Homemade Cheese and Gnudi

Last week, while waiting for my duck to cure (yes, it is like watching a pot boil), I made cheese. I made a whole milk cheese, using organic milk and breaking it with lemon juice (slowly bring milk to a rolling boil, add lemon juice, strain with cheesecloth) and a goat cheese. The goat cheese was far tastier. I broke that with rice vinegar (because the only vinegars I had were that and balsamic), to add a sweetness to the goat-y stink, but the sweetness wasn’t really present. The goat cheese was delightfully light and faintly goatish, and was perfect for spreading on toast or baguettes. The milk cheese was less so. It was a little chalky in texture, and not very flavorful. I chose not to salt it because it was already so chalky, but then it was also bland.

The only thing I had come up with for it was that it was quite tasty replacing the mozzarella in a caprese salad, especially since the dry cheese absorbed so much balsamic dressing. Then it hit me, I could make little gnudi-gnocchi things! And I did!

Here they are, sauteed with salt, pepper and rosemary in brown butter.

I have no real recipe for these, I went by feel. I used what was left of the cheese (probably 2/3 of the original output of a carton of milk) added one egg, then added flour until it had a pasta dough like texture.

I broke off small pieces from this, rolling them out the way you made a snake out of playdough back in the day, then cutting that up into gnocchi size pieces. Then I dropped them all into boiling water, pulling them out as they floated to the top. That was it. It was so quick, so easy and amazingly delicious.

Un Chivo Delicioso: Goat Chilaquiles–kind of

I should have taken pictures, but my camera was out of battery, and really, there was no good angle. My goat chilaquile casserole, as I’ve decided to call it, looked like any baked cheese lasagna type thing from first glance. I could have taken a picture after I sliced it, but it looked as good as it tasted–like a goopy messy, drippy delicious pile of everything wonderful. Unfortunately, these things don’t translate well to photography. They look good to anyone in the vicinity, but I wouldn’t enter it in an art contest. There was melty baked cheese everywhere, thick homemade tortillas bathing in rich goat and roasted pepper stew and just thicker than runny egg yolks shining sunnily from the whole mess.

Chilaquiles are a traditional mexican brunch dish involving left over tortillas deep fried and layere with beans and cheese and sometimes eggs. I love chilaquiles, but am trying to be a little bit healthier, so I decided to do this a bit more like a casserole, and as a dinner dish.

I made the entire thing in a 9×6 lasagna pan, which was the perfect size. I put down a layer of homemade tortillas, one of goat stew, then cheese (queso fresco, of course). On top of this I cracked 2 eggs. Then layered more tortillas, more cheese, more goat. Then more tortillas and cheese on the top. Baked this for twenty minutes at 450 degrees. When it came out of the oven, I sprinkled it with a layer of cilantro.

A few things: Most any part of this could have been bought, I chose to make it all except the queso fresco myself, but that is because I like making tortillas and goat stew. The only thing I would say to not substitute is the queso fresco. It is simply the only cheese that fits here and is the most authentic (and delicious, but that is personal opinion).

Handmade tortillas: I used two cups of Maseca (corn flour) and one and a half of water, and a liberal sprinkling of salt. Mash this all together with your hands until it is one giant ball. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and grab out about a one inch ball of dough. Many recipes will tell you to roll it out between two sheets of plastic (which has never worked out for me) or to use a tortilla press (and I don’t got one of those). I use the authentic method, and reccomend you do too, because for this, it was great to have the slightly thicker, smaller sized tortillas. Smash your ball of dough flat between both hands. Then, using a slapping motion, smack your palms together, but with your fingers from one hand making a right angle to the other hand (if this confuses you, put down the dough, put your hands together like a prayer position, then, keeping the palms touching, rotate one hand 90 degrees towards you, this is how it should be when you slap them). Slap the dough back and forth between your hands until it gets bigger than your plams (at this point, if you keep going you will get dough everywhere). layer the tortillas on a plate, keep them from sticking using plastic wrap. To cook the tortillas, simply heat a skillet, dry, and leave them on each side until they just begin to brown.

 Goat stew: I made my stew with roasted peppers, since I don’t like tomatos. I used a 12oz jar of fire roasted red and yellow peppers (thank you trader joes). I blended these with a small can of diced jalapenos and half a cup of chicken stock. I poured this into the lasagna pan that I later cooked the whole thing in, then added about a pound of goat meat. I left this in a 325 degree oven for 2.5 hours. I took it out, fished all the goat out and let it cool. I took out all the bones from the goat and chopped it all up real small, then added it back to the stew, which I put over a low flame while I made the tortillas. At the last minute, I added half a sauteed white onion, one chopped fresh jalapeno and a bunch of chopped scallions.

Seahawks and Salsa: El Tajin on Broadway: (11/13/07)

All I asked for was decent food and a TV to watch the Seahawks play some Monday Night Football. By decent food I meant anything besides pub grub. Usually my go to method here is the ID, but after 45 minutes of driving around looking for parking (No diehard seattlite would pay for parking), I hightailed it to Broadway, where I found myself in the bar half of the brand new El Tajin Mexican restaurant.

I won’t declare Mexican food saved in Seattle, but let me tell you, this place is getting it on that track. This is not La Carta de Oaxaca high falutin’ small plates, this is some truck stop Mexican food, and I was impressed. The TV played the Seahawks game and the water never let my bottles of Sol get low, nor the BF’s draft Dos Equis. I was dissapointed they were out of the Chicharrones (mmmm…fried pork skin!), but I was happy to settle for the chilequiles. The menu covered every region of Mexico, with mole (Oaxaca), Huaraches (Vera Cruz), Tortas (DF), and Pepian (Southern, I’ve mostly had it in Guatemala). They had a lot of standard Mexmerican food, but they also had about all the traditional Mexican options one could want. And the balls to put fried pork skin on the menu.

Both my and my BF’s meals were reasonably good and big enough to feed a small army (I reccomend splitting one dish). I wouldn’t reccomend our individual meals, neccisarily (he had the combinacion tres valedores), but I do reccomend the restaurant as a whole. Why? The chips were clearly made in house, I know they used local tomatoes in the salsa because while the salsa tasted great, it also felt a bit like late fall tomatos. The food tasted like Mexico, even if it was portioned like America.

And the number one reason I want to shout the name “El Tajin” to the hills? Instead of coming with sour cream, as most Mexican restaurant meals do here in Seattle, they were served with true Mexican Queso Crema. Sigh….

ViengThong: Wow, its actually Thai…

“Wow, it’s actually Thai” was the recurring theme of our dinner last night. We headed out to ViengThong, on MLK Jr Way, just past the Loews. And by we, I include my brother, who spent three weeks at Muay Thai training camp in Thailand, and his friend who lived there for a time. These boys snottily laugh at the Thai food we eat here in Seattle, comparing it to the delicious stuff they got in their time living on the beach there. As I reminded my brother, I think he has told me about the sticky rice like fifty times.

They opened the menu and seemed pleased at the options. The waitress giggled when they thanked her for water in Thai. They ordered a bunch of stuff, not all of which I can remember. The soup was the first to arrive, and it is the best soup I have ever eaten. I am not always prone to hyperbole, but when Aaron, the guy who’d lived in Thailand (and who is slightly more prone to hyperbole than me) echoed this sentiment, I felt a little more comfortable. It was spicy enough to push you to the edge, without ever losing flavor nor feeling like flavor is sacrificed for heat. A hint of coconut milk was present, but it wasn’t overly creamy as so many tom kai gais are.  (or tom yum gai. which ever one has the coconut!).  Next up was som tum, the green papaya salad that is ever present in Thai cuisine. This got another round of favorable comparison to true Thai food, though with the stipulation that it was (thankfully) missing the fish sauce which “no sane american would get anywhere near”.

We shared a pile of main dishes, a decent green curry, a chicken dish that turned out not to be what the boys were hoping for. Then we had two stand out dishes. At the waitresses suggestion we ordered a plate of barbecue chicken. The flavor was perfect, the chicken, cut like they were ribs, was amazing. It melted away in your mouth. The other stand out dish was the steamed whole fish. In a thin brown soy based sauce, the fish fell apart on the fork. It was, I believe a sea bass. And it was, I believe, delicious.

We also ordered the Phad Lao, which was similar to a phad thai only far less sweet (always my biggest problem with pad thai). I enjoyed this, though it was much closer to dishes I had had before. Then of course, was the sticky rice. As I said last night, rice is one of my favorite foods, but I really enjoy food more when I can use my hands. Sticky rice has solved this probelm for me. It is meant to be eaten with the hands. And shovel it in is what I did. You can use it to pick up chunks of fish, sauces whatever. Similar to injera at an Ethiopian restaurant.

Everything we ordered was so far superior to dishes at any other Thai restaurant, it was a quite pleasant surprise. And all through the night the boys just kept echoing “Just like in Thailand!” and reminiscing about sticky rice from street carts and choose your own fish stalls on the beach.

Another great deal too: $100 with tax and tip for the six of us, beers included!

Jerks and Mozzies

No they aren’t rival gangs, Jerks and Mozzies is what B asks for when he wants to go watch football at Wingmasters. In an effort to save some money and spend more time at home, I told him that I would make him Jerks and Mozzies while he watched football. Unfortunately it was an exciting game, and as such I neglected to write down what I put in to the dishes. Luckily I took a picture of the ridiculous mise en place I had for the jerk sauce, so I hope I can tell you approzimately what I put in there.

Starting with the bowl in the center, which is one bunch of scallions. The red in the one oclock position is 2 habanero peppers, working clockwise that is the juice of one lemon, an entire package of thyme (about 1/8 of a cup maybe?), about 5 cloves of garlic. These little ones are hard, but I ground all the spices myself, so I really don’t want to mess these guys up! A tablespoon of oil–I used a bit of sesame, a bit of hazelnut and a little olive. Then cinnamon, the flat chinese dish has a bay leaf, the bowl at the 11 oclock is ginger, next to it is nutmeg. of the four small spoons, I know one is salt and one is pepper. Okay, only two more spoons to think of. Um…one is coriander and one is allspice. Wheew. Remind me to right these down next time!

I put all these in a cuisinart and made them into a paste, I stuck them in the power marinater for about 20 minutes (equivilent to overnight) and baked the wings in a 375 degree oven for about an hour. What I didn’t do, which I think would have kept them a bit crispier, was to put them on a rack in the dish in the oven, as they ended up poaching a bit in the sauce.

So there they are in all their glory. Spicy and delcicious and way healthier than the ones at Wingmasters. The mozzarella sticks were way easier than I thought. I bought mozzarella string cheese, cut them in half, dipped them in egg beaters and rolled them in premade bread crumbs. Then I put them all in the fridge for a bit and repeated the process, then baked them at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes. Keep an eye on them, because a few did burst before I got them out of there.

The Ethiopian Feast Part 2: Eat your Veggies

To go along with our meaty parts of the Ethiopian feast I made two veggie dishes, both of which I have seen on most every Ethiopian menu. The first was a simple salad with a very flavorful dressing. For this, I simply chopped romaine lettuce, white onions, half a jalapeno and a roma tomato and tossed them in a dressing. The dressing was the juice of half a lemon, a tablespoon of olive oil, 2 cloves of garlic (I said very flavorful!) with salt and pepper.

The greens were a little more complicated. I was hoping to do mustard greens, but the Greenwood Market seemed to not have those, so I chose collard greens instead. Also included in this dish were: half a green pepper (chopped), half an onion (chopped), 2 small thai hot peppers (diced), 2 cloves of garlic (minced), about a teaspoon of chopped ginger, nitter kibe, salt, pepper, cardamom and stock.

I chopped off the stems of the greens and blanched those for a good while. In the mean time I sauteed the green peppers, hot peppers, garlic, ginger and onion in two tablespoons of nitter kibe. I then added the greens’ stems and began blanching the leaves, while I continued to sautee the rest. When the leaves were done blanching, I added them to the sautee pan and poured in about a cup of chicken stock. Seasoned this with salt, pepper and a touch of cardamom. Once this had reduced down (about 15-20 minutes) it was ready to eat.

The Ethiopian Feast Part 1: Kitfo and Cheese

Kitfo, often referred to as Ethiopian steak tartar, is one of my very favorite foods in the world. It was very exciting to try my hand at this very simple dish. The first thing I did was to prepare the cheese that accompanies the meat. Because the meat is so spicy and flavorful, this bland and cooling cheese provides the perfect foil when the two elements are cradled together in a piece of injera.

For cheese: 1 quart of buttermilk (I used low fat, because I do try…), cheese cloth and a bit of quark (or yogurt if you have that already), salt

I poured the buttermilk into a large pan and kept it on low to medium heat for about 25 minutes, then drained it in a cheesecloth, working hard to get all the liquid out. I then placed it under a crate of oranges (though any heavy object will do) for another hour. When I removed it, I wanted a bit of a creamier texture, so I added about a teaspoon of quark, which worked perfectly, then just a dash of salt to bring out the natural flavors. I stuck this in the fridge for the 3 or so hours while I worked on the rest of the dishes, and I actually think the time in the fridge did it a fair amount of good, as it came out of the fridge tasting better than I remembered it going in.

For the kitfo beef, I chose to use a half pound of eye of round. Why eye of round? It was a very cheap, very lean cut. Buying extra lean ground meat would also work well, as would, I’m sure any other lean cut of beef. I chose to hand chop it myself to get the intense texture that comes from hand chopped steak (though B later said he preffered it ground. Oh Well). Then I microwaved (yeah, I’m lazy) 2 tablespoons of nitter kibe (spiced butter, from Zuma, see below) with a heaping teaspoon of berebere. Very important to let it cool after microwaving so that the butter does not cook the meat. Then, as I was serving the meat, I poured the butter/berebere mixture over the meat and mixed it well. Raw beef in all its glory.

The Making of an Ethiopian Feast: Shopping at Zuma

I used to live just down the street from Zuma, but I had never been there. The non-descript store front failed to call me in, and I knew where to get good Ethiopian food, and was just as happy to drive across town for it. But as I prepared to cook my Ethiopian feast, the fact that Zuma claimed to be a grocery store as well as a restaurant turned out to serve me well. I went in just after they opened, around 10:15 in the morning, and found the place empty except for a small child playing with his toys. There were two large fridges, one filled solely with giant ziploc bags of berebere, the Ethiopian spice mixture I had come for. The second was filled with a mish mash of random stuff and soda pop. On the opposite side of the room were shelf after shelf of various kinds of lentils. I picked out my enormous bag of berebere ($ and asked the friendly woman who had come out of the kitchen about nitter kibe, the spiced butter that my recipes called for. She went in to the back and brought me back a small plastic takeout container of it ($5). “Smell it,” she urged me. I did. As I sniffed the wonderful aroma, I knew my Ethiopian food would turn out well. With something this delicious smelling in it, there was no possibility of going wrong. I asked about injera, the lovely pancake like bread I was looking for to eat the food with. “Oh,” she said, looking concerned, “I’m running a little late, it is not ready yet.” Now, when searching for the freshest ingredients for a delicious feast, there are no better words you can here. She told me they would be ready in ten minutes. I walked across the street to the Greenwood Market where I was able to pick up the rest of my ingredients that I would need to make the feast. Upon my return, I was handed a giant plastic sealed bag still steaming with ten beautiful injera ($6). The fresh injera were so good that I devoured the first one totally plain when I got back to my house. The menu looked good, though I didn’t get the chance to try the food, I did notice they had kitfo, my very favorite Ethiopian dish.

 

Here is a photo of the final product. More posts to come with the recipes.

Foodie Feeding Frenzy

That’s right, it was a foodie feeding frenzy on tuesday night. Keren over at Savvy Savorer pulled a whole group of us foodie types together and organized an amazing dinner for everyone.

We gathered at Quinn’s on Capitol Hill. The place was crowded and noisy and the crowd was not my scene, but Keren got us a nice little corner table upstairs and things were pleasant. On the floor it looked like there were 7 people crowded around each 2 top smooshed against the next group. It took us an hour to even get to the food because we were all so talkative! I started with a sage margarita from the rather pleasant looking cocktail selection. It was a good margarita (with no added sugar, thank god) but I wasn’t able to get much sage out of it. I switched it up to a nice San Giovese afterwards.

We did a little gift exchange of foodie items, very cool. I ended up with two books from Ronald over at Cornichon. While we waited for the food to arrive, I picked the amazing brain of Jay who writes for Seattlest. As the food arrived we got the opportunity to share our plates and discuss the food. And what a brain. I got restaurant reccomendations for all over the city, up to Vancouver, and I’m pretty sure if I’d been interested I could have got them for the whole world. A fountain of restaurant knowledge. And my newly adopted restaurant advisor! The food arrived, and as much I am anti-vegetarian (send the hate mail right on over, folks!) I rather enjoyed the grilled salad ordered by Michael of Herbivoracious. Moving onto meatier options, I would say that my favorite was the gnocchi and oxtail that was ordered by Candace of Italian Woman at the Table. The gnocchi were a great texture and the oxtail was tender and well flavored. To my other side was Rachel, who is not a blogger, but rather a radio personality with a show called Stick a Fork in it on 710 KIRO and Annie, a former food writer for a myriad of local papers. Our table was rounded out with Katerin, who runs a translation company and is originally from Germany. Being the sole native of Seattle at the table (as I so often am), it was fun to hear the opinions on the Seattle food scene from people who grew up elsewhere. While the scene has changed since I was a kid, it certainly influanced me growing up and constantly eating at Thai restaurants and Chinese places in the ID. Dim Sum as a regular thing and not being afraid of trying new things.

The other dishes we tried at Quinn’s didn’t all please in the same way the oxtail did. I found the wild boar ragu sloppy joe dissapointing other than the spicy flavor imparted from the jalapeno pepper. The seared tuna was delicious, but the dish itself was uninventive. The other innovative dishes I tried (rabbit pate, duck with duck rilette) were all quite good, but none were shout it out amazing. I enjoyed everything I ate and would certainly return, though I think it will be after the heavy buzz dies down. The one thing I found inedible were there french fries, but why go to a place like that and order fries anyways?

Last but not least, Keren got a ton of companies to donate amazing goodies to us. I haven’t tried the yogurt or chips that we got, but I put some bacon salt on my poached eggs yesterday morning. WOW. That was amazing.

A Thrown Together Feast

Some days dinner starts small and grows out of control, and monday was one of those days. Yet it wasn’t hard work, and it was a lot of fun to put together. I rarely see my roommates A and O, so when I came home from playing tennis with B and started to cook our dinner, it was nice to see them around and I invited them to join us for dinner. I had just been planning to cut up some tuna sashimi and crab leg sashimi, but this would not have been enough for all four of us, so we went to work on our dinner.

I sliced up the tuna sashimi (a find at a recent farmers market) and sliced two of the crablegs up into sashimi, but instead of serving the crab leg as sashimi, I added it to a bit of defrosted frozen seaweed salad, tossing it with soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and sesame oil. O got on the steam station and steamed up an artichoke and the other 4 crab legs. A got to work on a pile of vietnamese fresh rolls, with steamed shrimp, lettuce, thin rice noodles, and hot peppers in a rice paper roll up. Served that with a little sauce of peanut butter, hot sauce and coconut milk.

By the time this all came together, a long with a starter of the leftover pumpkin soup, we had a meal that spanned multiple continents and countries with its flavor combinations, yet all of it was delicious, and it was lovely to share a meal with the roomies.