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Cheese

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Day Seven


And now to go with our homemade yogurt: granola!

I just started making granola recently after discovering I had been scammed into paying $5-7 a bag for the good stuff when it's super easy and cheap to make it at home.

The beauty of granola is that it's one of food's blank canvases. Once you've got the primary ingredients (oats, a little oil or butter, and maple syrup or sugar) you can add pretty much anything you have in your kitchen or looks yummy while shopping the bulk bins.

I got my original recipe from Joy of Baking: http://www.joyofbaking.com/breakfast/HomemadeGranola.html

The basic recipe:

3 cups rolled oats. I recommend thick cut.
3/4 cup nuts
1 cup seeds. I've been using sesame and flax, sometimes pumpkin.
1/2-3/4 cup dried coconut (optional)
1/2 tsp spice, such as cinnamon or ginger
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp canola oil or melted butter
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 cup dried fruit


In a few short words, preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit, mix the dry ingredients, save the dried fruit-you'll add that after the baking, together in a medium bowl. In a smaller bowl mix the wet ingredients. Pour the wet over the dry and mix well.

So far, pretty easy. But wait, it gets even easier!

Spread your unbaked granola on parchment lined baking sheets (do this and you won't even have to wash them when you're done) and bake for 30-45 minutes. It'll keep crisping after it's out of the oven, so stop just short of where you want it.


Once the granola has cooled, add your dried fruit and mix. Store in an airtight container.

Holy crap that was easy.

FYI: Today I used macadamia nuts, dried papaya and pineapple in my recipe.

I had to bust up the nuts a little as they were a little too big. Plastic bag worked best, but I had to focus my mallet on one nut at a time. Sounds much more Sadistic than it was.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Day Six

Day six actually took place last night. Over six hours. One more six and we're in trouble.

Adam and I spent the evening making our first batch of home-brewed beer. It still has a second fermentation and a few weeks to go before we can taste the outcome. But I've posted pictures here of the first of the two processes.

While I could explain the whole process it's probably best that you go here: http://www.sanfranciscobrewcraft.com/articles.asp?ID=132 or take a trip to Brewmasters in San Francisco, http://www.sanfranciscobrewcraft.com. They are very helpful there: don't let the speed metal deter you. They are also apparently experiencing a recession-based uptick in business. I guess more time on your hands + more worries - money = homebrew. Although I'm not really sure if this is saving us any money. Maybe if we make a lot of beer over a long period of time.

The first process did take us six hours plus, so make sure you have the time. Most of that is passive so you also want a book or a movie. And preferably someone with you on the first go as it just seemed easier to have physical/moral support.

Here we go:

Dumping the grain into the cheesecloth bag...


Grain soup...

For some reason you dunk the grain bag 7-10 before removing...

Beer soup. The house now smells like the Molson Brewery of my youth...

Another beer making mystery: spa time.

Add the sweet, yeasty malt...

Some other stuff...

After boiling for 45 minutes the brew cools in an ice bath...

"Pitching" the yeast...
Now more brew...

And we have our first fermentation. We'll be back in six days with part two!

Friday, March 13, 2009

Day Five, Part Two

Now for something happier! Hollandaise! Just in time for the weekend. And I can feed 3-4 people Eggs Benedict for the same price as feeding just me at a restaurant.

Hollandaise, as it turns out is not as tricky as everyone says. The real trick I found it timing everything right so you have nice smooth sauce, warm crispy English muffins, and hot running egg yolks all at the same time.

This Hollandaise recipe has worked well for me in the past, so I'm using it again here. http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/recipe_hollandaise.htm

Here are the ingredients:

2 tbls warm lemon juice (about one lemon)
3 tbls boiling water
3 large egg yokes
1 stick unsalted butter
1/4 tps cayenne
1/2 tps salt

For the rest of the Benedict:

English muffins (I tried the fancy, fluffy ones once and it didn't taste as good as just regular old EMs.)
eggs (I serve two per person.)
cheddar (I like to put a little sharp cheddar on the muffins while they are toasting, but it's optional.)
prosciutto or smoked salmon (Again, optional. I serve one with and one without on each plate.)

Here we go:

One of the tricks I've found to Hollandaise is to have all of my ingredients ready to go. So I start by getting my double boiler ready. Again, the inside pot is not to touch the boiling water below. I get my eggs out, I start my kettle for the boiling water, I'm melting the stick of butter on another burner, the lemon juice is warming in the microwave, my cayenne and salt are measured and ready to be thrown in at the very end.


Same goes for the other Benedict ingredients. My EMs are separated and cheesed, the prosciutto is out of the fridge, the broiler is on, a medium pot of water with a little white vinegar is boiling on my remaining burner.

Back to the sauce: yokes go into the double boiler bowl. I whisk until they are starting to thicken. One at a time I pour in the three tablespoons of boiling water. Again with the whisking. It's not thickening very quickly so I throw the eggs in for poaching and by the time I am done the sauce is beginning to thicken again. Then I add the lemon juice and remove it from the heat.



I throw the muffins into the broiler for browning. (I usually set the timer for this kind of thing as I frequently forget to check on the broiler until I smell burning.) Returning to the sauce, I pour in the butter while whisking. Then the salt. Then the cayenne. And we have Hollandaise! Now quickly back to the broiler to check on the muffins, then quickly back to the eggs. I remove the eggs from the pot with a slotted spoon, place them carefully onto a plate lined with paper towel (to soak off the water), and season with salt and pepper.

Muffins are out from the oven. One of each pair gets a slice of prosciutto. They both get an egg. Then big dollops of special sauce and we have brunch success!

Day Five

Get ready: there are two posts coming at ya today. The first is chicken. Yes, just chicken.

Yesterday Adam and I visited our farmer friend Ken. Ken's a real 'live off the land' kinda guy and as such was preparing to slaughter some of his roosters for dinner. (Did you know that most of the chicken we eat is actually rooster? Because hens are used for egg laying. Of course! It just had never occurred to me...)

I can see I'm already making you squirm at the idea that this issue of Homemade will involve chicken slaughter. And squirm you should. I promise only to show the least gory of the pictures I took and to explain a little of why I'm even posting this entry.

While watching and participating in the slaughter and butcher of chickens didn't make me a vegetarian (well, maybe for the last 24 hours), it did certainly give me a new found respect for where meat comes from. It was very clear yesterday that an animal was killed so that I would have meat to eat. I have never really had qualms with eating meat as I have long felt secure about my place, as a human, in the food chain. I also believe in becoming more personally involved in producing the food I eat and limiting our store-bought meat to that from farms employing humane and sustainable practices. And that is why we were at Ken's farm yesterday.

Yesterday really drove home to me the idea that our relationship with animals is sacred, and that things like monster burgers, cheap meat, and daily doses of bacon are signs of a cultural addiction to and total lack of respect for meat and the animals that provide it. Today, to be honest, I still feel a bit traumatized from killing those chickens. In fact, we had to put our chicken in the freezer because I can't yet bring myself to prepare it, even though my renewed sense of the sacred is telling me that I'm verging on the wasteful.

Here are some of the images from yesterday's endeavour:

Adam looking clean and happy as Iron Chef of the chicken slaughter.

You know what these are for.

Farmer Ken. Everyone is still smiling at this point.

Putting the chickens momentarily in a paper bag calmed them down so we could tie up their legs.
This is where is gets ugly...

Dunking the dead chicken in hot water makes the feathers easier to pluck.

I was primarily on plucking duty.

Removing interior parts...
...including the testicles.

Cleaned and cooling chickens.

A more palatable scene...Ken's hens have begun laying eggs.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Day Four


On today's menu: Lima Bean Skordalia.

I had never heard of it either until I worked at the cheese counter at The Pasta Shop in Berkeley, CA. This dip was one of my favorite things there.

Generally when I say the word 'dip' bad things come to mind: Ruffles potato chips, lactose intolerance, football.... But this one is totally legitimate, perfect to serve to vegetarians and carnivores alike, and was super simple to make. So today I'm trying to replicate it at home 'cause The Pasta Shop is 50 minutes away and a 1/2 pint of the green stuff is $5. The recipe below will yield twice as much for about $6.50, depending on the quality of olive oil you use.

I found this recipe at Epicurious.com: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Grilled-Lamb-with-Lima-Bean-Skordalia-2063

What's needed:

20 minutes & approximately $6.50 for the dip

1 pack frozen Lima beans
3/4 - 1 cup olive oil (I am using Extra Virgin, but a lighter one would work well too)
3 cloves garlic
juice from 1/2 lemon
salt to taste

colorful veggies




I start by steaming the Lima beans for approximately 12 minutes. Once they are tender I throw them into a Cuisinart. Now both the recipe and the instructions on the back of the package mention nothing about removing the bean skins, so since this seems like an 8.5 on the scale of tedium I puree with the skins on. I add the garlic, about a cup of olive oil, and the lemon juice. I taste, then add salt, then puree some more.

I end up with a pretty thick dip, but the addition of more olive oil or even a touch of water might make it a less mashed potato-like consistency. But it is good. Really good.

Vibrantly colored veggies look amazing next to the bright green dip. I use pink and red radishes, those multi-colored carrots sometime available at the farmer's market, yellow and orange bell peppers, etc.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Day Three


Today we make ravioli. I have a few successful dinner parties under my belt and rarely does any meal go over better than fresh pasta. It sounds hard and tedious, but here are a few reasons to try it: 1. fresh pasta tastes better 2. it has that homemade/made with love look and feel 3. it makes your guest believe they are in the midst of a true gourmand even though making it is more Play-doh than Michelangelo 3.5. It's a cheap, but luxurious way to feed small group.

We started making homemade pasta for dinner parties about a year ago. I brought home a pasta maker then promptly elected Adam (the b-friend) as the house pasta maker. We (the royal we) use a pasta maker to achieve a thinner noodle. You can certainly roll the pasta out as thin as you can and this is very satisfying; I did it in Italy, once. But remember we are trying to get the pasta thin. The noodles will bulk up while cooking. In any case, as with any recipe, I try on myself before trying/inflicting it on friends.

Ok, so ravioli. We need:

1.5 hours (maybe more our first time out) and approximately $7 (including filling, but not sauce)

3 eggs
2.5 cups of flour

Filling

We're going with a simple stuffing of ricotta. I borrowed from this recipe from Teresa DeSantis: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/the-best-of/homemade-ravioli-with-ricotta-cheese-filling-recipe/index.html. You can fill your ravioli with whatever you like, our main purpose here is to take on the challenge of the pasta and then to see how we make them into little packets.

We're making a basic egg pasta recipe, but the dough can be made with or without eggs (substituting water and olive oil). Once you've got the dough, it can be made into any type of pasta you so desire. (Maltagliati--badly cut-- is a nice one: just take your knife to the dough and cut away.)

Ok, ok, here we go. I think we'll tell this story mostly photographically. When we first start mixing it, it really doesn't look wet enough. We sprinkled it with a little water so it became more like a hard dough. (I wouldn't just add more water from the get-go because it can easily become too wet.) Basically don't get discouraged: at every step of the way it looked like we were doing it wrong. The dough we end up with looks like dry clay. Once we have the dough we leave it uncovered (though you can cover it with a damp towel) for 15 minutes. The moisture content in important and tricky, so keep an eye on it.


To get started we separate the ball into five hunks then pound the dough into a paddle shape. When we run it though the roller, things get tricky. The important thing to remember is to start with the widest setting and go down one notch at time. The dough comes out with holes in it. Again, we're thinking we screwed it up; but again, this is normal--or if not normal does still lead us to good pasta in the end.

We take two holey sheets and run them through together. When we want a longer sheet we shove one sheet in before the first is finished to get them to stick together. In the end we want nice long sheets without holes. This is all we ask!

Once we have a hole-less sheet we put it back through the pasta maker one setting thinner. When they are too long to manage, we cut them in half. We go all the way down to setting one, the thinnest. We end up with six long rectangles.

We baste the dough with egg wash (or water), place dollops of ricotta filling every inch and a half (but it can be bigger or larger), then fold over the dough, and crimp between the dollops to squish out the air creating a 1/4" crimp between raviolis, and finally crimp the front (Adam uses scrap molding, but I'm sure there are more hygienic methods available). To cut them we use a pie edger, to beautify our ravioli.


Note: about six ravioli into the process we realized that we had skipped the step of draining the ricotta (it looked pretty dry to us, but what do we know). We were getting soggy ravioli. I highly recommend squeezing the ricotta through cheesecloth.


Our dinner party isn't until tonight so we store the ravioli on a parchment lined baking sheet in the fridge.