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.

Leftovers (part I)

The first weekend (my first, back from vacation), I went totally hog wild and bought far too many fresh vegetables, and a small chicken. I roasted the chicken a la Nigel Slater. It was fantastic - but I obviously could not eat even a small chicken in one sitting.

(slight aside: his book, Appetite, is one of my all time favorite cookbooks. Anne Fadiman wrote an essay in her book, Ex Libris, click here for a review titled “Never Do That to a Book” in which she broke bibliophiles into two categories: courtly lovers and carnal lovers. Since reading it, I have at unexpected moments found myself making the same division. Nigel Slater is a carnal lover of food. I am a courtly lover of books, but a carnal lover of food.).

This past weekend, in an ineffective attempt to rein in my buying impulses, I brought a shopping list:

• Arugula
• Swiss Chard
• Leeks

Items not on the list, but bought nonetheless was:

• Eggplant (they just looked soooo good)
• Zucchini (but, they go so well with eggplant)
• Mushrooms
• Tomatoes
• Tarragon
• Peaches
  

Sigh. Of the items that I bought, only a third had been my intention.

I began with an omelet – must keep up my strength for the cooking ahead – and then, having realized once I got home that if I didn’t cook some of the vegetables immediately, they’d go soft and unpleasant before I did, I grilled them on my George Foreman grill (My apartment does not permit gas or coal grills, and the Foreman works very well for vegetables. And “Panini”)

Then I moved on to other things.

Heat

It has been (or so the radio tells me) seven straight days where it has reached over 90˚F. Blech. So yesterday seemed like the perfect time to go see a movie (gasp, on a work night!). This is the first movie I’ve seen since Christmas.

There are a lot of fun movies out or coming out soon that I’ve heard good things about – which of these brought me to the theater?

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

I enjoyed it – most particularly Guillermo del Toro’s fantastic imagination, and his horrifying re-interpretation of tooth-fairies and the bizarrely-eyed seer beneath Ireland. Nonetheless, I think that the first movie (excellent) was the better film. There was more tension between characters, more for the viewer to figure out on their own, and less certainty that the right people would all win out in the end. In short, I think the first film was the smarter of the two.

Nonetheless, I consider it money well spent.

Okay. I’m back now

I think.

It took longer than I expected (which is no great surprise, as the inner me often expects the unreasonable) to get back into the swing of my “real” life and catch-up with all the little chores that keep life moving smoothly and cleanly.

As dearly as I loved eating on my vacation (oh, seafood!), I’ve missed eating more lightly and cooking. Saturday I went to the Farmer’s market before temperatures crested 90˚F and collected some fresh produce.

Despite a list, I still bought more than I can rationally expect to eat in a week and I spent much of the weekend cooking.

Bliss.

I also started going through my vacation photos. I think that I may end up spending as much time going through them as I did actually on vacation. I also wish that I’d spent the time I’d intended playing with my new camera before I left. Then again, I suppose that I would never have immersed myself in playing with it the way that I did while I was away, so it may be just as well. …

I took over 1200 photos. Oh, the painful lesson of a digital camera and a big memory card …

(confession: I’m actually really enjoying going through all these photos ..)

I'm back!

I arrived back at home at about 2 am Tuesday morning and returned to work on Wednesday. I heard some bad news about a good friend, and with jet lag and another bridal shower this weekend and still not being unpacked, it may take a little bit before any details of my trip get typed in – or photos sorted through.

I will say that I had a fantastic time.

And ate, really, an embarrassment of oysters.

So I’m craving light food now. Specifically lots and lots of vegetables. Dinner tonight was stolen from Eric Ripert: broiled zucchini slices topped with hard cheese (again with the Prima Donna) and drizzled with a basalmic glaze. Tasty!

Tasty! I had it with a glass of Cavit Riesling, which I’m discovering that I like quite a lot.

*Prima Donna is a mild cow's milk cheese made in the style of a Dutch Gouda. As compared to a four- or six-year Gouda, Prima Donna has a distinctly softer, subtler flavor. It has an ivory rind with slight rose blush; bright, crunchy texture; and sweet, nutty flavor with a distinct caramel aftertaste. Pair Prima Donna with bigger reds such as Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Zinfandel.