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.

Never Say “Eew”

I first heard of shirataki as a substitute for noodles for people on low carb or low cal diets. As often as I diet, I am committed to the idea of real food. That means no fake sweetners (except diet coke, and that is a flavor thing, not a diet thing), no freeze dried or frozen miracle foods, to me, I assumed it also meant no shirataki, some sort of concoction dreamt up by the marketing geniuses over at Weight Watchers. A short time ago I learned that this is in fact a traditional Japanese food, created from starchy vegetables and used in a variety of ways. I was only feeling slightly daring and decided to start with Tofu Shirataki. And I’m in love. I took it out of the package and gave it a quick rinse before tasting it. It was terrific. Just a hint of al dente texture, like a lovely thick piece of fettucini. I don’t know what I expected, but I think I thought it would be more like an over cooked onion. I was, suffice it to say pleasantly surprised. I had planned to stir fry the noodles with red bell peppers and onions in Korean red bean sauce. Instead, I made it like my favorite simple pasta dish: Olive oil, salt and pepper. I popped it in the micro for a minute and a half. It was perfect. I think I may have a new favorite instant meal, and I just wanted to share my love of this miracle food with the rest of the blogosphere.

Gourd Tastic: Part 1–Delicata Fettucini

It’s fall here in the northwest and my favorite season to boot. The fun of fall vegetables never fails, as you can see in the previously posted pumpkin soup recipe. I also created a butternut squash ravioli that I unfortuantely didn’t manage to post about. But the fun never ends with gourds, as this weekend I ventured into new territory: Delicata squash and Pumpkin pie.

I don’t want to post the picture of the delicata fettucini I made because the picture does no justice to the tastiness of the meal itself. We came home from the pumkin patch starving and bearing a 2 large delicata squashes. The fun part of delicata is that you can eat the skin, so of course this (and the rush to eat) made me think that I could sautee it. I had never sauteed a squash before, so I tried at first to cut the pieces quite small, but after a taste fry, I realized it was going to be fairly quick to fry up, so I ended up cutting the onion and the squash as close to the width of the fettucini as possible in order to get some textural consistancy. I won’t say this is a top dish of all time, but I did think that it was great for starving squash bearing people who can’t handle waiting for the thing to roast in an oven.

Enough for two people, with leftovers:
1/4 large delicata squash
1/4 large white onion
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and Pepper
Oregano
Basil
1 package fresh fettucini (I loved how the tenderness of the fresh noodles played with the squash texture–just a touch more al dente, but you could sub out dried if neccesary)

Put the oil in the pan and sautee the squash and onion, adding the vinegar pretty early on to let it caramalize a bit in the pan. Add the herbs to taste at the end. Just as the veggies are getting ready to finish up, toss the pasta in the pot. When you pull it out, put it in to the pan with the veggies and toss them all together–this got the noodles totally coated with the vinegar and herbs, and made them taste terrific.

The whole thing took maybe 20 minutes.