Doris and Jilly Cook » Cheese

Latke Love

dorisandjilly — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:28:25 +0000

Only four nights of Hanukkah left! Eat those latkes while you can, folks. My latkes tend to be somewhat improvised, so, rather than provide you with a real “recipe,” I’m sending you over to Food in Jars, where Marisa has put up a terrific step-by-step approach to latke goodness. (For the record, though, I do not endorse lard in latkes. It may be delicious, but it’s still just wrong.)

My best latke tips:

1. Really wring out those potatoes. You’ll ruin a kitchen towel, but you’ll be much happier with the results.

2. Add a tablespoon or so of cottage cheese. Just trust me on this one.

3. Make sure your oil is really, really hot. Few among us have a deep frying thermometer these days, so I’ll characterize it like the Spanish would: it needs to be hot enough to brown a breadcrumb in 30 seconds.

4. Scoop out the latkes in a 1/3 c. measuring cup. Really pack it in there, the better to keep it together in the frying pan.

I’ve never met a latke that I didn’t like, but I’m especially partial to cheese latkes, potato and sweet potato latkes, and regular potato latkes with a handful of shredded carrots thrown in. Yours?

Strata with Sausage and Broccoli

dorisandjilly — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:55:06 +0000

Perhaps it has not escaped your notice that I seem to have a lot of eggs and cheese. It’s inevitable. I’m often on the road this time of year, but the CSA, with its dozen eggs, half pound of cheese, and two pounds of meat, arrives every week. My husband and I therefore eat a lot of yellow dinners. This is an attempt to get some color back into our diets.

I discovered the joys of strata through Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. They are a wonder of the kitchen: utterly flexible, and fairly forgiving. Better yet, a good strata uses stale bread! So long as you’re using some combination of eggs, milk, bread, and vegetables that go together, you’ll end up with something nice. Do tell us what you come up with, yes?

Strata with Sausage and Broccoli

half a loaf of stale bread (good bread makes a better strata)
4 eggs
2 c. milk (2% is fine; richer milk makes a richer strata)
1 lb. loose breakfast sausage
1 head broccoli, cut into large pieces
About 1/4 lb. cheddar, Swiss, or other mild cheese, shredded
Salt and pepper, to taste

1) Brown the sausage.

2) Blanche the broccoil (cook in boiling water only until it changes colors).

3) Cut the bread into enough thin slices to make three layers in a deep baking vessel (I use a 9x9x3 pan). Put the first layer on the bottom. Cover with 1/2 of the sausage, 1/2 of the broccoli, and 1/3 of the cheese. Add another layer of bread, then the other half of the sausage and broccoli and another third of the cheese. Add the third layer of bread, and top with the remaining cheese.

4) Beat the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper. Pour the mixture over the bread. Use a potato masher to push the bread beneath the level of the custard. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour, then bake at 350ºF for about an hour, or until it’s golden and puffy.

Basic Corn Pudding

dorisandjilly — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:19:39 +0000

Our CSA supplies us with a lot of eggs and cheese. Plus, we have a freezer full of corn. Hence, corn pudding.

This version is a slightly altered version of the standby “Corn Pudding with Poblano Peppers” in the 1990s version of Joy of Cooking. Among other things, their recipe omits an oven temperature. I find 350ºF makes the pudding a bit on the dry side—you’ll be happier with the results at 325ºF. It turns out that the amount of corn is flexible, as are the number of eggs and the amount of cheese. You can add roasted peppers if you want, or serve it with a sauce. It’s richer with cream, but perfectly fine without. In short, use this as a pallete to combine whatever you think would be nice with frozen corn.

Basic Corn Pudding

1 quart frozen corn (if using purchased corn, I guess a pound?)
1 onion, chopped
1 T. olive or canola oil
3/4 t. salt
4 eggs
About 1 cup of cheddar or jack cheese, shredded
Fresh chopped oregano or whatever herbs you have on hand (basil’s good in this)

1) Preheat the oven to 325ºF.

2) Saute the onion in a skillet with the oil for a few minutes, until translucent. Add the corn, herbs, and salt and cook a few minutes more.

3) Beat the eggs in a large bowl. Add the cheese and the corn mixture. Turn into a gratin pan or pie plate. Bake for about 30–40 minutes, until the center is set.

Meatballs!

dorisandjilly — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:55:14 +0000

Have you been wondering what I’m going to do with all that stuff I canned and froze this summer? Me, too! In honor of this problem, and my basement full of food, we have a new category of post: Stuff made from preserved foods. We inaugurate this category with a messy throwback: meatballs. Mmmmmm. Meatballs.

Meatballs with Homemade Canned Tomato Sauce

1 lb ground beef
1 lb ground pork
1 c. bread chunks
3 eggs
1 onion, chopped
1 small head of chard, with the leaves shredded
3/4 c. hard Italian cheese, like Parmesean or pecorino romano
A handful of basil
1 T olive oil
1 pint homemade canned tomato sauce*

1) Combine everything but the olive oil and the sauce and mix it well, by hand. Form the mixture into 1-inch meatballs.

2) Gently brown the meatballs in a non-stick pan and transfer them to a crockpot.

3) Pour the sauce over the meatballs and cook on high for about 5 hours.

Viola! Meatballs! Serve them over pasta, or put them in sandwiches. Even better the next day.

*Eep! Apparently I never actually wrote that post on tomato sauce. So, use your favorite version or—if you’re really desperate—use commerical. I made about a dozen jars from 25 pounds of tomatoes earlier this summer. Sadly, the time for making anything from 25 pounds of tomatoes is over for this year. So sorry.

Doris and Jilly Make Cheese

dorisandjilly — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:05:19 +0000

As you’ve surely gathered by now, Jilly, the Southern Indiana sister, has some goats. Until a few months ago, however, she didn’t have any goat milk because her goats had never been bred. Recently, though, she and my brother-in-law increased their flock to include a goat in her milk. For better or for worse, they’re now getting somewhere between one and three quarts of goat milk every day. It’s delicious to drink, but if you have that much goat milk, inevitably your thoughts will eventually turn to cheese.

There are as many ways to make cheese as people who make it, so we’re going to spare you the blow-by-blow. Suffice it to say that it’s straight of out the 1970s-era Joy of Cooking, a time when mainstream cookbooks assumed that a typical housewife could get her hands on a gallon of unpastuerized, unhomogenized cow, sheep, or goat’s milk without too much trouble. To make a really nice cheese, you need a cheese culture—much like a yogurt culture—that will give you cheese a distinct flavor. For goats, obviously, a chevre culture would be most fitting, but a cheddar or mozzarella culture would also do pretty well. Without a culture, you can make surprisingly good cheese, but it’s somewhat less predictable.

In our version, we simply relied on rennet, a natural enzyme that will separate the parts that will become cheese from the whey. After we added the rennet, we heated the mixture to 104°F and held it there for half an hour. This is where things got murky. If you do this right, Jilly tells me, you end up with a big block of cheese-to-be that you can cut with a knife and then knead in the pan. We didn’t get that. We ended up with something that looked more like cottage cheese. Nevertheless, I “worked” it by running my hands through it for about 15 minutes, supposedly extracting much of the extra whey. After following the rest of Joy‘s somewhat convoluted instructions, we eventually drained the cheese into a form wrapped in cheese cloth, weighted it, and stuck the whole thing in the fridge.

Then we let it sit for 24 hours.

Given the odd texture at the beginning, our expectations were fairly low for this batch. But to our shock and delight, this pretty much turned out like feta. My sense is that you’d have to have a pretty hard-core sense of smell and/or taste to distinguish this batch from your basic sheep’s feta. It definitely had a little goat whanginess that separated it from cow’s milk cheese, but on the whole, we were pleased.

Neither one of us knows much about cheesemaking, but we’d very much like to learn—if you’ve figured out how to do it well, especially if you’re breeding your own cultures, can you please drop us a line?

Green Bean and Beet Salad

dorisgoat — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:55:21 +0000

Simple, improvised salads are one of the purest joys of summer. Get a few flavor combinations down, and you’re set. Mark Bittman’s recent list of ideas of 101 salads is a great place to start, but really: just toss together whatever comes in from the garden and eat what you like. Not coincidentally, things that ripen at the same time tend to go well together. This is one of our favorites.

Green Bean and Beet Salad

About 1/2 pound of blanched green beans, preferably a full-flavored variety, like Romano
About 1/2 pound of cooked beets, cut into chunks
a handful of hazelnuts, toasted
a small clump of blue cheese, crumbled
~ 2 T olive oil
~ 1 T balsamic vinegar
Good salt

Mix everything together. Serve sooner rather than later unless you don’t mind pink green beans.

Pea and Leek Risotto

dorisgoat — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:55:45 +0000

Spring is finally here! Is there any dish that’s more springlike than a simple combination of leeks and peas? It’ll get even better in about three weeks when the peas come from the garden instead of the freezer, but even this version feels like a celebration of renewal.

If you’ve never tried making your own risotto, here’s the deal. It’s important that you use a short-grain rice to produce the necessary starch. Arborio is traditional, but you can use any short-grain rice, including brown rice. They key is to stir frequently to release the starches and to add hot liquid in stages. Cookbooks will tell you that you need to stir “constantly,” but that’s not actually true. Just push it around a bit to make sure it’s not sticking and you’ll be fine. They tell me you can make a fanastic risotto in the pressure cooker, but since for me the whole appeal of risotto is an opportunity to read a book while I make dinner, I prefer the slow, methodical stovetop version. Once you get the hang of it, you can start substituting liquids, vegetables, and fats to fit your whims.

Pea and Leek Risotto

2 T butter (for vegan version, use more olive oil)
2 T olive oil
2 leeks, white parts only, cleaned and cut into thin strips
1 1/2 c. short-grain rice
approx. 5 cups stock
appox. 1 c. dry white wine, preferably unoaked
about 1 c. of fresh or frozen peas
1/3 c. or so aged cheese, like parmesan, pecorino romano, or gruyere, shredded

1) Heat up your stock in a small pan. Keep it simmering on the stove.

2) Melt your fats together in a thick-bottomed medium saucepan. Add the leeks and cook until they’re limp. Add the rice and stir until all the grains are coated. Cook for about a minute.

3) Start adding liquid in small batches. Start with 1/2 cup. Stir it in, and keep stirring until the grains have absorbed most of the liquid. When it starts to look dry, add more. Keep repeating this process until the rice is al dente. At some point, use the wine instead of the stock. The entire process will take about 45 minutes. In the end you’ll have something that looks sort of like oatmeal, only with rice.

4) When you’re more or less satisfied that the rice is almost done, add the peas. When the peas are cooked through, turn off and add the cheese. Stir until everything is well mixed. This is best served immediately.

Variations: A vegan version will be less rich, but still pretty good. Use olive oil for all the fat, use a vegetable stock for flavor, and add some additional vegetables. It may also need a little extra salt, since you won’t be adding any in the cheese.

Penne with Fresh Ricotta

dorisgoat — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:22:42 +0000

Fresh ricotta is a wonderful, underappreciated ingredient. If you can find rennet, it’s easy enough to make yourself, but in Philadelphia we are blessed with Claudio’s, a glorious cheesemaker that sells fresh ricotta for the bargain basement price of $2.99 a pound. (Oddly enough, they don’t mention the fresh cheese on their Web site, but trust me, it’s there). It’s so delicious that one of the best things you can do with it is simply to eat it, plain, on bruschetta or pizza. If you want to get a little more ambitious, it makes a fantastic creamy pasta sauce.

Penne with Fresh Ricotta and Sun-Dried Tomatoes

1 pound dry penne, or fresh pasta of your choice
1 pound fresh ricotta, or less, to taste
1/4 c. sun-dried tomatoes, preferably cherry tomatoes you’ve dried yourself
1/2 c. parsley, chopped
salt and pepper

1) Bring a big pot of water to boil for the pasta. Meanwhile, soak the tomatoes in about a cup of boiling water. When they’re flexible , drain them, reserving the water to thin the sauce later. Cut into thin strips.

2) Combine the cheese, tomatoes, and parsley.

3) Cook the pasta until it’s as tender as you’d like it (al dente is nice, as the sauce is so creamy and mild), then drain. Return the pasta to the cooking pot along with the cheese combination and the sun-dried tomato water. Toss everything, and add some olive oil if it’s too dry. Add salt and pepper to taste.

As you might guess from the ingredients, this is a pretty rich dish, so a little goes a long way. You’ll want to eat more,though. If I ever manage to track down an affordable pastry mat to cover my countertop tiles, I’ll get back in the habit of making my own pasta…