Make your own ricotta!
Yesterday afternoon Mr. Pea and I made ricotta cheese using our kit from cheesemaking.com. It was even easier than the mozzarella and tasted about 400 times better than expensive, prepackaged ricotta. I still can’t believe how good it was. You start by pouring a gallon of milk (we used 2%) into a stainless steel pot, adding a little salt and some acid; you warm it up, using a thermometer to gauge temperature, to about 195*, stirring a lot; then you let it sit. You pull out the curds and place them into a cheesecloth-coated colander, and then hang the cheese to further drain. The longer you let it drain, the stronger the flavor, the denser the texture. Ours drained about an hour, and I’m still amazed at the texture and flavor. Our gallon of 2% yielded about a pound and a half of ricotta–whole milk will evidently yield between 1 3/4-2 pounds. Our favorite milk supplier, which carries inexpensive hormone-free milk from a local dairy, was closed, but considering ricotta–the 2 pound size–is usually $4 or $5, this is a steal.
What’s lovely about making ricotta is that you don’t need anything fancy to make it at all. We used powdered citric acid that came in our kit, but doing some googling yesterday, I came across a bunch of other recipes that use lemon juice, buttermilk, and vinegar. You should try it yourself. All you really need is a pot, thermometer, and some cheesecloth; you can find all those things at the grocery store in a pinch.
Here are some other recipes:
With buttermilk, at 101 Cookbooks
With lemon juice or vinegar, at about.com
and with heavy cream and milk, at Chowhound
And look what you can make with your lovely cheese…
Ricotta Pie with Pineapple, I think I love you. Like a fluffy, subtly flavored cheesecake, you are delicious, even if your crust is a bugger to make. Recipe here.
White pizza with asparagus and shiitake mushrooms
I came up with this pizza idea when pondering what to do with half a dozen asparagus stems left in the fridge from dinner a week or two ago. I thought that shiitake mushrooms, which have a lot of texture and a sorta meaty-ish flavor would compliment them. And I am very happy to report that I was dead on in my assessment, if I do say so myself.
I began by making this crust, as I quite often do, from Everybody Likes Sandwiches, though I use 1/4 c less water than Kickpleat does. The recipe makes two; I let it rise a bit, split it in half, popped half in the freezer, and pressed the other half out on an oiled baking sheet. Someday I’ll use my pizza stone.
In a skillet, I sauteed the half-dozen asparagus spears, cut into thirds, and some sliced shiitakes–maybe 6 of them? in just a little olive oil and salt and pepper. When they were just cooked I removed them and put 3 or so tablespoons of olive oil in the pan. I warmed this very gently. When it was warm I added three crushed and roughly chopped cloves of garlic. They simmered there for a bit–five minutes, maybe, you don’t want them to brown–and I turned the heat off. This gave me a flavorful garlic oil, which, once cooled a bit, I slathered, chunks of garlic and all, all over the dough.
Then I covered the oil with a mix of mozzarella and provolone cheeses, and topped it with the veggies. I popped this into the oven–set at 425-ish, as our oven can’t seem to maintain a temperature at all lately, let alone one that resembles the temp you select–for 12 minutes until golden and delicious. Yum!
Eggplant and tomato penne bake
Mr. Pea and I took a little road trip yesterday but were still back in time to make dinner. And granola. I’d picked up an eggplant last weekend at the grocery store with the intention of making eggplant parm, but I’ve got a bit of a cold and lack the energy to make anything elaborate. So I made this simple bake instead. You begin with a sauce and then toss with cooked penne, which you then cover with cheese and pop into the oven.
For the sauce:
1 medium eggplant, chopped into 1″ pieces
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
bit of water
pinch of basil
pinch of oregano
pinch of red pepper flakes
salt and pepper
1 28-oz can of tomatoes
1/4 c red wine
In a wide sauce pot, start by sauteeing the onion in 1 or 2 T of extra virgin olive oil over medium heat for a few minutes until translucent. Add garlic. Add eggplant, stir, and cover. It’ll likely want to stick, so adding some water and putting a lid on it helps the eggplant to release its own water and cook down. Add basil, oregano, salt and pepper. If eggplant sticks some, don’t worry. Add tomatoes, breaking them up with a wooden spoon. Use the juice of the tomatoes to work whatever’s stuck to the pot up. Add wine. This isn’t necessary but I had some old red on the counter in need of use. Bring to a simmer, reduce heat, and let cook about 20 minutes.
In the meantime, cook your penne. Toss half sauce with penne. Place in a baking dish. I put about 1/3-1/2 c of cheese–combined provolone and mozzarella–on top. Bake at about 350 or so for 15 minutes until cheese is melty. Serve with extra sauce, if desired. I froze what was left.
While eating this we thought it’d be good with some white beans mixed in. That would help add protein, too!
Food rules
While proctoring that midterm yesterday, I discussed eating and ecology via facebook with a cousin of mine. I brought up the idea of having Food Rules: some hard and fast things that, when shopping, you stick to but which can be forgiven when you go out to eat, as it’d be really hard to pursue. Though Mr. Pea and I don’t eat out a lot compared to many of our peers (we ate out on a weeknight this week and felt indulgent–then had lunch on the road today), we do like to try a variety of places, so, for example, the grass-finished beef burger place is one we can only frequent so often. Food rules, at any rate, would be good for my memory (I get confused with various reports on food, ecology, etc. routinely), my conscience, and help me make better decisions when overwhelmed at the store. And after reading in a couple of places (most notable, the New York Times) about the ways in which eating antibiotic filled meat make us more susceptible to diseases that resist antibiotics, I’ve decided to put that at the top of the list. So here we go.
1. All meats purchased must be free of unnecessary antibiotics and hormones. In an ideal world they’d all be happy, free-range animals once, but I can’t afford that just yet. I can compromise. Perdue, incidentally, does not use unnecessary antibiotics nor hormones in their chicken. Milk we already purchase free of those things. Ideally, we’d also find cheese, too, that’s hormone-free.
2. I will not buy vegetables conventionally grown nonlocally that are on the Dirty Dozen list. I say nonlocally because often local farms use sustainable methods, minor amounts of pesticide, and things like biodynamic farming but can’t afford organic certification. So this applies to the grocery store. Many veggies and fruits, especially this time of year, come from abroad. Most countries that sell us produce, from what I’ve heard, can use even more pesticides than American law permits as healthy. The dirty dozen includes: bell peppers, apples, cherries, imported grapes, nectarines, peaches, pears, raspberries and strawberries, celery, potatoes, and spinach. Currently we only make a point of buying organic apples; this week I made sure to get an organic pepper. From now on, once what we have is gone (ie, the sack of taters in the fridge), it’s all organic or locally grown.
4. Buy local milk. We buy ours from a CT dairy. Local dairies are really suffering right now for a variety of reasons, so supporting them means they’re happier and you get a fresher product.
5. Resist buying what I can make myself, especially at the grocery store. The cupcake from the bakery is ok, as that’s a little local business that needs support, and one shouldn’t have a dozen decadent cupcakes in the house, anyway. But mediocre cookies from Keebler? We haven’t bought those in ages, but sometimes crack under the pressure of grocery store apple pies when we’re feeling lazy.
I can’t think of anything else right now. I’m on day 4 of a mild cold and day 3 of my sleep being broken up multiple times by an eager cat, so I’m a bit zonked. Suggestions are always welcome!
Organic? Sustainable? Local? None of the above?
Food research makes my head spin. “Spoiled: Organic and Local is so 2008″ in this month’s Mother Jones really does a job of making me confused. It discusses the limits of strict local shopping and organic growing–the harm both might ultimately do–the size of carbon footprints–and offers some options which may or may not prove more sustainable to a global world. What can the average person do? Mostly nothing, though partly greater true sustainability comes from limited meat consumption. We only eat a moderate amount of meat every week, though last night we went to a steakhouse with a coupon and gorged. I’m sure it was pumped full of antibiotics and god knows what else, too, but sometimes, one gives in. I think I know of only one restaurant that uses grassfed beef in the area, anyway.
I’m sure there was once a day not terribly long ago where the rare trip to a steakhouse–as this one was for us–wasn’t necessarily a trip to the drugstore…
I really don’t have any coherent plan for this post, I’m just musing things over…
