Jer: Panna Cotta

When my family has a potluck gathering there is a particular dessert that my Auntie Harriet regularly brings that I just love. She mixes sliced strawberries into strawberry Jello and then tops the firmed gelatin with a layer of whipped cream. Its always one of the first desserts to be finished and I really just love it. There is another dessert that my mom and all of my aunts make regularly for parties. A $2 can of Dole fruit cocktail is mixed with some condensed milk and Cool Whip. I love these classic immigrant American desserts that can feed three generations of Filipinos for less than $10. They were the inspiration for my take on Ms. Hesser’s panna cotta.

I wanted to do something a little different with the panna cotta, especially since both Kaoru and Julie had already paired it with a fruit topping. What I love about the childhood dishes described above is how the bite-sized pieces of fruit get suspended in the thicker body of a creamy substance. Tonight was my sister Rachel’s birthday dinner and I certainly couldn’t make her panna cotta filled with cheap fruit cocktail. More importantly, there are certain substances that are just banned from my kitchen given how much of it I ate as a child. Canned fruit cocktail, Cool Whip, Spam and corned beef top that list (even though I will happily devour them at a relative's home). Instead I opted for a visit to Chino’s Family Farm and Seaside Market where I found some enticing artisinal plums, pears and peaches as well as the most inviting squash-yellow raspberries cultivated by the Chino family. One of these aesthetic gems, the $5 horned melon, did not make it into the panna cotta. My sister and I eagerly opened it up to taste its fruit to find a mushy and runny green substance that tasted nothing like we expected. We laughed when we did some research to find that people suggest using it as ornamentation in a table centerpiece.

This panna cotta is definitely lighter and more healthy than the creamier version Kaoru and I made in the spring. I like them both to finish different types of meals. Tonight I made my sister her two favorite dishes, a wonderful eggplant parmesan made with these delicate Japanese eggplants from Chinos and fettuccini Alfredo made with homemade egg pasta that I kneaded by hand in front of her as a gesture of how much I love her. We also started with a salad using Chino butter lettuce and tomatoes topped with imported burratta and finished with olive oil and a very thick balsamic syrip. Our meal was amazingly flavorful and truly wonderful yet very rich so this lighter panna cotta was a very nice and light finish.

I used only about one cup of yogurt and strained it for about a half hour to thicken it up. I took Kaoru's advice and added some vanilla. I probably added about a cup of one-inch diced and peeled fruit and we really liked how it deepened the flavor and texture of the panna cotta. Also, even though the recipe didn't call for it I did strain all milk-products into the final bowl to ensure no large particules or air bubbles.