I am rushing, rushing, rushing

Owen is master of the level.

I have to walk out the door in ten minutes -- Isabel is coming home! -- so forgive breathlessness and/or grammatical errors.

Lots of progress on the oven this past weekend. We made some mistakes along the way, but fixed them, and fixing the mistakes was extremely satisfying. I will have to say more later about how much I'm loving this project. It's been revelatory, a word I do not use casually.

where we left it

Back at it tomorrow, once I turn in my last work project of the summer.

As I've mentioned, we have a LOT of goat's milk these days. I've been turning it into chevre because cheese takes up less space than milk, But then we end up with these massive logs of cheese in the fridge --  4 or 5 pounds at a time -- and it weighs on my mind. I can not throw away chevre. But how to use up chevre before it molds?

Yesterday, I looked in my cookbooks and baked two chevre cheesecakes. I took them to Sunday dinner at my sister's. It was a showdown. I love showdowns.

Mario Batali's lemon goat cheesecake from The Babbo Cookbook vs. Kate Zuckerman's goat cheese cake from The Sweet Life. 

Both recipes had embellishments (glazes, a brittle to top the cake), but I omitted those. I just wanted to focus on the cakes themselves.

And?

Kate Zuckerman won. It was unaninmous. Mario's cake involved lots of lemon and had a dry, coarse texture. We would have probably loved it on its own, but Kate's cake was so silky and suave, with no lemon to interfere with the more subtle tang of goat cheese. I love tasting dishes side by side. It's the only way to truly determine which is better.

I can't remember which is which.

Neither was quite perfect, though. I resent a cheesecake that does not have a graham cracker crust. I will be perfecting my chevre cheesecake in the near future, and this will be my first fix. Now I really have to leave.

what Sunday dinner looks like

My indentured servant is back

My mom made that mushroom. 

Without meaning to, I took a vacation from the blog. I wasn't doing any cooking or cookbook reading and I got involved in a bunch of other projects and weeks slipped by.

I have not cooked since mid-June, when my kids went to New England to visit their grandparents. One night I put steaks in a skillet and turned on the stove to produce dinner for my husband and me. My husband looked at the steak on the plate and said, "No salad!"

No. Salad would have meant washing lettuce.

Here's what I've been doing instead of cooking:

Milking Natalie twice a day. Six quarts daily since her babies left. 

Making cheese with that milk. Have made camembert, taleggio, ricotta, chevre, a tomme that used up 16 quarts, St. Maure, and Neufchatel.

That gray matter isn't mold, it's ash, and the cheese is great.

I'm getting more confident, getting better, becoming less fearful about experimenting, less fearful about eating the cheese, although there have been a couple of cheeses so monstrous I wouldn't even feed them to the chickens.

Speaking of chickens, a raccoon killed Sally, the sole survivor from our first batch of Buff Orpington chicks. That was sad. A few nights later, the raccoon came back and tried to kill another chicken, but we ran outside with a flashlight and scared it off. The raccoon slithered over the fence and I went down into the muck and found the mangled bird.

sickbed

I nursed Sprite back to health, although she now staggers when she walks. Sprite used to lay eggs in our kitchen window box.

I don't ordinarily like impatiens, but these look like little roses.

Which has never looked better!

I've revived the garden in a big way. There are now tomatoes and squash, but mostly I just planted or transplanted perennials and citrus trees and vines. The irrigation is finally all in place so maybe this time everything won't die. I want some of the things I do around here to actually stick so I can be living in a functional and adult house by the time I qualify for AARP. No more overambitious plans and half-assed false starts.

With that in mind, I finally gave in and bought an Oriental rug. This sounds mundane, but it was a huge move for me. In buying this dirt-camouflaging Turkish carpet, I gave up once and for all the dream that I will ever live in an airy and darling home full of florals and charming vintage white furniture from the flea market. I wasted a lot of years on that pretty dream and it was a relief to let it go. I wish I'd never heard of you, Rachel Ashwell.

Now I just need to repaint.

The dark, complicated, quietly vibrant carpet replaces an insipid, totally filthy pink cotton rug which I had come to hate. I am so happy with this rug. I plan to die with this rug.

Owen came home a few days ago. It is good to have him back to help with the animals and also because he is nice. Not sure what or from what book, but tonight I am going to cook.

Quickly, for a change

We had Fran Gage's pork tamales from Bread and Chocolate for dinner last night and they were a little glitchy. I didn't get as many as she said I would, the masa dough was overly soft and difficult to manage, the wrapping instructions were a bit unclear. Plus: time-consuming. But the rich dark chili sauce -- I made it with anchos -- was incredible and I remembered as I ate them how much I love tamales. We all did. Empanada is good, but tamales are better. Sorry Spain. You should make tamales, but I would use a Rick Bayless recipe like this one. I haven't made this particular recipe, but I've cooked tamales from his books and they work beautifully. He is right to call for tying the tamales shut with a strip of corn husk.

For dessert: Gage's chocolate cherry tart. This just wasn't my thing. It was like Black Forest cake compressed into a tart and everything that is wrong with Black Forest cake was wrong with this. A big, sweet, crisp, cherry -- preferably a Bing, almost black in color -- is a mighty and perfect food, especially if it comes straight out of the refrigerator. Cooking weakens the cherry, leaches its flavor and texture, makes it stringy and watery and prune-like. And then you add dark chocolate? Dark chocolate is such bully and this is definitely not a fair fight.

That said, if you like Black Forest cake, you will probably like this tart.

On another subject, I threw away the goat reblochon this morning.

You can see the mold, but I will tell you that there is also slime.

However, the camemberts are looking lovely.

Up close they are soft and fuzzy, like cuddly little mammals.

Everlasting? This kitchen (and post) is &*#(% neverending

That's, I don't know, 50 sandwiches?

For relatively small animals, goats and chickens are very productive, and not just of babies. Relentlessly productive. I don't know what I would do if I had a cow except maybe jump off the roof. Quart by quart, the goat's milk accumulates, eventually making it hard to find space in the refrigerator for other things, like half a leftover Subway Veggie Delite sandwich or 5 pounds of Meyer lemons or caprine CDT vaccine or Chardonnay.

goat reblochon? we'll see

The other day, I got my act together and used all our milk to make cheese. High five! I made reblochon and ricotta. That took some time but cleared refrigerator space and eased my conscience. Will the reblochon age into real reblochon in our crawl space? Big laugh. First of all, real reblochon is made with cow's milk. Whatever. The milk is gone.

Now there's just the whey. The cheesemaking left behind a gallon of whey and whey makes the most incredible bread. A few years ago I tested this hunch scientifically by baking two batches of bagels, identical except that one contained whey, the other, water. In a blind tasting, everyone agreed that the whey bagels had more tang and flavor and aroma. You can not just pour whey down the drain.

such a burden

So to use up whey, I opened Bread and Chocolate and made another batch of Fran Gage's country wheat bread. I let the starter sit for 20 hours again and the bread was again fantastic. Since one recipe didn't get rid of much whey, I made her polenta bread (dense, excellent) at the same time, and let that starter sit for 20 hours too.

But there was still a lagoon of whey in the refrigerator. So I made bagels.

It's all about the presentation.

There was now a smaller lagoon of whey, but also three loaves of bread and ten bagels on the counter, plus the tail end of a previous loaf of bread which we hadn't quite finished. And you can't throw staling bread away.

The next day, I made french toast for breakfast, which I think of as a "jackpot" food, because it uses not just staling bread, but eggs.

And eggs, people, eggs are the mightiest challenge of all. We have 17 chickens. It is May. I give my sister a dozen eggs a week and my father takes six and a few weeks ago I gave my neighbor Joan 25 eggs that I discovered in a nest hidden in the ivy. They come from a single Blue Andalusian hen who values her privacy.

 means there aren't rats in the ivy

If you're thinking it was rude of me to foist weird not-so-fresh ivy eggs on Joan, don't. She knew where they came from and knew there was nothing wrong with them. Ivy keeps everything cool. Would a Burgundian housewife have declined unrefrigerated ivy eggs? Non. (This fun interview with Tamar Adler explains Burgundian housewife reference.)

Even though we give away eggs, I still have too many eggs. I judge recipes based on how many eggs they use up. For instance, I was disappointed that Fran Gage's Meyer lemon poundcake only used 2 eggs.

It would have been taller if I'd used a smaller pan.

And even though I don't love chocolate, I'm very stoked to make her chocolate pots de creme, which use 10 eggs. JACKPOT.

As of a day ago, the goat's milk was all gone and the whey was on the wane and we were down to 77 eggs. Maybe we had a bit too much bread and ricotta, but everything was momentarily under control.

Then I went outside and when I came back in I was carrying eleven eggs and a quart of warm goat's milk. Yesterday morning I brought in another quart of goat's milk and by the afternoon, seven more eggs. Last night, a pint of goat's milk. This morning, another quart. And in another week, Sparkles comes on line.

Last night, we had Fran Gage's ricotta gnocchi for dinner, which rid us of half of the goat's milk ricotta and 2 eggs.

dumplings soaked in butter

I also made Gage's salade Beaujolaise which I have always known and loved as frisee aux lardons. You may be familiar with this wonderful salad: curly, crunchy lettuce with cubes of bacon, croutons, vinaigrette, all of it topped with a poached egg, the yolk of which dresses the leaves.

I will make this again.

Jackpot recipe because it used up 2 slices of polenta bread and 3 poached eggs. For dessert, we had Gage's strawberry ice cream, which used 3 eggs and was delicious.

Occasionally I leave the kitchen. The other night, Owen and I went to a restaurant in San Francisco called Volcano that serves Japanese curry,  a genre of food we were unfamiliar with but loved instantly and very, very much. While Volcano had fast-food ambiance and prices, you could see people actually cooking and preparing food from scratch behind the counter and back in the kitchen.  Owen's fried calamari and shrimp were spectacular and I can't explain why except to say that they tasted "fresh," which is a useless adjective, but the only one I can come up with. The seafood was crispy. It wasn't at all oily. It was perfect. It tasted fresh.

Owen wanted me order the spiciest sauce -- "volcano" calibre --  on the pork katsu curry because he thinks that watching people eat spicy food is hilarious. He is 11. I obliged because I love spicy food. He taped me eating without telling me he had the camera on, which he also thinks is hilarious. Almost as hilarious as taking fish-eye photos that make people look bloated.

sidesplitting

I have never watched myself chewing nor wanted to, but I enjoyed this video because I now know that I eat just like my mom did. My grandmother eats that way as does my sister.

If it the video doesn't upload, I apologize. You're not missing much. Just the family way of chewing.

The katsu was fabulous but too fiery. If you ever have the opportunity, you should go to Volcano, but order your sauce "medium." After eating about a third of the katsu, sweat was pouring down my nose and I packed the rest of the meal into a box and when we got home I scraped it to the chickens who will convert it into eggs which will be used in Fran Gage's ricotta tartlets later this week.

To be continued. Endlessly.

Now you don't need to read that whole long New Yorker story!

the raw milk collection

When I'm feeling energetic and optimistic, I love having goats. Our cup runneth over, etc. When I'm feeling weary and blue, I hate having goats. Yesterday evening, the goats were yelling in the back yard, Natalie needed milking, Owen needed homework supervising, and I just wanted to sit on the sofa and shop for rugs on the internet because looking at our family room rug makes me want to cry. There is something about a really filthy rug. The main criteria for the new rug is that it not show dirt, no matter how dirty it actually is, which probably means Oriental. Owen kept asking, what's 12 times 13? and the goats kept yelling and I was so tired. The furtive hope crept into my head that maybe the neighbors will complain about the noisy goats and we'll be forced to get rid of them.

This morning, perish the thought! We've been letting them graze on the hillside right outside our front door and they are methodically eating down the invasive Scotch broom and blackberry brambles. It is strangely mesmerizing to watch goats forage, very peaceful. I can't really explain why, but I can watch them for hours.

We now have more goat's milk than I can use in flan and crema catalana and so the other day I made cheese. To produce this particular cheese, you sprinkle a pinch of culture over barely tepid milk (in our case raw; more on this momentarily) and then add some rennet. Let the pot of milk sit at room temperature for 24 hours, drain it for a few more hours, stir in some salt, refrigerate. You end up with a fluffy, snowy, spreadable dairy product, like whipped cream cheese, but tangier. If you've had Laura Chenel chevre, this is just like that, except fresher and better.

About the raw milk. I have not yet read the Dana Goodyear story because our New Yorker subscription lapsed, though I intend to find it at the library this afternoon. I do think people should be able to buy raw milk legally, although I would have no interest in ever doing so myself. I also think people should be able to buy marijuana legally, although . . .  oh wait. Perhaps a bad example.

Because we keep goats, we currently have a lot of raw milk on our hands. Stove-top pasteurization is an option, but seems like a nuisance given the pains we already take to sterilize the bucket, wash Natalie's udder with iodine, check the milk for impurities in a strip cup, strain it through a fine filter, immerse immediately in a bowl of ice, and so on. Why bother with those tedious steps if you're going to pasteurize the milk anyway?

One argument made by raw milk advocates: You treat the product with care from the very beginning and there's no need to boil the bejesus out of it.

This makes sense to me.

And yet, what exactly does it mean to "treat the product with care?" How clean is clean enough? I don't wear rubber gloves to milk. The polite word for the back yard, where we milk, is earthy. There are earthy flies and lots of earthy chickens squawking and scratching around. Or are flies and chickens just dirty? Natalie herself is extremely earthy. Sometimes a speck or two of of earthiness land in the milk. I strain it out. Fret. The fretting goes something like this:

Me: Oh, come on! A little fleck of dirt never hurt anyone. You're such a ninny. People drank raw milk for millennia before Louis Pasteur.

Me: And for millennia, people didn't live very long.

Me: You know as well as I do that most of them didn't die from drinking milk. Anyway, you live near a hospital.

Me: I would never forgive myself if something happened. Not to me, but to someone else.

Me: If you're just worried about other people, what's stopping YOU from eating the cheese? Even if you do get some bug, you'll probably kick it.

Me: That's true and the cheese does look awfully good. You know, you're right! This is stupid. I'm just going to eat the cheese. I'll be a guinea pig.

It was delicious cheese. A day passed and I felt fine. Then everyone in the family ate the cheese and everyone loved it and everyone is fine.

Upshot: We are going to continue with our current dairying practices, although we will not be offering raw goat cheese to pregnant women, small children, or my grandmother.

such a sad photo of really good bread and cheese

The bread in the photo above is the sour cream bread from Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet, an outstanding baking book. You should make this bread and you should also buy this book, but if you don't, the sour cream bread recipe is here

I would not suggest that you buy The Cuisines of Spain. I'm glad I checked it out from the library because while it's a solid compendium of traditional Spanish recipes, many very tasty, I've cooked nothing I would make again. Last night we had patatas a la Riojana which involved boiling onions, potatoes, greasy chorizo, and paprika together in a big pot of water.

all it takes to make a mediocre soup

Everyone liked this soup but me. I found it oily yet watery, which seems to be a hallmark of many Spanish soups.

no gracias

Goat kids are hard to photograph because they hop around so much, more like jackrabbits than  plodding farm animals. Not a great picture of Owen, but a fine portrait of Jack Frost.

the boys

Poulet au pie crust

Wednesday night I wrapped a whole chicken in "bread" dough (poulet au pain from Stir), except it wasn't really bread dough, it was pie dough. Flour + butter + water = pie dough, no? So cool! The chicken was completely sealed in dough when it went into the oven, but there must have been a breach because juices oozed forth to make a rich, salty, gooey sauce that was very delicious mopped from the bottom of the pan with shards of pastry. My husband said: "It's not as good as chicken a la king." I think he just said it because he wanted to be quoted on the blog. Even he couldn't believe it. This chicken was special.

I also creamed some spinach per Barbara Lynch's recipe. Creamed spinach should contain cream, of course, but should also be pureed or finely chopped -- creamed -- to minimize the distinction between solid spinach and liquid cream. This creamed spinach failed in that regard, but I am like Popeye in my fondness for spinach in all forms, save salad. Remember how Popeye would punch a hole in a can and pour it down his throat? That used to make me hungry.

Thursday night, it was just Owen and me and neither of us wanted much for dinner, so we ate homemade camembert on toast. The first bites of camembert were fantastic, but it got a bit stinky and intense towards the end. You need to pace yourself with the house camembert.

Making cheese

Those are blue cheeses I made last Thursday and decided to age in the refrigerator. Apparently, they're going to be late bloomers.

See this?

A chunk of the very same blue cheese that I decided to age in the "cave." This hussy is already wearing a tube top and watermelon lip gloss. She smells like blue cheese dressing; I have a feeling she's growing up too fast.

This is the cheese cave:

The temperature reads 64 degrees on a hot day and in the low fifties on a cold day -- overall, just a bit too warm for optimal cheese ripening. But I have limited refrigerator space and some of the cheeses -- camembert, cheddar -- have come out of the cave in spectacular condition.

I started making cheese after taking a Davis Co-op camembert workshop back in April and it's my favorite thing ever. If you have any interest at all -- even a flicker of interest -- you should try it. Don't be intimidated. Buy this book and order supplies from this guy. Take a class, if you can. Improvise your cheese molds using soup cans and strawberry baskets. It's harder than baking bread, but easier than stuffing sausage or decorating a cake and far more gratifying, at least to me. Watching a pinch of powder and a few drops of rennet effect transformations on a gallon of supermarket milk is the closest I've ever come to performing magic. I've been about 50% successful with the cheeses, which is 100% more successful than I'd expected.

No verdict yet on either the blue cheese or the Taleggio.

You wash down the rind of a Taleggio every few days with salt water to control the mold, but these babies have still been growing an awful lot of fur.

Chocolate chip cookie update coming soon.

Homemade camembert

Whether or not "my" first camembert will age into something edible remains to be seen, but the camembert workshop  I took yesterday at the Davis Co-op was the most fun I've had this April. You have to enter a lottery for these workshops, and if you live within a 3-hour drive and have any interest at all in cheesemaking, I recommend you do this. When I won the space in the camembert class, I thought, hmm, this should be absurd. Normal people can't make camembert.

Not so. The class was revelatory. We divided into small groups, each with a pot of milk to play with, and three hours and some very simple steps later, we left with our baby camemberts "molded" in small segments of plastic pipe. We also got to eat some of the camemberts made by our teachers who, admittedly, are not normal people, and they were incredible. I wanted to drive straight home and make more cheese.  

I let the camembert drain all night in its plastic pipe. This morning, secured in Tupperware, it went into the basement crawl space, which I suspect may not be cold enough. We shall see. Supposedly the refrigerator is perfectly okay, but I like the idea that our useless crawl space is actually an undiscovered cheese cave. 

I haven't cooked anything lately except this lovely apricot almond bread from Jim Lahey's My Bread, a book that hasn't let me down yet: 

The bread contains almond butter and quartered dried apricots and would be amazing with some camembert.

I'm going to start Ad Hoc at Home tomorrow. I'll do Big Sur Bakery after that.

Homemade Mozzarella

In all my cooking life, never such a triumph. 

About 6 months ago, I ordered the mozzarella "kit" -- some rennet, citric acid, and a dairy thermometer -- from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. I learned of this outfit, as of so many things fascinating and troublesome, from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

I put the "kit" (in quotes because it's not much of a kit) in the pantry. Time passed. Making mozzarella seemed overambitious, tiring, impossible.

Yesterday, looking for an after-school project that could be executed with an 8-year-old fan of How It's Made, I thought, whatever, mozzarella.

I wanted to do one of those excellent Pioneer Woman photo essays, but didn't quite pull it off. 

There are warnings about trying to use ultra-pasteurized milk to make cheese, so you start with a gallon of fancy milk:

I understand the irony of calling milk that has been minimally processed "fancy." I guess a better description would be "real." Or "real and expensive," because both are true and relevant. You can also use powdered milk, which I am going to try,  just to see how cheaply this can be done. 

 

You pour your "real and expensive" milk into a stainless steel pot, add a spoonful of citric acid. Heat to 90 degrees. Take off heat, stir in a tiny quantity of crushed rennet. Let rest five minutes and when you look again, you will have a large pot of  custard, which you cut (you don't take it out of the pot) into large, tofu-like squares.

 Heat and slowly stir, stir, stir. The large, soft, blobby curds will shrink into tight, firm little clusters.

When you drain off the whey, you will be left with a heavy, clotted mass.

Submerge this mass in a hot water bath for a minute or two. Really hot, so wear rubber gloves as you massage the cheese.

When you pull the cheese out of the bath, it will be bouncy and elastic.

You are now supposed to stretch it like taffy until it becomes shiny and supple,

Salt is meant to be incorporated at this stage, which I didn't quite figure out how to do correctly. But I did it, sort of, incorrectly. You then shape the cheese as you wish, and you are done. See mound of cheese at top of page.

This whole business took us about 45 minutes. I did not weigh the finished cheese, so I don't knowhow much we actually got, and how all this compares to the price of fresh mozzarella from the supermarket. I will calculate with my next batch.

And there will be a next batch. This cheese was one of the most incredible things I've ever made. Not just ever made, ever tasted. I happened to have a tub of Whole Foods mozzarella that I sampled side by side with homemade. I used to love this WF cheese, but by comparison with ours, this was mushy and flabby and stale. I wanted to throw it to the chickens.  I have been ruined for storebought mozzarella, and you could be too. Proceed with caution.

So many more thoughts on this, but I have to go fill lunch boxes.  

The Sweet Life in Paris: Cooking fish is hard, fromage blanc is easy

In the recent comments (thank-you very much!) there were a lot of votes for tackling the fromage blanc souffle from David Lebovitz's Sweet Life in Paris. I've never actually tasted fromage blanc and given your accounts of its tastiness and scarcity, decided to see if it would be hard to make at home. 

It isn't. I tried Emeril's recipe, the first one that popped up on the search engine, and it took about 10 minutes of so-called "active" time. You slowly heat milk with buttermilk and lemon juice until curds form, drain off the whey, and there's your cheese. It doesn't differ all that much from homemade ricotta, except it was smoother and slightly more delicious, maybe because I added the optional cream. I always add the optional cream, a personality trait and perhaps a problem. Tomorrow night: fromage blanc souffle.

I also baked Lebovitz's lemon-glazed madeleines, the recipe for which is here. 

Pretty. Lebovitz's innovation is to "swathe" each madeleine in a "puckery" lemon glaze to ensure that they are as moist as the madeleines at his favorite Paris bakery. I haven't actually tasted one yet, am trying to wait until after lunch.

In other news, I've decided it's silly to rush through the remaining dishes I want to try from Paris. Like, what's going to happen if I don't keep to a schedule? I'm going to have to fire myself? So I'm going to start cooking from the next book tomorrow -- Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen -- and we'll just have a few days of overlap. Vietnamese entrees, French desserts.

Also, this interesting story by Joel Stein made me want to buy both the books he mentions and brew some cherry bounce. 

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Soon we will purchase a loom

Isabel, the cheesemaker. 

Now I just need to acquire a cow, and she can become a milkmaid.

Here's a crazy fact: miniature dairy goats are legal in Seattle -- yes, Seattle, where they invented coffee -- but not in my own backwater suburb. Is it not wrong that one can own three slavering, barking Rottweilers, but not a pair of tiny, bleating ungulates who trim back the fire hazard brush, fertilize the earth, and provide both milk and old-fashioned chores for 21st century children?

Well, obviously it is wrong.  

Back to the cheese. This was our second outing with Mark Bittman's ricotta. This time we made it with Straus organic whole milk, as opposed to supermarket 1%. Definitely softer and creamier, and again the flavor was vastly superior to the ricotta you can buy. Last week we did a side-by-side tasting with a tub I bought at Whole Foods and there was no comparison. Fresh homemade cheese is hard to beat.

Here's how you make ricotta, in my own words, based on the Bittman formula:

1. Slowly bring to a boil 1/2 gallon of milk (preferably whole), stirring constantly. Slowness and stirring are important because it will save you from having to scour scorched milk off the bottom of the pot, an ordeal that could turn you off ricotta making forever.

2. When the milk starts to rise up in the pot as if it's going to overflow, pour in 2 cups of buttermilk. Take off heat. Stir. Add a pinch of salt. 

3. The cheese will separate into curds and yellowish whey within 30 seconds or so. Let it get nice and clumpy. Pour into a strainer that you have lined with cheesecloth or a piece of clean white pillowcase.

4. Let the whey drain away gradually. You will have roughly 3 cups of excellent cheese to use in lasagna or ravioli or cake.