Dreamy Breakfast

Since I have all this fresh ricotta around the house I have been tinkering with it this week. One of this best uses I found was for breakfast, riffing off traditional Turkish morning fare.

Breakfast in Turkey means light goat cheese, bread, cherry jam, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives and sometimes a hard boiled egg. Memories of that inspired me to throw an English muffin topped with fresh ricotta under the toaster oven and then when hot and bubbling, spoon over some fantastic cherry jam thick with whole cherries. It was good enough to make it breakfast for most of this week.

No Whey!

In an effort not to be wasteful, I decided I would try and use the whey from cheese making as the liquid medium in a loaf of Bittman's food geek sensation no-knead bread. And the verdict? Um, no. I'm not sure if there was too much heat in the whey and it killed the yeast or if there is something else chemical but, despite a pretty crust, my rise got nowhere fast. Back to the original rules and water in the bread for me.

Little Miss Muffet

For the last few years I have had an article on making homemade ricotta stuck up on the fridge. It seemed like such a nice idea, but I'd never bothered to actually do anything about it. For unknown reasons, the science fair allure of this project called to me this weekend so this morning I assembled the equipment and ingredients:
1 gallon whole milk
1 pint well shaken buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt (which should be increased a bit, a least for my palette)
Fresh ground pepper

The first step was to pour the milk and buttermilk into a stainless steel pan, I used my 8 quart stock pot which was the perfect size. Then everything needed to be whisked together and put over medium high heat. At this point, my instructions said the milk would boil and cook for 25 minutes until it curdles and "thickened but still light" (whatever that means). It was unclear if that was supposed to be 25 minutes total or 25 minutes post-boiling. So I decided since I already had an apron on and a wooden spoon at the ready I would just hang out in the kitchen drinking tea and peering into the pot periodically. This was a good idea because timing in the recipe was irrelevant to my experience. The milk burbled but never really boiled and was on the stove close to 40 minutes before anything happened. At this point a few curds started to appear, continued cooking and stirring for about 10 more minutes resulted in more and bigger curds.

Curds and Whey

At this point I had to drain off the whey. This was tricky because A) it felt very wasteful since there was a lot of it, if I only had a pig to slop I would have known what to do B) I do not have a large bucket which would have been useful. I improvised with a bowl that had to be shuffled around for draining and strainers\colander lined with cheesecloth. Since I was in the science fair mode, I reserved some whey to use in bread baking. Results pending.

This left me with pretty, fluffy (albeit damp) curds. I went back to the instructions and mixed in salt and pepper and then let the curd drain for about 20 minutes. They still seemed a bit too wet, so I relied on yogurt cheese making experience and went ahead and bundled up the cheese cloth and started squeezing additional liquid out.

Snuggled up Curds

I sampled some at this point and...quite lovely. I detected a subtle nutty flavor that I can't recall ever having in commercial ricottas in the midst of all that creamy pleasantness. At this point they got spooned into oiled custard cups and cooled under cover at room temp for about 45 minutes. In summer methinks they'd be very pretty with a nasturtium blossom tucked on top.

Finished Product

Happy Valentine's Day

Peanut Sauce

I'm not a big tofu eater, with the exception of when it is in a Thai style peanut sauce. I used my trip to Thai Grocery yesterday as an opportunity to make a batch. This is one of those recipes where I forget exactly how to make it so it's a little different every time.

The constants are:

• Peanut butter (I will only use the hippie kind, fresh ground peanuts and nothing else)
• Coconut milk
• Chili paste
• Fish Sauce (I use 3 tablespoons, which many would find excessive but I do like the stuff)
  
• Minced Garlic

This gets thrown into a sauce pan over low heat and stirred until the texture has smoothed out. I sometime use grated ginger at this stage as well. Then I add the "top notes" of this dish. Yesterday, this was finely chopped cilantro, scallions and holy basil.

Once a batch is finished it can be spooned over stir fried tofu and veggies and any leftover sauce keeps beautifully for another meal.

Rhubarb Nectar

Although I am generally a proponent of eating local, seasonal produce these noble instincts are hampered by the fact that I live in Chicago. Our "Paris on the Prairie" has many fine qualities but a year long growing season is not one of them.

So it was great delight on this snowy morning that I unearthed a container of Rhubarb Nectar that I'd tucked into the freezer last summer at the end of rhubarb season. My mom has long made a rhubarb compote to spoon over ice cream and the nectar is just a slight version on the same theme with a bit more liquid and serves as a drink base. I defrosted and stirred into a glass with a dose of seltzer and pretended for a moment that it was green instead of white outside the window.

Chard Stems

I am a fan of Chard, but for years I had been relying on its spinach like qualities. The recent arrival of the Silver Spoon into my life, however, introduced me to the idea of using the chard stems which I had been throwing away up until now.

No more. After parboiling them slightly, I did a really lovely dish with olive oil, lots of garlic and anchovy. At this point I am limited to using the plain white Swiss Chard stems but my mouth is watering at the thought of recreating this dish in the summer months once the Bright Lights variety hits the farmers' market.

Coming in from the Cold: Thai Grocery

There are times when the charms of urban life are a bit elusive, like being stuck on a jam packed grubby train with a delay. That's when stumbling into to someplace like Thai Grocery can remind you that city life does have its glories. I am originally from the sticks where places like this simply don't exist. This market has been around for over 20 years and its narrow aisles
are a great resource for anyone interested in Asian cuisine and I took advantage of having Lincoln's Birthday off (go Abe!) and headed down there this morning.

The shelves hold a wide range of goodies, both expected Southeast Asian specialties such as fish sauce and rice vermicelli as well as some surprises like a great selection of reasonably priced seaweeds, bonito flakes and furikake for Japanese dishes. There is beautifully fresh produce outside of typically supermarket fare including gangal, fresh kefir lime leaves, cilantro roots and 2-3 types of basil. This morning they even had fresh curry leaves for Indian style dishes. The fresh goods also include locally produced tofu and soy milk and I picked up a package of fried tofu with visions of peanut sauce running through my head.

There's a nice selection of take out dishes tucked away in the back, but this morning they were out of my beloved steamed banana, rice and coconut milk dumplings. There was mourning.

For the gadget fetishists among us, Thai Grocery's inventory is rounded out by a small selection of gear such as woks, rice steaming baskets for sticky rice and mortar/pestles.


Thai Grocery
5014 North Broadway
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 561-5345
One half block west of the Argyle red line stop.

Bacon: A Love Story

For the better part of my junior year of college, I was smitten with a young man who was a vegetarian. One evening as we sat in a diner studying over coffee I asked if ever missed eating meat, such as when the smell of bacon cooking wafted across a room. And he replied:

"Oh, yuck. Bacon is nasty."

Although he spurned my interest in favor of someone else, I should have known then and there that it would never work.

My veggie box recently contained collard greens, which made my heart sink when I first saw them. I like most kinds of greens, but a few years ago I was sharing a veggie subscription with friends and eventually had to drop out after an seemingly endless series of collard greens. They kept appearing week after week in the dark heart of winter. But after my initial dismay, I realized that I was using a flawed approach. I have discovered the correct attitude to have when faced with collard greens: they are an excuse to eat bacon.

My method for this was to chiffonade the greens and then sautée bacon until crispy. I pulled out the bacon bits to drain on a paper towel, added some finely chopped onion and (here's the kicker) braised the greens. In bacon fat.

I might be okay with collards showing up in the box again.

Book Review: Anthony Bourdain's Nasty Bits

Ever since figuring out how to decode the written word in first grade, I have been a reader. Obsessively so. Although I read quickly and widely, the reality is that I live in a smallish urban apartment and do not have the luxury of having space for a library. Over the past few years, my compromise position has been that I try to limit my book purchases to cookbooks and culinary topics and rely on Chicago's excellent library system to meet my fiction and non-fiction needs. On a semi-regular basis I'm going to periodically review recent reads.


First up: Anthony Bourdain's Nasty Bits. This was actually checked out rather than purchased since I have mixed feelings about Bourdain. I spent my college years and a chunk of grad school moonlighting as a waitress which meant Kitchen Confidential didn't seem all that revealing and abrasive machismo is most entertaining in limited doses. I read A Cook's Tour in the airport in Singapore after just having spent four and a half months covering a lot of the same territory that he writes about in SE Asia. I loved his enthusiasm for the food of Vietnam, which totally won be over but I read the chapter on Cambodia shaking my head and thinking "what a dumbass." Despite knowing that he can usually make me laugh and it would qualify as a purchasable food book, I pulled out the library card rather than shelling out for the hardback.

I actually liked most of it quite a bit. He shows more self reflection than in the early books that tempers the abrasiveness and several of the pieces raise some interesting questions about class and the changing roles for chefs. When he pulls out the bite, it is used to rally in defense of the immigrant workers that form the backbone of kitchen labor. Or in an essay attacking the silliness of the raw food movement, which earns my whole-hearted support.