's idea of looking through books one recipe at a time. You should definitely have a look at her blog, Grannie Pantries. She shows all the things that showed up on dinner tables night after night, especially the things that food historians have tried their damnedest to bury. (And all the questionable things that were done in the name of "health food" in the crunchy 1970s and aerobics-class 1980s!)

Getting back to the book, the "Easy Frozen Lemonade" is as simple as the Kool-Aid: put lemonade in the machine. I think Cuisinart was trying to reassure you that you hadn't just spent too much money on a frivolous machine. It's not just for ice cream, you can also make slushies for the kids!

Because this is from the 1990s, we have recipes for low-fat (always low-fat) frozen yogurt. For those who weren't there, fat was the dietary demon of the 1990s. If you ever wondered why marshmallows often have "A Fat Free Food!" printed on the bag, I'm pretty sure it's a holdover from the era of SnackWells and olestra potato chips.

I think the massive early-2000s Atkins Diet surge (and its many anti-carb knockoffs) was a backlash of people who had gone half-crazed from several years of cutting every last gram of fat out of their food. 

As an anecdotal note, I remember the first news stories when Atkins was first taking off. Newscasters were incredulously reporting that people were losing weight on a pound of bacon and a half-dozen greasy scrambled eggs a day. Food manufacturers started putting "net carbs" on the nutrition label, and dieting experts got several hours of airtime out of debating whether "net carbs" meant anything. 

These days, anti-carb diets have gone pseudoscientific and morphed into things like "keto." But in the 1990s, we all thought that eliminating fat would prevent getting fat. (Never mind how much sugar went into "fat free" snacks to make up for its absence.) For a few years, frozen yogurt looked like it might unseat ice cream. After all, if it's low-fat, it must be good for you!

 

 

Moving on from the dieting relics of a more prosperous time, the more "laborious" recipes like the sorbets involve juicing your own citrus fruits. The writers seem to realize that we don't always have the patience to refrigerate anything overnight, so they helpfully add that you can stir your mixture over a bowl of ice water "if you wish to make sorbet right away."

On an economical note, I like that the raspberry sorbet starts with frozen raspberries instead of fresh ones. (Like I said, Cuisinart's recipe developers were surprisingly realistic about cost and bother.) That easily cuts the price of fruit in half, and you weren't going to spot the difference after blenderizing them anyway. We at A Book of Cookrye always approve of saving your splurges for somewhere you'll notice. And again, the Cuisinart people seem to have actually intended for people to make these recipes at home.

Aside from the occasional blenderized fruit, most of the recipes in this book are variations on the theme of "stir everything together and put it in the machine." Even the frozen puddings don't involve actually getting out a double boiler and making custard. They use pudding mix instead.

 

In an attempt to prove that ice cream machines aren't just for children's parties, they end the book with two cocktails. Both of them are as easy as the rest of the book.

The frozen piña colada doesn't involve tracking down cream of coconut and whatever else Wikipedia tells me goes into one of those things. Instead, you open a can of "piña colada concentrate" and (barely) spike it. Personally, I would add actual rum instead of a teaspoon of rum extract.

The strawberry daiquiri is slightly more toilsome than the piña colada. You have to put strawberries in a blender. However, the recipe writers use actual liquor this time-- if not much of it. Half a cup of rum may seem like a lot until you compare it to the rest of the ingredients. You'd get faintly queasy from excessive fruit and sugar before you managed to get tippled. I can only speculate that Cuisinart didn't want to be legally liable for the property and bodily damage that might ensue from using their product as a pinch-hit margarita machine.

That's one twentieth of a cup (that is, a scant 2½ teaspoons) of rum per serving. It's practically safe for children.

This brings us to today's recipe. The orange sherbet suggests that we "serve with vanilla ice cream for a creamsicle flavor." This is an impressively subtle sales pitch for using both of the freezer bowls that came with our machine.

After reading the headnote, I wanted to make creamcicle ice cream. My idea was simple enough: instead of making vanilla ice cream and sherbet, I would mix both together and then freeze. Both recipes direct us to simply stir the ingredients together and put them in the ice cream machine, so combining them added no extra work unless you count measuring out a lot more ingredients. 

 

However, I inflicted disaster upon myself right as I was ready to freeze. I double-dipped my tasting spoon and then realized you don't cook this. I'm fairly careless about tasting cake batter because it later gets baked, but we don't do nonconsensual spit-swapping in this house. With great reluctance, I put my ice cream in the microwave (stirring every 20 seconds) until the meat thermometer said it was again safe for everyone. However, our crisis of food safety had turned our ice cream into curds and mess.

It tasted like the smell of a trash can. I tried to tell myself that it was only so bad because it was steaming hot and that it would be better after it got cold again. After all, hot gelatin smells revolting but it turns out all right.

Our ice cream was less bad after freezing, but it still tasted like the wrong side of an expiration date. I quietly thanked the nearest available gods that no one was home to see me dump an entire batch down the drain.

However, I couldn't help thinking about how good this had tasted before I cooked it to death. So, naturally, I made it again without double-dipping my spoon and introducing microbes. The mixture tasted a lot better because I didn't have to cook it, which was such a relief. I had been faintly worried that my brilliant idea was an inherently rancid recipe.

Our uncooked half-sherbet turned out all right wasn't anywhere near what I wanted. It tasted diluted, like fruit punch after all the ice has melted into it. I couldn't decide whether to save the rest or not. It wasn't bad, but I didn't know if it was good enough.

As I discreetly sent more ice cream down the drain, I decided I was overthinking the recipe. Why not forget the sherbet and add orange concentrate to the vanilla ice cream I've been making all this time? 

You need to add food coloring to make it look like this.

Yes. Yes it does. It tasted like pure happiness. This came out exactly how I wanted. I should have taken the easier route the first time. This tastes just like a creamcicle and is nearly no effort to make. (Well, no effort aside from having to use an ice cream machine.) If you have an ice cream machine, I think you owe it to yourself.

Pineapple Water Ice: So easy, but so good

Pineapple juice is too good to throw away.

Pineapple Water Ice ⅔ cup sugar ⅔ cup water 1 cup pineapple juice Mix the sugar and water in a saucepan. Boil and stir until dissolved and clear. Measure out one cup of this syrup and add it to the pineapple juice while still hot. Freeze in an ice cream machine. (Depending on your machine's directions, you may need to chill the mixture first.) Ginger-Pineapple Water Ice: Make the syrup with ginger tea instead of water. Note: You can easily adjust this for however much pineapple juice you have (say, if you're making a small batch using the juice you drained off a can of pineapple). Just use equal amounts of juice and syrup. Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1844 edition

When a recipe starts with draining a can of pineapple, I hate discarding the juice. I often drink it on ice, but this time I decided to put the juice in the fridge until I decided what to do with it. I might have put it in cake batter, but that would require turning on the oven in this horrible heat. Then I realized: We can make water ice!

Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1844 edition

Eliza Leslie (or, as she billed herself on her own title pages, Miss Leslie of Philadelphia) appended a lot of water ices to the end of her cookbook as the editions kept going. Actually, she tacked on a lot of unsorted recipes over the years. (Eventually, she decided that had added so many that she just wrote another book.)

It's very fitting that a proudly Philadelphian cookbook writer would have so many water ices in her book. It's still a popular hot-weather treat in Philadelphia to this day. 

Getting to today's recipe, I always thought they were too expensive to eat in Miss Leslie's time. But her book has recipes for preserved pineapples (she preserves them whole with the green tops still attached), pineapple ice cream, iced pineapple lemonade, and today's pineapple water ice. I don't know if she included such extravagances for the sake of wealthier people who bought her book, or if pineapples were more affordable than I thought.

Now that we don't need to squeeze the juice out of a pineapple or skim the scum from of our sugar (back then, you had to get the dead bugs and detritus out of sugar every time you cooked), this recipe is ridiculously fast to make. We start off by making a syrup with a little bit of water and almost enough sugar for my cornflakes when I was six.

At this point, we only needed to add the pineapple juice to the syrup and start the ice cream machine. Really, I was going to call this recipe a hump-day quickie were it not for setting up the ice cream machine.

That's it. We're done.

While we're waiting for our pineapple ice to get cold enough to freeze, let's chat about the new machine. I have a mixed relationship with it.

On one hand, having to put those bowls in the freezer is annoying, though they don't take up any more space than a bag of ice. On the other hand, it is nice not to have to buy ice and hope it doesn't melt in the car.

However, the freezer bowls only have so much cold to give. With the usual kind of ice cream maker, you can repack half-frozen ice cream in a fresh round of ice and salt if the first round doesn't do it. With this one, you're kind of screwed if your ice cream doesn't freeze the first time. This means that not only must you remember to put the little bowls in the freezer beforehand, you also have to refrigerate your ice cream overnight. Cuisinart gives us no spontaneity.

 

But even if this machine isn't all I ever wanted, it does appeal to the part of me that used to open the washer and watch the laundry. (Well, I shouldn't say "used to.")

One of these days I'm going to dribble hot fudge sauce in there right before I turn off the motor.

I thought about adding some food coloring to make our water ice look more like it came from a pineapple, but then I decided not to bother. The wan-looking yellow I got "naturally" (if canned pineapple is natural) would be fine--- yellow snow jokes aside. But to my surprise, this froze into a beautiful snowy white. It just shows that we should always trust Miss Leslie except when she's boiling vegetables beyond their death. 

 

As I was getting the water ice out of the machine, I realized that I should have added some ginger to it. We've learned from my great-grandmother's newspaper clippings that pineapple and ginger go almost shockingly well together. But then again, Miss Leslie didn't put any ginger in her pineapple water ice, and she wrote one of the best-selling cookbooks of the century. 

I decided to make some ginger blondies just because I knew what I was missing. (The recipe is simple: add a lot of ginger to a batch of blondies.) And... these two went together like birthday cake and ice cream. 

I know this will surprise everyone, but pineapple water ice tastes like pineapple. It had the perfect texture, like a Slurpee without industrial chemicals in it. However, I wasn't prepared for how much this tasted like fresh pineapple. Somehow the canned taste froze away. So, I'm going to keep this recipe on hand for whenever I have to drain a can of pineapple. It'll be like a little bonus treat.

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding: or, Cornbread by any name

I don't know if autumn is here or if we only get a short reprieve from the heat, but we can turn on the oven!

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding 2 eggs 1 cup boiling water 1 cup white cornmeal (white if you have it) ½ tsp salt Drippings from roasted meat Heat oven to 350°. Pour the drippings into a 9" round or square pan. Beat the eggs until thoroughly whipped and lemon-colored, set aside. Pour the boiling water over the cornmeal, stirring constantly. Add the salt. Gently mix in the eggs, trying to deflate them as little as possible. Bake until the top springs back when lightly pressed in the center, about 30-35 minutes. While it's baking, baste it 3 times with additional pan drippings. Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Apparently they really liked Yorkshire pudding in my great-grandmother's house. Or maybe she frequently roasted large slabs of meat and Yorkshire pudding was an easy standby. Either way, she has two recipes for it, carefully nestled together in her binder. 

We have already made what I think is normal Yorkshire pudding, so today we're going to find out what the heck the cornmeal version is.

As I've often mentioned, I started saving beef fat when beef is too expensive to throw any part of it out. So even though we're not buying beef for a while, I still have a lot of what I call "saute-grade" fat in the fridge at any time. This is my term for the meat-filled beef drippings that have a beefy taste and a shorter shelf life. You can't use it for everything, but it's still good enough for things like sauteeing onions. 

The point is, I had drippings (which apparently no Yorkshire pudding is complete without) even though I didn't have any meat roasting in the oven. To this I added paprika, garlic, and a few other basic necessities. I figured if I had spooned the drippings out of a roast-in-progress, there would be seasonings. 

After our pan was ready, it was time to make the pudding itself. It involved fewer ingredients than I expected. I always thought Yorkshire pudding was very "continental" and perhaps a bit fancy, but this is almost the cheapest batter you can make-- even including the eggs.

I didn't know if whipping the eggs would make a difference, but they actually fluffed the batter a little bit. You could even see the last sloshes of egg foam that didn't quite want to mix in. Had I needed to hand-whisk the eggs, I would have been annoyed at how little the batter changed, but this was only two minutes with an electric mixer.

As a quick aside: I like how aside from a brief encounter with an eggbeater, this was a mindlessly easy recipe. It's perfect for slapping together when you already have a fully-loaded stove to tend to.

The directions say to "baste three times while baking with some of the dripping from roasting pan," but I didn't know how much fat to baste this with. So I put a few little splats on top and hoped I guessed right.

After baking, the pudding bubbled on top where we had basted it. This would subside after a minute or two, but not in my mind. After the suds were gone, this merely looked like bread with well-seasoned splats on top. Which was what it turned out to be.

Those bubbles! Why does it look like I put dish soap on top?

The newspaper called called it "Yorkshire pudding," but this is cornbread. Basting it with seasoned pan drippings did add some nice flavor to it, but it's cornbread. With that said, it's pretty good cornbread. Since it's not raised with baking powder, it doesn't have any chemical taste hiding deep in there. It was just light enough to be nice, but still dense enough for perfect plate-sopping.

In case you're wondering, today's pud is floating on this.

Hump-Day Quickie: Spinach-Cheese Rice

A lot of our nearly-heatless recipes have been desserts because, well, it's nice to treat yourself when you're hiding indoors from the weather. Also, most of our low-heat suppers have been a simple matter of "put it in frying pan and cook until done." I've also made the occasional batch of haluski even though it involves two burners, and maaaaybe turned on the oven to serve frozen fish alongside it. (Shhhhhh....) But today, we're presenting a vegetable side that barely heats the kitchen.

Spinach Rice You don't need to precisely measure out anything except the rice and cooking water. ¾ cup rice 4 oz spinach (about a third of a 12-oz package, just eyeball it) ½ cup shredded cheese (use more or less depending on taste. Choose a kind of cheese that melts well.) Salt and seasonings to taste Squeeze the juice out of the spinach and add enough water to make 1½ cups. Add salt to taste and cook the rice in this, whether you use a rice cooker or a saucepan. When the rice is done, add the cheese and stir until melted and mixed. Then stir in the spinach and seasonings to taste.

Not to go all Agatha Thrash on everyone, but whenever I use frozen spinach in anything, I try to put find some room in the recipe for the juice I just squeezed out. (Or sometimes I don't bother draining it at all) The spinach juice takes a lot of flavor away with it when you drain or wring it out. It's hard to eat your spinach when you've reduced it to blank fiber wads. 

I guess I also halfheartedly worry about throwing out water-soluble vitamins, but mostly I don't want my vegetables to taste like nothing. For today's recipe, the spinach juice adds a lovely flavor to the rice in a way that you simply cannot get by cooking the rice first and seasoning it later.

You may wonder why we bother draining the spinach at all if we're going to put the juice back in later. Well, I tried skipping that and got a soppy mess of rice-and-spinach glop. It kind of looked like the savory baked rice before we baked it. It was edible and I reluctantly didn't throw it out, but I didn't do it twice. With that in mind, the easiest way to drain the spinach is to stack another bowl on top of it and then squeeze it over the rice cooker. 

This is the only annoying part of the whole recipe.

Today, we're also getting some of the beef stock out of the freezer from the most expensive meatball pie I have ever made. You know, since we can't buy beef at any price until further notice. I didn't bother completely thawing it- I just let it half-defrost enough to gently mash the ice into the rice cooker. I figured it would melt in its own good time if I didn't mind the wait.

When that the rice is done, it's time to improve it with cheese. I like to mix the cheese in before adding the spinach so that I can be sure the rice has enough retained heat to melt it. (And I do like to add a lot of cheese. We're eating our vegetables, not punishing ourselves.)

I ended up adding "just a bit" more.

At this point, I like to try a small spoonful and make sure it has enough salt in it. If it doesn't, I add it with our spinach which has been patiently waiting next to the rice cooker. The spinach does want to stay in little hard clumps, so you have to kind of spoon-jab it to break it up.

So there we have it: cheese and spinach rice! It doesn't heat the kitchen any more than a single rice cooker, it's mostly good for you (I think), and it's low-effort enough for when it's too hot to lovingly cook anything. It may not be the most exciting thing anyone's ever made, but it's pretty darn good.

Coffee Ice Cream: Wheeee!

Today, we're playing with our new toy!

Coffee Ice Cream 1⅓ cups (14-oz can*) sweetened condensed milk 2 cups half-and-half 1 cup water 1 tablespoon instant coffee 1 tablespoon vanilla Dissolve the coffee in the water (You can warm the water in the microwave if you need to, but my coffee dissolved in water right out of the tap.) Mix all ingredients, then put in an ice cream machine and freeze until done. Transfer to a storage container and put in the kitchen freezer until firm. For vanilla ice cream, omit the coffee. For chocolate ice cream, omit coffee and melt 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate in the condensed milk. You can microwave it, stopping in stirring every 20 seconds, until the chocolate is melted. Or, you can use a double boiler. *The original recipe calls for a 15-oz can, but it seems Borden did a bit of recreational shrinkflation and nipped one ounce away from the cans. This recipe didn't mind the loss, but you should still be bothered. Borden's Eagle Brand Magic Recipes, 1964

I make this ice cream recipe out of a Borden condensed milk handout more often than any other.  Everyone wants this one over and over again. On one hand, it's nice when everyone wants you to make something where the instructions are just "stir everything together." (If I never hear "I thought we'd do chicken marsala tonight" again...) On the other hand, it's almost insulting for the same reason.

Borden's Eagle Brand Magic Recipes, 1964

The instructions may look daunting because they're so long, but that's because the writers decided to write out every single detail of using an ice cream machine. They end with the direction to "Cover freezer with burlap, heavy paper or carpet until serving time." Did everyone have carpet scraps lying around the house back then?

Regardless of whether we're temporarily unseating the welcome mat for the sake of ripening ice cream, we're trying a variation that The Nostalgic Cook suggested the first time we posted this recipe: add a spoonful of instant coffee. 

Now, when I got my new ice cream machine, I didn't think anything of it still being in the box. I used to believe people who keep their kitchen gadgets in the original box were being stupid and snobby, like all the people my age who have shrines of still-in-box action figures. But now, I see why you'd do it. After all, you need to store your doodads in something, and each one came with a box that's just the right size. So when I saw this was still in the original packaging, I simply figured the previous owner always put it neatly away. Then the box exploded styrofoam inserts all over the countertop.

After unpacking and examining, I don't think someone bought it in the late 1990s and never touched it. The ice cream scoop was still in its box with the tissue paper.

Also, this thing is so old that neither the registration card nor the instructions have a website on them. 

How long has it been since you got a mail-in registration card with something like an ice cream maker?

Aesthetically, you can tell it comes from a more prosperous time. They printed things like "EXTRA VALUE!" in cheery-colored text on the box--- twice. 

In the 1990s, we still put colors on our packaging. These days, everything is black, white, and gray.

Getting to the recipe, I couldn't decide if I wanted vanilla or coffee ice cream. Then I remembered that our machine came with two of those ice-pack bowls.

I do like how instant coffee is just as good as brewing it yourself in recipes like this. Or maybe I have a tragically undereducated taste for coffee since I almost never drink the stuff.

I'm going to have to get the hang of figuring out when this machine is done. But for today, I decided it was ready when our ice cream stopped moving. 

It turns out that letting your ice cream keep churning for extra time doesn't make it come out firmer or better. It just means that more of it turns into solid ice on the side of the machine. 

This is what learning looks like.

This tasted like a cup of coffee made to A Book of Cookrye standards. In other words, it's like an iced coffee-- the kind with lots of syrup and whipped cream. I absolutely loved it. 

Hump-Day Quickie: Potato Fudge-- or, You'd never believe it's microwaved!

Our heatless cooking continues!

Prince Edward Island Potato Fudge 300g chocolate chips ⅓ cup warm mashed potatoes (just the potatoes, no added milk/butter/etc) 2 tbsp melted butter 1 tsp vanilla ⅛ tsp salt Up to 4 cups powdered sugar (viz. icing sugar) Have a greased 8" pan ready. Melt the chocolate. You can use a double boiler, or melt it in a large bowl in the microwave- stopping and stirring every 20 seconds. Mix the mashed potatoes and butter. Then mix them into the chocolate, along with the vanilla and salt. Mix in about half of the powdered sugar. Gradually add more until the fudge is about the right consistency and sweetness. You may have to set down the spoon and mix with your hands. Press into the pan. Cut into squares, then chill until firm. -Canadian Potato Museum, Prince Edward Island

...all right, so strictly speaking a microwave isn't heatless. The food in there does in fact get hot. But a microwave doesn't produce enough heat for the air conditioning to notice. At any rate, today we are making potato fudge. 

Apparently our recipe comes from the Canadian Potato Museum on Prince Edward Island. Those of us in the "Land of the Free" may know Prince Edward Island (if we've heard of it at all) as the home of Anne of Green Gables, but apparently in Canada it's also known for potatoes. Which makes me deeply regret that I haven't gone there in any of my northerly travels.

Mid-Century Menu

Anyway, someone on the Mid-Century Menu group shared this with everyone. I was skeptical, but then they shared pictures of the fudge itself. 

Since this recipe is very easy to cut down to a quarter of its original amount, I decided to add something special to it: Star anise! As the kids apparently say these days, we're sleeping on star anise in fudge. I can only add it to very small fudge batches because most people complain, but I think everyone should try it. However, I didn't think our coffee grinder could successfully pulverize entire star anise pods, so I prised the seeds out of them. They look like egg-cases from some household pest, don't they?

Meanwhile in the microwave, our chocolate had not melted but turned into a hot clay. I actually know why this happened-- it's that spoonful of butter. All butter contains a small amount of water (or, if you want to sound cheffy, all butter contains a small amount of moisture content). If you add a tiny drop of water to melted chocolate, it seizes into hard clumps and no amount of heat will make it melt again. But if you add a lot of water instead of just an accidental smidge, your hot seized chocolate will immediately go runny again. (If only I knew this when I did that sachertorte!)

This brings us to the magical ingredient: potatoes! 

The spuds added enough water (or, in twenty-dollar terms, the spuds added enough moisture content) to unseize the chocolate and make it act melted again. Potatoes really can solve all our problems in life.

The last step was to add a lot of powdered sugar. I had to put aside the spoon and knead it like I was making meatloaf. At first we had a crumbly mess. I feared that I had wasted a lot of chocolate.

But after getting my hands in there and forcing everything to mix, we had, um, this.

At least it's holding itself together.

I know what we're all thinking, so let's watch the video.

I managed to press the fudge into our container, but I think quartering the recipe made this harder than it should have been. The fudge couldn't hold onto its small amount of retained heat long enough to shape it and make it look nice in the pan. But after we had gotten it as good as we ever would, I cut it into four very generous pieces. I don't like tiny rations of chocolate.

 

This wasn't the best fudge I ever made. But I think that's because I added all of the powdered sugar at once when the recipe says to add it "gradually." My single day of experience with this recipe tells me the word "gradually" in the directions means to "stop according to taste" and not "mix in all of it." Since I realized that too late, my first-ever spud fudge was more or less like sliceable cake frosting.

However, I could tell this would be good if I didn't dump in an excess of sugar. And maybe I simply needed a lot of chocolate after paying for an entire car air conditioner's worth of parts-- even if I saved at least a thousand dollars by persuading some friends to, um, help install everything.

This time, I forestalled seizing the chocolate by melting it with nothing else. Doesn't this like a better start to fudge?

Next, I added the potato, butter, and vanilla to the melted chocolate together. This meant we added too much water (or, in order to preemptively one-up food pedants, we added too much moisture content) for the chocolate to seize. I know that our chocolate unseized and broke apart the first time, but it was nice to keep things just a bit easier. 

I also omitted about a third of the sugar, which I think made the fudge better. Really, I think you can leave out about half the sugar before you miss it.

A lot of "no-cook" recipes are sad imitations of their respective originals, but this was in fact fudge. It is a lot better than I thought it'd be. If I'm being honest, it's no Fantasy Fudge, but it's definitely good enough to give away. And I really love how easy it is to reduce to very small amounts. And of course, we didn't heat the kitchen at all!