Ricotta

Saturday I made homemade ricotta.

OMG, that was easy, and so divine! I took the recipe from From Argentina with Love

but she modified it from Michael Chiarello's Casual Cooking and Heidi Swanson has virtually the same recipe at 101 Cookbooks, so it’s pretty bog standard. All that you need is whole milk and buttermilk (4:1), cheesecloth, a strainer, a pot, and a candy thermometer – and I’m thinking that I won’t need the candy thermometer next time, now that I know what it should look like. I made mine using 1 quart of milk (4 cups) and ended up with about a cup of ricotta.

Why did I make ricotta? I’ll give you a hint:
Michael Ruhlman and cook eat FRET

Baba Ganouch

I’m Addicted. I again bought eggplants at the Farmer’s Market (Again over-buying), this time with the intention of making Baba Ganouch.

I love the way it feels to say that word:
Baba Ganouch. Baba Ganouch. Baba Ganouch.

I believe it hails from the Mideast in the area of Syria and Turkey – and the ingredients certainly back it up: eggplant, tahini, garlic, lemon juice, seasonings …

I love eggplant, and yet I’ve never made Baba Ganouch. It also would not have occurred to me to char the eggplants first, until I read David Liebovitz’s method. (Though it being nearly 90 degrees here, I cheated and used the microwave to finish cooking the eggplant). I had bought Sicilian eggplants and these looked as though they had been grown white, and the farmer later ran out in the dead of night and painted it aubergine.

I also used cilantro and not parsley because I adore cilantro and am not too fond of parsley.

Yum!

On a related note, I’ve had a recipe cut out from Martha Stewart Living magazine on my fridge forever (months, anyway) for parchment bread (It’s more cracker than bread), which looked too simple to be real, but if it worked, would be perfect for the Baba Ganouch.

Baba Ganouch. Baba Ganouch. Baba Ganouch.

It really is incredibly easy – if you have a pasta machine and a pizza stone. I expect it’s more difficult if you need to roll it out by hand. Fabulous! I am absolutely, 100% making this again.

Leftovers (part II)

I bought some Red Chard at the Farmer’s market. Chard is in the beet family, which explains why I like it almost as much as beet greens. To me, beet greens have a stronger, more earthy, flavor than chard. On the other hand, I can get two good meals out of a bunch of chard where a bunch of beets inevitably wishing that I had more beet greens and fewer beets …

Cooking it is fairly straight forward: parboil and then sauté with some garlic, separating the stalks from the leaves as the stalks require a little more cooking. I think that I may have over-cooked the stalks in this case …

To make use of the rest of my roast chicken, I made chicken-pot-pies (individual portions) using a recipe from Delia Smith which called for sharp cheddar and cayenne in the sauce (excellent). As usual, I went a little overboard and took the crust from a different recipe, one that called for cream cheese.

To be honest, I’m not sure that the cream-cheese added anything to the crust, except in the unhealthy sense. On the other hand, it didn’t take anything away, either, but I don’t suppose I’ll go to the trouble of making it again.