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Cheese is the new wine: Capra Goat Cheese with Honey
Now, in my house, I am the cheese person. I’m the one who stands at the cheese counter looking equally perplexed and enraptured, deciding on cheeses a quarter-pound at a time, and then I bring them home and pick away at them over the course of a couple days. My husband and kid will sometimes try the cheeses I bring home (usually at my insistence), but otherwise, I’m King of the Cheese around here.
When I took this goat cheese with honey out of the fridge yesterday afternoon, I made my usual offer to everyone besides me: “Here, have a bite; you might like it.”
Within 20 minutes, I was looking at this:
“I love this cheese!” said my kid.
My husband agreed, saying, “I think I might be in love with this cheese.”
What did I think? Well…
Imagine an incredibly good cheesecake filling — honey-sweet, very rich, with a nice goat-milky tang. Could you eat gobs of it on its own? Then this cheese is for you. It was not, however, for me. The sweetness got to be too much for me after more than a bite or two and I surrendered the rest to those who liked it more.
Ingredients: Pasteurized goat milk, starter culture, rennet, salt, honey.
Country of origin: Belgium.
Aged: “Only a few weeks.”
Price: $8.99/lb. at Fairway.
Final verdict: Good, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.
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Beatles or Elvis? Lemonade or limeade?
I am a deeply committed limeade person. I don’t dislike lemonade, but it’s just… missing something that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s too sour or maybe it’s missing the sort of floral note from the lime zest, but whatever it is, I love limeade.
And I love this limeade best of all…
Based almost entirely on this recipe from Red Bird Crafts, this is possibly the most perfect limeade ever. Why? Because it’s a syrup, which solves two limeade problems for me. 1. I like my limeade pretty strong but my husband and kid like it more dilute, so this allows us all to customize our limeade. 2. This makes a lot of limeade without taking up a huge amount of space in the fridge.
The recipe:
1 c. water
2 c. sugar
8-10 limes, juiced
zest from 2 limes
pinch of saltBring water, sugar and lime zest to a boil and let simmer for 5-7 minutes.
Strain, if desired. Add sugar solution to lime juice. Let cool.
Add 2-4 tablespoons syrup to 12 ounces ice water (or as desired).
A few notes on limes:
The juiciest limes have smooth, thin skins and are heavy for their size. If they’re a little yellow, that’s fine.
In order to get the most juice possible from a lime (or any citrus fruit), juice them with a wooden citrus reamer. Plastic and metal reamers slide around, but wooden ones have a nice amount of grip to get all the juice out.
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Not exactly about food, but still pretty great.
I am a compulsive recycler. If something can possibly be used again, by god, I have to at least try — and if it keeps me from having to buy something new, I am equally delighted by my ingenuity and my single-handed environment-savingness.
At the same time, I also really love a good household purge. When you live with another adult and a kid (as well as three cats) in less than 650 square feet, there is really no room for anything you not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
So, what happens when you have something still beautiful but not useful? For example, what to do with a shirt that shrunk in the wash just enough to be too small on my husband while still too big for me?
Recycle it and make it into something beautiful, like so:
More photos and details behind the jump… -
Greenmarket Grub: Millport Dairy
Every week, I go to my Greenmarket with a $20. I could easily spend more, but my desire for buying things like leafy greens often outpaces my desire to cook said leafy greens in a timely manner. So, I set a $20 spending cap to feel slightly less bad when I’m throwing out slimy, wilted food.
Despite their name, Millport Dairy are my go-to egg folks. They’re pretty standard pastured farm-raised eggs, which is to say, lovely; incredibly fresh, with thick whites and amazing, lurid yolks. We’ve been going through a dozen a week — especially impressive for a family that often lets lesser eggs sit around until they go bad — so $4 a week is always earmarked for their eggs.
A couple weeks ago, I hadn’t been cooking much and still had almost an entire dozen eggs in the fridge. Determined to spend my entire $20, I took the $4 for eggs and picked up a jar of Millport Dairy’s bread and butter pickles instead (again, still not a dairy product). I was a little put off by $4 for a pint jar of plain old pickles, but I figured it’s still cheaper than Rick’s Picks which are $7 or more a jar (although to be fair, they are really quite good).
I can’t even describe how much restraint it takes for me to not just stand in the open fridge door and scarf these pickles straight out of the jar. As you can see, they’re sliced paper thin, with bits of onion and sweet red pepper, making them a bit more condiment than regular pickle, but they’re a perfect blend of sweet and sour and just the right amount of crunch.
Naturally, I went back the next week and bought more — habonero dill this time.
I’m on the fence about these.
Eaten on their own, they’re crisp, slightly sweet but more sour, and OH SWEET FANCY JESUS MY MOUTH IS ON FIRE AAAAAARGH. I’m not a spicy food sissy, but these are hot. Hot hot. They were quite good tucked under a cheeseburger but I don’t know what else I can do with these beside eat them until my lips swell up.
Millport Dairy also sells cheeses, some meat products, and another six or seven different kinds of pickles (including beets, which are my favorite), so it’s pretty safe to assume you’ll be hearing more about them before Greenmarket season is over.
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Greenmarket Grub: Chioggia Beets
Chioggia beets (also called Candy Cane, Candystripe, or Bull’s Eye) are an Italian heirloom variety, named for the Italian city of Chioggia, near Venice, and were introduced to the US around 1840. One of the sweetest varieties of beets — with an 8% sugar content — they lose their distinctive coloring when boiled, although roasting them supposedly helps keep their rings.
How crazy looking is that second beet? I was cutting off a piece of skin I’d missed while peeling and it ended up with that fractal effect.
Those beets came from Migliorelli Farm — one of the only farms I know by name, because their fruit and produce is so consistently good. It also doesn’t hurt that they make fantastic cinnamon-sugar cider donuts.
I couldn’t bear to have these beets lose their fun rings, so I shredded them with my all-time favorite kitchen gadget, the Borner mandoline, along with a couple of Granny Smith apples and some carrots, to make this:
I’m calling it ABC Slaw (for Apples, Beets, Carrots, not Already Been Chewed) and it’s really simply dressed with just olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt and pepper. One caveat: it’s best when it’s eaten right away. Otherwise, the beets’ earthiness starts to overpower the other elements and the whole thing starts to taste like, well, earth.
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Cheese is the new wine: Cambozola Gourmet Cream Cheese
As I sat down to type in the ingredients of this cheese, I realized this should have been my first clue: nine ingredients? Even the cheese spread I reviewed only had six.
I really wanted to like this Cambozola cream cheese. It’s made by Champignon, a name I actually recognized. I like most blue cheeses and I would probably eat a clod of dirt if there was enough cream cheese on it. This should have been a win-win here. But no.
So, what happened?
Ever order blue cheese dressing in a less-than-upscale restaurant? Cheap blue cheese has this… tang to it. Not a good tanginess, but a sort of sweaty-gym-sock-plus-metallic aftertaste, right?
I tried this cheese on a burger, on a sandwich, on its own, and I kept coming back to the cheap blue cheese dressing comparison. Worse, the more of it I ate, the more I thought, you know, I bet this is what spoiled cream cheese tastes like.
The best thing I can about this cheese? At least it was only a buck.
Ingredients: Pasteurized cream, blue cheese (pasteurized milk, salt, microbial rennet, cheese cultures, penicillium roqueforti), yogurt (pasteurized milk, yogurt cultures), milk protein, cellulose gum, salt, stabilizer (carrageenan, locust bean gum), citric acid, traces of dextrose.
Country of origin: Germany.
Aged: Unknown.
Price: $0.99 for 2.86 oz. at Fairway.
Final verdict: Pass. -
I made pizza! It was easy! And it didn’t suck!
A couple of years ago, we were living in Massachusetts and squirreling every dime in the hopes of moving to New York. The pizza delivery guy was a distant, dim memory from the days of frivolous purchases like take-out, cable TV, or new underwear. Desperate for pizza, I labored over a batch of dough, then wrestled it into a pizza-like shape and attempted to be generous (but not foolhardy) with the cheese.
Before setting it in the oven, I did not think to check the broiler for, say, a piece of foil I’d left in there the night before. Which, naturally, caught on fire. Smoke billowed out of the oven. The pizza dough I sweated over, now gray and speckled with ash, slid unceremoniously into the trash.
Since then, the notion of making pizza has consistently been met with one thought: fuck that noise.
I don’t know why I decided to make pizza dough again, but wow, I am so glad I did. This recipe from The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen is so unbelievably simple — the dough came together in less than 10 minutes in the food processor. I topped it with Swiss chard, red onions, tomatoes and goat cheese, which was… okay. A little bland, honestly, but the crust was terrific. In the oven for about 15 minutes at 450 degrees, then a little olive oil brushed on the crust once it was done. Super easy! And good!