School's Out and I'm back

 I am delighted to report that I  just finished a very intense 13 months in a graduate program during which my time was at a premium. A lot of things had to go, including food blogging. To be honest, I didn't do a whole lot of cooking and most of what I made wasn't all that remarkable. The whole purpose of my shiny new M. Ed. is to pick up more teaching hours but my hope is that even with additional work I will once again have time for things like reading for pleasure, taking photos, and blogging (not to mention spending time with family and friends-imagine that!). After months hunched over my desk alone in our chilly basement, it sounds like heaven.

We were invited to brunch this morning and I decided it was time to remake one of my old favorites in gluten free form. I got the recipe for blintz soufflé from an old Internet friend and there are many versions to be found on various Jewish food sites.  The only change I made initially I was to replace the cottage cheese with fresh ricotta which I find a lot easier on my stomach. There's only a cup of flour in the recipe so replacing with gf options seemed safe enough. My usual homemade blend uses corn starch but our host is sensitive to corn, too, so used equal parts brown rice flour, sweet rice flour, and tapioca starch which worked perfectly. 

This dish has all the lovely sweet, creamy flavors of traditional blitzes with a fraction of the fuss. It's a great brunch dish because it bakes for 50 minutes, leaving you plenty of time for other last minute preparations. Served with sour cream and fresh fruit or a lightly sweetened berry sauce, you couldn't ask for a better option on your brunch table.

You'll find the recipe here.

Savory Cheese Custard

This is one of my favorite standbys when I realize a meal is low on protein and we have nothing but cheese and eggs on hand. These savory custards from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone are quick, tasty, nutritious and well received, even by pesky children. You could make the custard in one large baking dish (cook it longer

You could certainly play around with different cheeses and seasonings but we are always pretty happy with a simple blend of Tillamook cheddar and Parmesan. I like these served with roasted potatoes and a simple vegetable on the side.

You'll find the printable recipe here.

Insanely Good

When I saw this recipe in my friend's Fine Cooking magazine, I was very, very interested. So many flavors that I love: brown butter, pecans, blue cheese, and Brussels sprouts. Sounds a little busy, doesn't it? But it is a heavenly combination.

The first time I made it I followed the recipe exactly and loved the rich, buttery flavors. When I made the dish tonight, I used onions in place of shallots, half and half instead of heavy cream, and Gorgonzola in place of the blue cheese because these were what I had on hand. The resulting dish was a little lighter, but no less delicious.

I particularly love the Brussels sprouts which are sliced and then roasted before being tossed into the pasta. I'd never had them prepared this way and will definitely consider the roasted sprouts as a side dish.

Biscuit Breakthrough

I've always loved cheese scones/biscuits even when they are, sadly, a little tough. I'm not a whiz with the dough and I often end up over working things but the results are OK nonetheless.

Today I wanted to make up something to accompany a pot of broccoli soup and my girl was itching to try her hand at making butter, so a little something bready was in order. I remembered a lovely cheese biscuit recipe I'd copied from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking which is also the source of the best brownies ever. Just saying.

Anyhow, these cheese scones are delicious due to the liberal use of chipotle powder, one of the finest flavors ever--so rich and smoky and deep and, sadly, poison to my daughter who worked so hard shaking that jar for butter. So I opted for a the similarly flavored Spanish paprika which has the same smoke, minus the heat.

The soup was nearly done and all I had was frozen butter for my scones. In a flash of brilliance, I decided to grate the frozen butter into the dough, which gave me lovely results. These were the lightest, most delicate biscuits I can remember making.

Whether you make these zippy with chipotle or mildly smoky with Spanish paprika, they're bound to be a hit. Especially if you decide to gild the lily with a little fresh butter, handmade by cheerfully enthusiastic child labor.

Printable recipe here.

Goodness from the Garden

One of the ongoing horrors of raising picky children is getting stuck in their ruts. At various times some or all of my children have been perfectly happy eating nothing but pasta and bottled marinara sauce topped with a blend of Parmesan and Romano cheeses. Apart from the burrito, mediocre pasta with red sauce has probably been served more often than any other dish in our house. It drives me crazy because I can make a fine tomato sauce. I even stocked my freezer with pints and pints of the good stuff at the end of last summer. But my kids turned up their nose at my summery goodness, making it clear that they much preferred the stuff in the jar.

I think may have reached a point where I can't look at another one of those jars again. But I still love pasta as much as ever. I came up with this recipe after being inspired by one published in this month's Bon Appetit magazine, but I made enough changes that I think it's safe to call it my own.

I was instantly drawn when I saw ricotta used. I had my first attempt at homemade ricotta in the 'fridge and this looked like a worthy showcase for my meager but tasty cheese. You don't have to make your own ricotta though if you are interested it could hardly be easier. Mine was a not-terribly-successful attempt at making ricotta using the whey leftover from cheesemaking. A lot of hoo ha for not much cheese, though it was tasty. There's a good, simple recipe at 101 Cookbooks that has nice clear directions and should have a much higher yield than the whey ricotta. It's on my list of things to try soon.

Back to the pasta--it's creamy and light, with lemon brightening the flavor of the sauteed veggies. I used what I had on hand in my back garden which meant only a few sugar snap peas, but my first zucchini of the year and a handful of tender young chard leaves. The combination was delicious and I'm sure you'll find your own combos which work just as well. My purple beans are coming along and will likely star when I make this dish next.

The added benefit of making this dish from what was in my garden (apart from not having to make a trip to the store) was that while I was poking around to see what was available, I got to nibble on delicious, perfectly ripe strawberries--and dessert before dinner isn't a bad thing at all!


Link to downloadable recipe

Triumph!

My first batch of goat cheese was just the tiniest bit disappointing. I was expecting the sort of creamy, tangy spreadable cheese that I associate with the term chevre. I now know it was a learning cheese. It was a quick cheese which used cider vinegar to coagulate the milk and then hung to dry for a few hours. The resulting cheese was mild tasting and much drier and firmer than I'd expected.

I'm learning a little bit with each batch of cheese I make. I now know that vinegar makes a somewhat rubbery cheese and long draining times make a drier cheese. Nearly every recipe I've tried so far has come from either The Home Creamery or Home Cheese Making, both of which are excellent books full of promise. But I also tried a little freestyle cheese making last week, adding to my goat's milk some heavy cream and homemade yogurt which I wanted to use up before a trip out of town. The resulting cheese was unlike anything I've ever tasted and I was so tickled! Ed, my source for ultra-fresh goat's milk, tells me if I created it, I should name it but so far it's just The Awesome Cheese. I don't know why, but adding the cow's milk cream and yogurt to the goat's milk seemed to enhance the goaty flavor in a really good way. The cheese was a little dry but sliced nicely and disappeared all too rapidly. I'll try again and if I can duplicate my results, I hope to share the recipe here.

I still hadn't managed a creamy, tangy chevre and after a bit more research realized that I needed a starter culture and time to let things age properly. I ordered the Fresh French Goat Cheese kit from The New England Cheesemaking Company and soon found myself in possession of two types of starters, four cheese molds, more rennet, butter muslin and a recipe booklet which talked me through all the steps for a classic chevre. It's not quick--it takes a few days what with sterilizing the milk, incubating the culture, and draining the curds, but it worked! Two full days after I started the process I was rewarded with four tiny rounds of delicious cheese. I'm so jazzed about this! I really can make cheese in my kitchen from milk purchased nearby fom the happiest goats I've ever seen. Today I tucked some thin wedges of the cheese into pitted dates and wished I could pat myself on the back for my cleverness.

You won't be surprised to learn that I've added a few new blogs to my RSS reader. Curd Nerds, I Make Cheese, and Cheese Underground really hit the spot for me these days. But after reading/gawking at this fabulous photo essay on artisan cheesemaking in the Alps, I am starting to think that maybe the world needs another cheesemaker more than it needs another ESL teacher.

Dairy Adventures

After I wrote about my Dairy Magic class a few weeks ago, you surely knew that homemade cheese was sure to follow. I bought myself a copy of The Home Creamery and have started to experiment.

The first thing that caught my eye was chevre, a fresh cheese made from goat's milk which is actually something my entire family enjoys. I went off to New Seasons and grabbed a couple of quarts of goats milk not long ago, started heating everything up, reached the proper temperature, added the cider vinegar and....nothing happened. Nothing. I knew from making paneer and mozzarella that the curds and whey tend to separate pretty quickly so I figured something was wrong. When I dug the milk cartons out of the recycling bin I realized I'd missed one of the first details Chris mentioned to us: ultra pasteurized milk is no good for cheese. And sadly the Meyerberg goats milk so commonly available is, in fact, ultra pasteurized. I ended up tossing half gallon of warm, sour milk down the drain as I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use it.

Earlier this week our homeschool co-op was scheduled to visit a small family farm outside of Camas, Washington. I figured we'd go and pet horses and chicks and whatnot but as it turned out, Conway Family Farm is a licensed dairy selling....you guessed it--fresh raw goats milk. Hooray! Despite their long list of customers, they had a couple of half gallon bottles to spare and I was in business!

I made the cheese yesterday morning and it really was super simple. You heat the milk (half a gallon in this case) to 175 degrees, hold it at that temperature for 10 minutes, add 1 cup of cider vinegar, watch for the curds to form, and then strain using a colander lined with a clean tea towel. You then wrap the curds in the towel and hang to drain for and additional few hours though I found mine was well drained after an hour and beginning to get quite firm.

This isn't the creamy, tangy chevre that we buy at the farmer's market. It's a firm cheese with a clean, pure dairy flavor. I was able to slice it and eat on hearty bread with a light sprinkle of coarse salt-heaven!

The goat cheese went so well I decided to give yogurt another go. My first experience a few weeks ago was using the crockpot which sounded too good to be true. My result was runny and stringy and not very tasty at all. This time I used the stovetop method outlined in The Home Creamery and it was a snap. Really--heat the milk, cool it down a bit, add some starter and stir. The big issue is keeping the milk somewhere warm for 9-12 hours while it sets up. I used a large picnic cooler and nestled my jar of yogurt among some large jars and bottles which I'd filled with hot water. Once I closed everything up in the cooler, the temperature stayed nice and warm, perfect for turning milk into yogurt. Ten hours later, I opened up the cooler to find a perfect quart of yogurt awaiting me--so exciting!

I'd wanted to make granola to eat with my homemade yogurt but didn't get to it right away so today's breakfast was a tumbler full of banana lassi. I put a cup of yogurt in the blender with a banana, some crushed cardamom seeds, and a dab of honey. So simple but so, so good. Of course ripe mangoes make a lovely lassi, too.

Now that I have the book, the thermometer, fresh rennet and starter cultures, I guarantee there will be more dairy adventures in the near future.

Tuna Corks

There are lots of delicious looking recipes in A Homemade Life. I'm not sure what it was about these that intrigued me other than being made of things I generally have on hand (and let's not underestimate that appeal). The fact that anyone could write rhapsodically about humble tuna caught my attention and this was among the first recipes I tried. They're kind of funny looking: short, squat, and oddly pink. Despite this my kids gamely tried them (I think they were really hungry). The result--"not too bad" which would be high praise from anyone else. I rather liked them, too. They're easy enough to make, not as fishy as they sound, and provide a solid blast of protein should your meal be lacking. Also--as highbrow as the name bouchons de thon may sound, we got a kick out of the English translation: tuna corks. How great is that?

You'll find the recipe here. Let me know if you're brave enough to try them and what you thought.

Perfection?

Here's what I just realized--I already wrote about this dish, back in March. I wrote out this whole post and went to type out the recipe when I saw that I'd already done so. Oy. So if you want to read the first post, it's here. Feel free to read on for my more current thoughts on the topic of macaroni and cheese. I'm sure this type of thing never happens with the fancy, professional food blogger types.

I don't know if perfection is a goal I should be aiming for giving that sometimes it's a major accomplishment just getting everyone around here to eat. But some things you shouldn't have to settle for. Sometimes you just want to find that one, perfect recipe--the one that will allow you to end your search.

That's how this recipe for macaroni and cheese came into my home. I love a good macaroni and cheese but for years wasn't able to get to what I wanted: cheesy, of course, and nicely chewy without the sludge of a heavy, milky sauce. I tried any number of recipes, most of which were OK though one stands out as being inedible (John Thorne, what were you thinking with the evaporated milk?) but nothing really came close to what I wanted until I found Jack Bishop's recipe in A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen.

This is the simplest and tastiest version of macaroni cheese I know and can be varied endlessly with different cheeses from plain old Tillamook medium cheddar to a liberal amount of crumbled Cougar Gold. The bread crumbs make a slightly crunchy topping and you can control the texture depending on how you cook it. A large shallow baking dish will give you chewy macaroni with lots of topping and a deeper vessel makes for a creamier dish. Either way is great as far as I'm concerned. The recipe is here. I hope it goes over well in your home.

Curds and Whey

I blame Barbara Kingsolver. I've been thoroughly enjoying Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I respect and applaud her family's decision to break away from the world of corporate food and eat as locally as possible. Really, I do. But part of me (the insecure and immature part I guess) was feeling kind of like a loser as I read, thinking wistfully about the cook and gardener I could be if I would just get my act together and knowing that I probably never will. But then came the chapter on cheese, specifically the 30-minute fresh mozzarella recipe. Really, she insists, normal people can make real cheese in their own kitchens. Well, I was in.

I especially wanted to make cheese with The Spouse this weekend. It might seem like an odd activity for an anniversary but we are, after all, the couple who had to visit both the Tillamook Cheese Factory and the Blue Heron French Cheese Company on our honeymoon. We like our cheese.

I started out simply by heating a gallon of organic milk on the stove. My thermometer isn't terribly accurate at the lower end, so I had to guess about the proper time to add the citric acid. At this point it was more or less like making paneer, which I have done many times. Adding the rennet seems to change the consistency of the curds and make them stick together with more tenacity than paneer. Once the curds formed I scooped them out with a slotted spoon and mashed things around to press out as much of the watery whey as possible. Eventually the mass of curds came together into something resembling either a cauliflower or a brain, depending on your point of view.

The mass of curds is then heated in the microwave for a minute or so and kneaded. This is the fun part as the texture begins to change dramatically. Once it cools, you repeat the heating/kneading until most of the moisture is out of the cheese.
You can then form the cheese into whatever shape you like. I made about 12 2" balls of cheese. The flavor was incredibly delicate and buttery and the cheese squeaks just slightly when chewed which is a sensation I love.

It took a few phone calls to find vegetarian rennet locally but I figured if I was going to make my own cheese I might as well make it kosher as well. The citric acid also took a couple of calls but we were able to round up all the ingredients here in Portland. For those more patient folks wanting to do mail order, I'd take a look here as they seem to have a huge array of items for your cheesemaking needs.

This isn't particularly cost effective as there wasn't a whole lot to show for a gallon of milk, especially once The Dark Lord came through the kitchen and discovered the cheese. But I will certainly try this again, perhaps when I have a pile of fresh grape tomatoes. I can see rolling the fresh mozzarella into tiny balls, and tossing them with fresh basil, tomatoes, and a bit of olive oil for a variation on the Caprese salad. How lovely that would be in deep summer with home grown tomatoes and homemade cheese! I may not have a farm of many acres and I even fell behind in planting my vegetable beds this year, but I did manage to pop a few tomato plants in the ground last month, so that heavenly salad shouldn't be too far away.

Apologies for the photo quality. Given a choice between cheesemaking and documenting cheesemaking, well, the cheese won so I (or The Spouse) snapped what photos we could despite poor lighting.

Treasure from the Freezer

I woke up to yet another gray, rainy spring morning. The usual smoothie or yogurt/granola breakfast had no appeal whatsoever and, since it was too wet and miserable to go for a walk, I thought I could actually take the time to cook something proper. Somehow I got to thinking about the remaining bags of roasted green chiles tucked away in the back of my freezer. Every year I try to hit the farmers' markets when the chile roasting folks set up camp, mid to late September or so. I stock up, buying many pounds of the charred treasures. When I arrive home, I chop them, remove stems, and pack away in smaller size freezer bags for use the rest of the year.

Today I think I was craving protein so I decided on this simple crustless quiche. I clipped the recipe from the FOODday section of our local paper some time ago and have made it countless times since then. It's simple, hearty, easily portable, and good warm or room temperature and great for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The ingredients are pretty basic though I really think that good roasted chiles (and not the vinegary canned types) make a huge difference, as does a good quality ricotta. I use Trader Joe's "fresh" ricotta in everything as I find it much more flavorful and less watery and insipid than most grocery store brands.

This was just what I needed this morning. Not too spicy, but definitely warming. Not too filling but definitely satisfying, getting my morning off to a good start. And, funny thing, after I ate, the slightest bit of sunlight started to peek through the gloom.

Give this recipe a try if you are interested and let me know what you think. I've noticed that, while there have been literally hundreds of dowloads of my recipes, there's been very little commentary. I'd love to hear what you think so please do post a comment now and then.