Moro yogurt vs. Brown Cow

On the left is homemade yogurt with strawberry jam. What's on the right was marked down at Whole Foods this week.

Although I make yogurt all the time, I've hesitated to send a child to school with homemade yogurt in a canning jar because I worried it might be embarrassing, like going to school in a dress made from a flour sack. But Owen, who is a 9-year-old ecofreak, loved the idea. I questioned whether, for all his scruples, he would find strawberry jam an acceptable substitute for "fruit-at-the-bottom." He did. Amazing. It has really bugged me to make great yogurt and then feed the kids expensive and mediocre single-serving cartons of Dannon/Yoplait/Brown Cow just because they're pre-sweetened and portable. Non-serious problem now solved.

As for the yogurt itself, I used the Moro recipe, which is much fussier than my go-to recipe in Anne Mendelson's Milk. 

 

Mendelson's recipe involves heating milk and cooling it, adding a few spoonfuls of "starter" yogurt then putting the mixture somewhere warm to sit overnight.  In the morning, you strain the yogurt for a few hours to thicken. It's like Greek yogurt, and it's fabulous. (This is virtually identical to Mendelson's formula, and if you've never made yogurt, you should try it.)

The Moro recipe calls for boiling milk until it reduces by a third, which takes a while, then adding cream. You cool this decadent mixture, stir in your starter, and put it somewhere warm to sit overnight. It is also fabulous, perhaps slightly more fabulous than Mendelson's yogurt, if not fabulous enough to merit the extra effort. It is also extremely fattening.

 

Still, I count this yogurt as one more reason to love the Moro cookbook.

In other news, I finally got around to reading Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Not for everyone, this best-selling mystery, as it is lurid, grisly, intricately (some might say "implausibly") plotted, and overpopulated with sadistic Swedish sex maniacs. I never wanted it to end. Have now embarked on the sequel instead of taking down the Christmas tree. There are times when serial killers are better companions than sentimental Christmas ornaments, though I really do need to take down that tree. 

A Homemade Life: still living vicariously

My in-laws are visiting from Boston and they have now eaten two Molly Wizenberg-driven meals.

Saturday night: an innocuous chana masala*(Indian chickpea stew) that I served with some Indian accoutrements, most notably the banana raita out of Anne Mendelson's Milk. I have no idea what made this raita so special (the 1/2 teaspoon of cumin? the supersweet, bordering-on-blackened bananas?) but it was very special. For dessert: Wizenberg's fabulous macaroons (so moist they're almost juicy -- like the inside of a Mounds bar -- the recipe is printed here) accompanied by dishes of black pepper ice cream.

The ice cream gave me pause. It occurred to me that black pepper ice cream could be perceived as a hostile gesture by visitors on their first night in town. Food is so loaded and symbolic maybe it would be better to go with, you know, strawberry.

But to thine own self be true and all that. If I'd served strawberry ice cream it would have been completely phony, and then what would the message be? I served the pepper ice cream. And while it was strange, it was also delicious, the dusty pepper kind of sneaking up on you towards the end. I don't think I'll make it again, but it turned out to be a delightful experiment and David and Mary are still speaking to me.

Last night, we had Wizenberg's lovely fennel and Asian pear salad, in which I substituted some Manchego for Parmesan. Just pristine layers of thinly sliced crispy fruit, vegetable, and cheese lightly dressed in lemon and olive oil. You feel like eating a salad like this is a spa treatment.

This was not true of  Doron's meatballs made with turkey, pine nuts, raisins, cilantro along with the more pedestrian meatball components, like egg and breadcrumbs. Served these fatty, delectable little numbers with a lemony Middle Eastern-ish yogurt sauce. As always, in my fear of undercooking meatballs I overcooked them so they all had a thick dark crust. Still excellent. Also, blurry.

I hate it when all I can think of to do is list the food I've cooked, but this morning, that is all I can think of to do. We finished with chocolate glazed chocolate cupcakes. They were likened to Ho-Ho's by those who enjoy chocolate, which was everyone at the table but me. I made the chocolate cupcakes as penance for the black pepper ice cream, but actually eating them would have been martyrdom. Sometimes, I feel so alone. 

*This is Wizenberg's now-husband Brandon's "recipe." Except, he doesn't use a recipe, he cooks by ear, and this is her attempt to capture his formula on paper. She encourages the cook to tweak to taste, which I did. A lot. The dish still never quite came together.

Milk: The long overdue earnest summation

Anne Mendelson got me started making yogurt and mascarpone; she pointed the way to success with scalloped potatoes and taught me how to make better paneer; her panna cotta recipe is easy and hard to beat. All this comes in the context of an authoritative, opinionated, and riveting history of milk in which every thought is fully developed and crisply (sometimes haughtily) expressed. Is Milk something a casual cook needs? No, but if you're even slightly interested in learning more about dairy products, you should own this book. 

The recipes tend to be basic and impeccable, often borrowed (with credit) from other sources. I have no problem with this; I'd rather have terrific second-hand recipes than a bunch of original recipes only some of which are actually delicious. 

I made 19 recipes out of Milk:

Worth the price of the book: 3

Great: 9

Good: 2

So-so: 4

Flat-out bad: 1

Milk struck a chord with me. There are things you try and you just know you're never going to get all that into them. I suspect I'm missing the sausage-making gene and I may not be cut out for apiculture. But when I started playing with milk, I thought: when can we get a cow?

(Answer: never.)

Are they drinks or are they dessert?

Technically, two of them are drinks, albeit drinks that require lots of chewing. The third is a pudding. 

Except when it comes to chicks I'm not a whim shopper, but yesterday at the New May Wah Market I was admiring, as always, the Vietnamese drink/desserts they sell in translucent plastic cups. Went for it. My father came to dinner and we had a tasting. 

From left to right, our thoughts: 

-Pink drink was filled with long, crunchy, translucent "noodles," juicy pearls of fuschia-colored tapioca, and mung beans. Sauce was sweet and milky. Fabulous.

-Green drink contained soft, translucent forest-green "noodles" -- they resemble spaetzle --  and kidney beans. Sauce was the same as with pink but with a different dye. Also fabulous.

-The tan dessert was a firm, astringent and slightly salty tapioca and banana pudding sprinkled with roasted peanuts. Our least favorite by far.

 

What's wonderful about the pink and green drinks is that they are

a. refreshing, cool, and thirst-quenching but also substantial.

b. playful and pretty

 

c. textural. There are items slippery, crunchy, creamy, liquid, and grainy all together in one glass. Or dish. I know this isn't to everyone's taste, but why not?

I spent some time at the New May Wah trying to find "oliang" coffee mix (it contains roasted corn kernels, sesame seeds and soybeans) to make the Thai iced coffee recipe in Anne Mendelson's Milk. Failed. Apparently a coffee "sock" is also required. I could just order the whole kit right here, but that takes away the fun. 

 

Milk: Unfriendly chocolate pudding

I prefer a dessert that is too sweet to one that is not sweet enough. Anne Mendelson's old-fashioned chocolate pudding calls for 2 cups milk, 2 squares unsweetened chocolate, and 1/3 cup sugar. It was incredibly, almost inedibly, austere. For comparison, I looked at my 1946 Joy of Cooking, which also contains a recipe for chocolate pudding. This one calls for 2 cups milk, 1 ounce chocolate and  1/2 cup sugar. Very sensible! More sugar, less chocolate, almost certainly a milder, tastier pudding.

What is with our weird national obsession with ever darker, harsher chocolate? It's ruining all the desserts! You know what's a good way to eat chocolate? In a malted. Or in a Hershey's bar. Or in a thin layer coating the coconut in an Almond Joy. I'd sooner eat a bowl of boiled cabbage than a big hunk of fancy bittersweet chocolate.

UPDATE: Actually, I'm all wrong. I just saw a copy of the ancient Fannie Farmer cookbook from which Mendelson took her severe chocolate pudding recipe. It is exactly the same. I guess my theory is a bust; people were already going for the extra-dark chocolate in 1948. Maybe it really is just me.

The kids are back

To quote the charming food writer and mediocre novelist Laurie Colwin: "Did people create families in order to keep themselves from wondering what the purpose of life was? With children it was a snap. Children were a purpose, and generally there was so much to do in their behalf that you might never stop to think at all."

I can handle the existential stress, but it's definitely restful to be picking up Star Wars figurines and mixing pancake batter after a week of somberly contemplating the horizon. What will I do when my purposes go to college? Is that why I ordered the bees? Why did I order the freaking bees?

Budget matters: 

On 4/15 Mark spent $11 at the supermarket on bread, lunch, etc.

Yesterday, after collecting the kids at the airport we went to Champa Garden, a Laotian restaurant in Oakland, and spent $55.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and haven't been already, you must, must, must go to Champa Garden. Order the sampler appetizer plate, a dish that stopped all conversation for ten minutes while we devoured every last crumb of rice ball salad, sausage, and spring roll. The kids must have been starving because they didn't stop eating long enough to complain that they don't like "Chinese" food. Champa Garden is in a funky neighborhood and looks like a converted corner liquor shop or laundromat, but of course that made it all the more exciting. We staggered out of there stuffed and very happy because of the fantastic food and because we're all together again. Honeymoon should last until noon today.  

Going forward: Two more nights of cooking from Fat and Milk to wrap up and use the caul fat, then I'm going to start Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen.

Milk & Fat: We had a feast and then we watched some TV

That's my mom feeding the meat into the stuffer, that's her friend Kathy easing it into the casing. Sausage was trickier than any of us had anticipated and I sense we made many errors, but it was nonetheless exciting and gratifying. The sausages -- Jennifer McLagan's lamb, red wine and rosemary sausages out of Fat -- turned out beautifully. They were leaner and more finely ground than what you buy at the market, lacking the discrete globules of fat I have come to expect, and/but were very tasty.

Making sausage definitely brings to mind indelicate subjects. Not just one, several. You can imagine, and I will let you.

The rest of the dinner was fantastic. I broke my scalloped potatoes losing streak with the help of Anne Mendelson's elegant and precise recipe. What was I doing wrong all those years? They are so easy.

I can't praise Mendelson's book Milk highly enough. Her crisply written history of dairying, which includes the most sensible analysis of the current raw milk controversy that I've encountered, is riveting. The recipes are all for simple dishes, but they have so far proven flawless.

For vegetable: McLagan's double butter salad. You make the dressing by melting butter until it begins to brown, add cider vinegar and salt, then pour it over some butter lettuce. Tastes like butter, but also like salad, and is delicious.

And for dessert: McLagan's choux paste beignets -- cream puff dough spiked with Pastis (or Pernod), fried in lard, and dusted with fennel-flavored sugar.* Served with hot chocolate. 

After this, the ladies went home and the children and I retired to the sofa for two episodes of Friday Night Lights. The longstanding Wednesday night DVD tradition (it began when Mark took the Wednesday night shift) may seem questionable because we stay up too late and watch shows with "mature" content. But Isabel and Owen fight so much the rest of the time, this seems to be the only way the three of us can enjoy ourselves together. It's a happy shared ritual and that feels important, more important than bedtime or going to our separate rooms to read worthy books. Plus, FNL: awesome.

*Put sugar and fennel seeds in a spice grinder until powdery 

Milk: There's a lesson in this

The scones were great, the clotted cream disgusting. It's all my fault because I got greedy.

I followed Anne Mendelson's recipe to the painstaking letter until the crucial last step. To make clotted cream, first you mix together cream and milk and let it sit for a day in a cool room. Then you heat it very slowly on the lowest possible flame of your stove. The cream gradually forms a beautiful, wrinkled, golden crust atop the milk and after four hours, during which time it must not boil, you put the whole pot in the refrigerator for at least eight more hours.

This morning, I carefully lifted off the crust, which is the clotted cream. It was lovely and buttery and smooth. I put it in a bowl. Then I noticed the milk below was filled with lumps. More cream! I carefully scooped those into the bowl on top of the cream. I actually thought: Anne Mendelson might have MENTIONED in her recipe that the milk is filled with lumps of cream. Silly lady.

I should have known better, because as far as I can tell, Mendelson is perfect. Finally, I tasted one of the clumps and it was flabby and grainy, like faintly sour, curdled milk. But by this time it had contaminated all the cream, which I could not retrieve, or even find, when I poked around in the bowl. I tried to eat it anyway, but ugh. 

Fat: I'll just have a little of the white meat

I like pork belly. I used to love it, but have cooled as time passes because, like foie gras, it always makes me feel a little sick. Why? Superrich. Once a year is about right, and Cheong Liew's braised pork belly out of Jennifer McLagan's Fat did nicely for 2009. 

You start with the raw belly (which I always buy at a Chinese supermarket where you can get it for less than $2 a pound*) and marinate overnight in soy sauce, wine, spices, and tangerine peel.

Then you braise for 1 or 2 hours, ending up with tidbits of mahogany brown meat clinging to hefty chunks of succulent, velvety fat, all of it cloaked in an extremely delicious salty-sweet sauce. 

 

I served this last night with some long beans, rice, and green onion pancakes, also from a McLagan recipe. Big success.

For dessert: lemon tart out of Anne Mendelson's Milk. Like all her recipes, it was simple, elegant, and impeccable. A tart tart was definitely called for at the end of a pork belly dinner. Sorbet would have been even better, but I didn't have my thinking cap on.

 

*Warning: There's the chance that a Chinese butcher will give you the belly with skin attached, which is good, but also with nipples, which is disconcerting. This happened to me once and I won't say I didn't wince when it came time to carve everything up. But we need reminders of where food comes from, however macabre. 

Milk: Yogurt v. yogurt v. yogurt

Do Americans fail to appreciate plain yogurt because commercial plain yogurt is so vile? Or is commercial plain yogurt so vile because nobody really cares? 

I've been making a lot of yogurt lately using Anne Mendelson's super-easy recipe from Milk, and decided to run a test.  I made one batch of yogurt with standard nonorganic whole milk and another with Straus unhomogenized organic milk, a local brand. Full disclosure: I am deeply attached to Straus, which comes in old-fashioned bottles with the cream on top and is incredibly expensive. I need any reason to justify buying it.

Interesting, watching the two milks heat in pans side by side as the supermarket milk was the shocking white of Elmer's glue while the Straus milk was a light buttery yellow.

My father came over shortly after the yogurt was finished, and we did a blind test. His answers were exactly the same as mine. Next to homemade yogurt, the commercial yogurt -- and this was a decent brand, Brown Cow -- was thin, sour, and basically lousy. The other two were almost identical, thick, creamy, and sweet-tart. There was a tiny bit more flavor to the Straus yogurt, but you really had to concentrate to detect it. 

I can no longer justify Straus milk for yogurt making. But I do think that if you want to appreciate yogurt qua yogurt, you need to make your own. It's vastly better. On the other hand, if all you're going to do is put it in a cake or biscuits making yogurt is a waste of valuable time you could spend watching Gossip Girl or reading a good book.

Milk: Chicken dinner

  My chicken in milk didn't look like the Kitchn's (above.)  It was slovenly and piebald and both wings fell off. Tasted good, though I will probably go back to roasting for purposes of simplicity and spiffy presentation.

The accompanying barley-and-whey pilaf from Anne Mendelson's recipe was just the kind of rib-sticking porridge you imagine people eating at a creepy inn in a Dickens novel. I mean that in a nice way! But it's not something I'm gonna make very often or ever again, particularly as my offspring were unenthusiastic. Whey's highest and best use is probably in bread dough. 

Although. Do I know that? It could be my imagination that all breads and bagels taste better when made with whey. A side-by-side bakeoff is called for but, man, so much work and who do I think I am, Christopher Kimball?

Milk: I want a cow more than ever

Too tired to structure a narrative, so: 

-Whole Foods charges $6.50 for an eight-ounce tub of mascarpone, but you can make it in your very own kitchen using the simple recipe in Anne Mendelson's Milk and it will set you back just over $3. It's a fascinating and empowering process, making mascarpone, a dairy product I had always assumed you had to be either rich or Italian to keep in your fridge. Incorrect. Here are some other mascarpone recipes, in case you don't want to buy Milk. (Though you should because it's brilliant.) Aside from Lynne Rossetto Kasper's unbelievable semifreddo, I don't currently have many uses for mascarpone but it is so delicious I'm going to find some. 

-Mendelson's saag paneer is vastly better than Mark Bittman's slapdash recipe, reinforcing my theory that he's an admirable generalist but whenever possible you should refer to a specialist.

-Why can my neighbors have a screeching leaf blower and we can't have a cow? Alright, I get why we can't have a cow, but why not two mini La Mancha goats? Is bleating anywhere near as irritating as a leaf blower?

-We're having this chicken for dinner which is from neither of my current cookbooks, but sounded so incredible I had to change plans. Also: barley pilaf cooked in whey from Anne Mendelson's recipe. After an hour on the stove it resembles gruel but tastes like risotto. 

-I've been neglecting Fat, but have a full-Fat meal planned for tomorrow that includes carnitas, refried beans, and brown-butter ice cream.  

Fat & Milk: Thin is the new impossible

Eating hot french fries showered in salt at your own kitchen table is an ecstatic experience, especially if you allow yourself fries as seldom as I do. A dish of mayonnaise would have made it even better, but I like to be able to see my feet when I look down. 

I fried half the potatoes in lard, which is what Jennifer McLagan recommends in Fat, the other half in peanut oil, then asked the kids to do a blind taste test. 

Owen declared himself a fan of the fries on the left (lard) while Isabel and Juliet preferred the fries on the right (peanut oil.) I wanted to back the lard, but have to side with the girls. Though it wasn't in any way offensive, lard (this lard, anyway) contributes a faint flavor to a fry that I am at a loss to describe. It's just there. I'm sure oil has a flavor too, but we've come to believe, perhaps wrongly, that oil is just the flavor of french fries.

Hardly matters. All fries disappeared in fifteen minutes, lard and peanut oil versions both. No one bothered with subtle distinctions.

I also served mango "milkshake" which was actually mango lassi made from Anne Mendelson's Milk. Like all mango lassis I've made (which is to say, one, thirteen years ago) this one involved blending yogurt, fresh mango, ice, and a little sugar. Delicious. I probably oversold the drink by promising "milkshakes" but 2/3 of the children present ended up drinking all their lassi. This was the vegetable course.

The shortbread: good, but too soft. I've put it back in the oven this morning to see if it can toast up a little bit. Maybe a wedge before spin class?

Speaking of traditionally-built women, this is very exciting.

Milk & Fat: The children have spoken . . .

and we want french fries. Mark is out of town, in Florida, the bum. So we're eating like they did in Mermaids 'cause women only cook balanced to show off for men. Once the master departs the premises, the nutritional gatekeeper takes a break. Why is that? 

Tonight we're having: mango "milkshakes"* (made from Anne Mendelson's Milk), homemade french fries and shortbread (both cooked out of Jennifer McLagan's Fat.) I was leaning toward McLagan's salted caramel tart, the photo of which is one of the loveliest things I've ever laid eyes on, but Isabel was adamant about shortbread.

Gonna cook some of the fries in oil and some in lard, for comparison purposes. I wish I had some duck fat. (Owen just read this over my shoulder and said, "Well, I'm glad you DON'T have duck fat.") 

 

It's one of those mornings when I feel so lazy I almost want to let him stay home so I don't have to get dressed and drive to the elementary school. Have considered going in my robe, but then how will I ever attract a mate? Oh, wait. . . forgot myself for a moment. Sorry, Mark.

*there's a trick, but I'm not telling until tomorrow when the "shakes" have been drunk.

Milk: Panna cotta

The picture, ugh. Sorry. It was fantastic and really beautiful, trust me. Panna cotta, like puff pastry, is one of those desserts with an undeserved reputation for extravagance. We should all be making panna cotta all the time until the recession/depression ends because it tastes luxurious and isn't. Even using the most expensive local organic milk and cream (Straus), the ingredients to make six servings cost me $4.39. That's roughly 75 cents for a dessert they sell for $12 at glitzy big city restaurants. It'll be plated prettier and gussied up and someone else will do the dishes, but the panna cotta itself won't be any better. Impossible.

 

Panna Cotta (adapted from Anne Mendelson's Milk)

1. Lightly oil 6 ramekins using a neutral-flavored oil.

2. Put 1 envelope of gelatin in a saucepan and stir in 1 cup milk, 2 cups heavy cream (preferably not ultra-pasteurized), 2/3 cup sugar, and a pinch of salt. Bring just to a boil and remove from heat. Cool slightly. Stir again. Pour into the ramekins and chill until set.

 

3. When you're ready to eat, bring a saucepan of water to a simmer, dip the bottom of each ramekin in the water for a few seconds. Run a knife around the edge of the cream, invert on a dessert plate, and shake until it comes loose. Serve with a fruit sauce.*

See how easy? 

*I cooked down some frozen strawberries with water and sugar, then mashed it all up, hence inelegant photograph. Tasted wonderful.

Fat & Milk: Food processing

I rendered an 8-pound behemoth of lard on Friday, a peaceful & pleasant all-day process that yielded more than a gallon of liquid pig fat the color of butterscotch. Immensely satisfying, pouring all that lard into little white tubs, labeling and sticking in the freezer. I've rendered lard before, but never this much, and never such expensive (ergo good? I hope? please?) lard. 

What to do with all that pedigreed fat I've no idea, but will figure out. Meanwhile, I put aside a tiny bit to make the lovely, fragile lard pastry from Jennifer McLagan's Fat, which I used for the buttermilk pie out of Anne Mendelson's Milk. The whole thing (see above) was delectable and handsome and, for once, handsomely photographed.

This morning: bagels and cream cheese.

Made the bagels, made the cream cheese. The chewy bagels are baked from the outstanding recipe in Bernard Clayton's Book of Breads. This is the second batch of the week, and I've never made anything more popular with finical children and spouse. I'm not Jewish, I'm not from New York City, and the perfect bagel is not my Lost Chord (that would be the Maddox spoon roll) so I don't claim authority. But I have eaten thousands of bagels over the years, and never encountered any as good as these. More about bagel-making in a future post.

The cream cheese, concocted from Milk, was not so fabulous. You warm up milk, cream, and a little buttermilk, add a crushed rennet tablet (as in Junket) and let sit in a quiet corner for a day where it will ripen into something with the texture of sour cream. You pour this into a cheesecloth-lined sieve, tie the cloth up around the ball of semisolid dairy product, hang it over the sieve to drain for a few hours, then top with weights or heavy cans to press out the remaining whey (which you can use to make incredible bread. . . or bagels.) Sounds complicated, isn't. The resulting "cream cheese" is loose and tart, more suited to topping a baked potato than a bagel. I might try again making some slight alterations. Or not. 

Fat & Milk: Lovin' both of you is breaking all the rules

Though I remain fully committed to cooking through Fat (see how beautiful?) I've lately become obsessed with Anne Mendelson's Milk (see how elegant?)

In my spare moments I sit at the dining room table trying not to think about certain unthinkable subjects by reading one fine cookbook, then switching to the other. I really want to buy a sausage grinder so I can make chorizo. . . gosh, look at this, a recipe for mascarpone. . . mmm, slow-roasted pork belly. . . with panna cotta for dessert? 

Anyway, I've decided to do both books. They make a great pair -- sharp, single-subject books by women who wear glasses. Just like me! Plus, they complement each other, as McLagan is short on enticing desserts once you depart the butter section (though apparently there's bacon baklava in my future) while Mendelson isn't as strong on entrees. 

So, that's the new plan.

 

A question: While it's nice to live in a world where people can choose "Torn Between Two Lovers" as their ring tone, can you imagine ANY scenario where that would be a smart choice?