Weird and potentially dangerous cooking of the day
It's very exciting when one finds new ways of eating yummy things. Case in point: sweetened condensed milk. My mom used it for fruit salad. I liked it so much that I used to eat it spread on bread or (surreptitiously) straight up by the spoonful. I also vaguely remember my dad talking about how he would cook up an unopened tin of sweetened condensed milk, resulting in a solid mass you could slice. But since he never actually demonstrated this, I was left with the fruit salad and a spoon.

It's even more exciting when you find out that you can make something at home which you previously thought was impossible. Case in point: dulce de leche. Last week, people on egullet mentioned doing the same thing my dad did: putting a can of the sweet stuff into a pot of boiling water and opening it up to find caramel/toffee/dulce de leche.

Dulce de leche? I had to try it.

You take the label of the can and scrub the glue away. You plunk it into a pot and cover it completely with water. You let it boil for about four hours. You check obsessively to make sure the water is always covering the can. If you are like me and particularly nervous about explosions (the label explicitly says not to cook the can without opening it), you do this in a crock pot so as to somewhat contain the potential shrapnel.

After cooking it for five hours (just to be sure), we let it cool. The next day, we opened it.

Foodgoat took one taste of it, and said to me, "You're doomed." It tastes just like caramel. Yummy. Foodgoat wants to make little balls and cover them with chocolate. I want to dip apple slices in it. What possibilities!