Some people just can't hold their whey

Our shmear casse came out great, in my opinion, although I'm waiting to hear what my grandmother has to say about it. It was so easy and so tasty, I'm wondering why everyone doesn't do this! You could totally make a half batch, too, if you didn't want to use it all.

What have we done with it? Tonight, I made a savory tart (which reminds me, I think Americans should emulate our British cousins and start calling people "tarts") with moroccan spiced chicken, orange tomatoes, andouille sausage, provolone, shmear casse and zucchini.

I have to say, I'm thinking of this mammoth squash we're still eating at as the Loaves and Fishes Zucchini. It doesn't matter how many times we cut and cook. It could feed a frat house for a year and still have more to go. I'm not generally given to blasphemy, and please excuse this next bit, but perhaps there weren't loaves and fishes after all. Maybe the neighbors just saw an opportunity and took it. They all ran for the left over zucchini people had in their gardens and just kept dumping it on the crowd. "Haven't we gotten to the end of the zucchini yet? Where did this come from?" "Uh..... nowhere! It was a miracle! I certainly didn't nip around to my house to get it. It must've been that guy up there!" The food stuff switch came later, when they were actually printing the Bibles. Never ending Zucchini doesn't sound nearly as poetic as Loaves and Fishes. It was changed in editing. Blame it on Guetenberg.

Back to the tart. I blind baked the crust, a store bought thin pizza crust in a tube. It has a great buttery richness but bakes to a cracker like crunch. I think it's Pillsbury. Anyway, my tip for the dough is don't let it sit for ten minutes in a hot kitchen, or it will melt the fat in the dough and you will not be able to unroll it. Instead, you will stretch and rip it, leaving you with an ugly crust with yawning rents and bloated edges. It will still taste awesome.

I drizzled a little olive oil then sprinkled the shmear casse. I should have had a heavier hand with this, because whenever I ate the finished tart, the bites with extra creamy, sweet, dairylicious ooze were my favorites. Next came zucchini slices, wafer thin and flash grilled to take the raw off but not add char. On top of these were thin slices of orange tomato. Most yellow and orange varieties are low acid, which is something you don't know you need until you have it. Raw red tomatoes, while wonderful, can be a bit overpowering in the mouth. The juice of these is more mellow, less assertive, and more reminiscent (to me, at least) of water than juice. An eau de vie, if you will.

But I digress. Over the tomatoes, I layered slices of chicken, which I had previously spiced with a moroccan blend and grilled. I sliced on the bias, the way they do to present meat in fancy restaurants, which means you're not trying to slice long tissue strands of chicken with your teeth just taking a bite. Much less messy. Also pretty. I studded the tart with slices of chicken andouille sausage, a last minute addition when I came across one lonely wurst in my freezer and decided to give it a home in this meal. I grilled it first as well.

Provolone topped the whole shebang and into the oven it went. It may not have started pretty, but it sure looked good coming out. The moment of biting into the tart was only slightly marred by my remembering I had forgotten to put fresh herbs on it. It was still good.

(It is at this point in a letter where I might sign my name, then do a P.S.. Blogs don't work that way, but let it be known that was an ending sentence and the following is, technically, a post script.)

Ah, wait. I forgot to address the blog post title. Well, it's like this. When you need a couple mint oreos to round out your evening and the only milk in the house is whole milk for your baby, and you've been drinking skim milk since you were 8, and besides you're not going to steal your baby's milk, and oreos just aren't all they can be without being dunked until soft and just about to disintegrate, and you realize that you do have a jar of left over whey from when you made cheese a couple days ago... well, you might just decide to taste it. And you might decide that, actually, it tastes like slightly sweet skim milk. So you might decide to go with it. It's also possible that you would be watching the Pirates game at the same time, and that you'd be a bit tired and punchy, so strange phrases would come from you, causing fits of nonsensical giggles.

It would be at this point that your Darling Husband would tell you that you're cut off, and mutter, "Some people just can't hold their whey."

Magically delicious

I am lucky to be able to say my husband loves to cook, does a good job, and can even clean up after himself. Darling Husband called on his way home from work and offered to stop at the store and make dinner. Actually, he offered to make dinner magically appear without me having to think of anything, prep for it, cook it or anything.

Ladies, I ask you, how many of your husbands would do this? And not bring home takeout?

Darling Husband made chicken picatta, thin breast of chicken pan seared in a lemon caper shallot sauce. With a side of linguine, tossed in the pan sauce. Mmmmmmmmmm!!!!! The chicken was moist and wonderful, the sauce was tangy and yet well rounded, the capers were little bursts of salty flavor and the pasta was the perfect vehicle.

Bravo, honeybear!

As an after thought, capers always remind me of steak tartare my mom made when I was a kid. She used to serve it with doritos and plain tortilla chips. Now that's comfort food, baby.

More veggie tales, plus exciting developments

Baby Girl, Darling Husband and I had planned to have a picnic at the peninsula this evening, but threatening clouds and the fall out from Baby Girl's 12 month check up today (four shots!) changed our plans. Instead, we had a picnic in the back yard. Hot dogs, pasta salad and grilled zucchini for us, club crackers and yogurt melts for Baby Girl. She'd already eaten her green beans while we were prepping the zucchini. She could be brave only so long.

Did you notice I said zucchini? Yes, loyal readers, we're still hacking away at the behemoth vegetable Darling Husband gleefully carted home from his office. Tonight we lopped off four large rounds, brushed them with jerk sauce and grilled them. That darned squash easily has three more meals left on it. This is, btw, left over jerk from the batch I made for my Build a Better Burger submission (more on that momentarily). The habanero really had time to build the heat--it was much hotter a sauce than it was before!

Unfortunately, the humidity is so high today that Baby Girl's crackers were turning soggy just sitting out. My mint oreo did the same, just in the span of a half hour. Sheesh!

You may have noticed my hit counter at the bottom of the blog now. I finally figured out how to put one in (thanks for tech support from Darling Husband!) and just in time, because there may be a few new visitors here for a bit. If you scroll back a few posts, you'll see that the Sutter Home blogger contacted me and asked if I'd allow them to link to my blog about prepping my burger recipe... turns out I'm the only one they featured in quite this way! They're soliciting stories and used mine to prime the pump, so to speak. I am very honored and excited. We're celebrating with a bottle of Sutter Home tomorrow night... I'm thinking Gewürztraminer.

If you're stumbling on this blog and haven't been here before, I encourage you to leave me a comment! I love comments, no matter if they're from people I see every day or people I've never met. It makes me feel part of a larger community.

Food Network chose wrong

I think they picked the wrong person to be the Next Food Network Star. I don't have anything against Melissa, but Jeffrey had a passion for food and a talent for explaining things that I really loved. His pilot was all about taking a new ingredient and finding uses for it. Love it!! He inspired me to try harissa, and I was really disappointed that 1) they didn't choose him and therefore I won't have cool new things to try each week and 2) Wegman's doesn't carry harissa.

Damn. Going to have to order it online.

Good luck, Melissa. I don't really need you to tell me how to pan sear chicken, and I worry that a half hour with you will be saccharine overkill, but as a person I relate to you and your babies are cute. (Four girls under the age of five. She deserves a medal!)

I do think Food Network should give Jeffrey his own show anyway.

Ale braised beef

With my chopped ingredients (as you recall, cane sugar, spare ribs, cellophane noodles, fava beans, white balsamic vinegar) I made a dinner with elements that worked and ones that fell flat.

I braised the ribs in Sam Adam's Summer Ale, having first seared them and added onions, garlic and golden cherries. Very little can go wrong when you start this way. When the meat was finished, I removed them and reduced the sauce with a bit of cane sugar grated in with the back of a vegetable peeler to achieve a kind of glaze. It worked. :o)

The fava beans were a bit intimidating, having read that they can be poisonous raw. I shelled them and boiled them, then removed their outer casing (as one might an edemame). I added them to some boiled, rustically smash cut potatoes and doused with the vinegar. I was going for a sort of pub "chips" taste.

Four ingredients thus out of the way, this left only the cellophane noodles. Have you ever seen the footage of dropping these in hot oil and they puff up immediately like someone's pulled the string on an emergency lifeboat? Yeah, it doesn't actually work. I looked it up ahead of time and used a thermometer, even. I achieved semi-success with soaking the noodles first, but even this wasn't right. I had intended it to be a garnish. Fortunately, I had saved out about a third of the package. I put these straight into the sauce from the beef to cook that way.

The meal worked. The meat was tender, although another hour would've been perfect. The sauce had all melded and married, so much so that eating a bit of cherry just tasted like the meaty goodness of the whole. The beans and potatoes were tasty and comforting. All in all, a qualified success.

My curds and whey

Tonight Darling Husband and I made shmear casse, or a fresh, farmer style cheese. Various people/recipes call it cottage cheese, queso blanco, ricotta and farmer cheese. I think regardless of what you call it, it's pretty darn cool.

True ricotta, actually, isn't technically a cheese at all. It's made from the whey left over from making, for example, mozzarella. It's name means re-cooked.

To make this cheese, we brought a gallon of whole milk up to 180 degrees, then stirred in 1/4 cup of vinegar. We let this cook, stirring, for 15 minutes while it curdled. Then we lined a colander with paper towels (because we had no luck at WalMart finding cheesecloth) and allowed it to strain out the curds from the whey. I kept looking about for spiders, but none were up on their literary cue.

What were we left with? We'll both find out tomorrow. My father said his grandfather's final step was to hang it above the sink to drip. Ours is dripping into a big pot, because surely there's a use for the whey. I hear there's a Portuguese soup made from it, but I don't know for what our whey is destined.

I'm holding off on making plans for my cheese until I see it and taste it. Will it be more like cottage cheese or more like queso blanco? Will it melt? Hmmm... I don't even know how much it will make. I'm planning on sharing some with my father no matter how much it makes, but I'm curious if I should be planning an appetizer application or plan to have left overs.

My turn! Dinner challenge...

Darling Husband has just presented me with Chopped ingredients (yes, we still do this, but it's a pain in the tuckus to blog about regularly. We manage about once every other week).

Fava beans
Boneless spare ribs
White balsamic vinegar
Cellophane noodles
Cane sugar (as in a big, hard block of brown stuff)

I'm thinking I need to use the balsamic as a finishing flavor, the noodles as texture, and I'd better braise the ribs for tenderness. I have some ideas brewing but I'm going to be coy and not share them just yet. You'll have to wait for the big unveil.

Incidentally, I just researched fava beans quickly and found that they can be fatal to certain people if eaten raw! Oh my! Those who take MAO inhibitors shouldn't eat them. (who knew?)And that some people use them instead of viagra. Also, in Egypt, the national dish is steamed and mashed fava with spices and garlic, served with bread. This is usually a breakfast food.

Food for thought. Of course, you could just eat it with liver and a nice chianti...