i can make cheese now. is there anything i cant do? ((yes))

A few weeks ago, i managed to get in off the waitlist for a goat cheese making class at the Natick Community Organic Farm. was so excited that someone dropped out of the class so that i could get a spot!! at the class, i got a little starter kit, so i decided to try to make my own goat cheese that very weekend! the family was in town for cathy's graduation, so i thought it would be a good little take-home gift. i picked up some goats milk at whole foods on my way home, and got things going. this recipe is so simple, i will probably make this somewhat often. you start with a gallon of milk, and heat it to 86 degrees. then add the starter. turn off the heat. take a picture. put the lid on. let sit. i started it around 11pm, maybe midnight. checked on it before leaving for work, and it looked pretty good, but i wanted to let it sit longer. i ended up getting home around 4:30 (it was a friday) and was able to begin step 2:


look at that amazing separation of the curds from the whey! so freakin awesome. so i scooped out all of the curds, and discarded the whey. apparently, you can drink the whey, or make whey-bread, or whatever you want, because it is all protein, no fat, and good for you. so...if you want some whey, i will save it the next time i make goat cheese, if you ask nicely.


so i ladled all of those lovely curds into cheese cloth. except this is not cheese cloth. it is butter muslin, which is much more fine, and allows you to make soft cheeses like chevre, soft goat cheese, fresh white cheese, etc. and so the cheese curds started chillin in the butter muslin in a collander...


you can let the cheese drain for a variable amount of time. i decided to do it for the rest of the day, and actually overnight as well, so that the cheese would be a really thick consistency. maybe i will try it really soft sometime, but i really prefer it to be thicker, and this actually came out an amazing consistency


the next morning, it was ready to be rolled into chevre logs, and spread on to pieces of bread, with a little drizzle of balsalmic vinegar. oh my god so good! yum yum yum. after that success, i decided to buy some kits so that i could make it again. and also so that i can make mozzerella and ricotta! SO excited to try making mozzerella soon!

so i threw a dessert party

so, months ago at this point, on my birthday, we were out at the peoples republik, enjoying some tasty cocktails, and talking about how much we like dessert. and making dessert. and wouldnt it be fun if we had a party where everyone made some dessert and brought some and enjoyed it all? so we pulled out our blackberries and looked for the right weekend to do it. settled on one, and i put it in my calendar, and then a few weeks later i sent out invites and we had ourselves a dessert party! i, of course, had to bake a whole bunch of stuff in case no one brought anything. and also because i wanted to use up some ingredients i had lying around. so the first thing i made is this apple molasses cake that sarah hopp gave me the recipe to. spicy and delicious, though it drives me crazy when you cant get a cake out of its pan completely. i think maybe next time i will use parchment paper so that the top is perfect, just have to hope that the caramel doesnt run under it.


after the cake was squared away, i opened up my martha stewart cookie cookbook, and looked for something tasty. and i wanted something chocolate. and so...chocolate peanut butter brownies! this picture is horribly out of focus, but its the only one i took of them. and they were deliciousssssssssss. i dont think you can go wrong with chocolate and peanut butter. i am thinking of making them again tonight, actually.


and then i had to pick a 3rd thing out of the martha stewart cookie cookbook. and i had some figs leftover from when i made the fig sauce for the duck breast from months earlier. so here comes the fig pinwheel cookies. which were obnoxious as hell to make. i dont know if it was because the weather was warm and so the dough was melting too quickly, or what, but even with chilling, it was impossible to work with. so i probably wont make these too often. but they were fairly decent.

party was a total success. allison brought red velvet cupcakes. erin did these amazing brownie-cookie-dough things. malima made cookies. jay made a carrot cake - complete with little orange/green carrots decorating the top. there may have been other things, but that is everything i can remember.

fiddle-le-dee fiddle-le-doo fiddleheads!

Oh fiddleheads. I had absolutely NO idea what these were when they arrived in my CSA share. because they look quite weird. and man they are a bitch to clean. but Jen, from work, who recently also joined the farmshare, shared her recommendation for how to cook them with me, and i did a little bit of googling, and made this delicious pasta dish with sauteed fiddleheads and tomatoes. yum. fiddleheads are one of my new favorite vegetables. one of many different vegetables i have happily been introduced to since joining my farmshare. beets, celeriac, parsnips, fiddleheads...the delicious list goes on.


the second time i got them, i also got english peas. which you have to shell yourself. which was actually remarkably fun. tedious, sure, but fun. i like peas. did a similar thing with the fiddleheads (blanche, saute with tomatoes, repeat) and it was...boring. i think i overcooked them, the peas were undercooked, i hate stew-like tomatoes, and i put too much oil in. blah. plus, i cant quite figure out what type of starch/grain this dish would go well with. its not right with pasta. potatoes maybe, but i think they would be too thick. couscous too thin. rice maybe but it might be too much. bah. conundrum. now that i think about it more, potatoes might be the best bet. would probably be tasty with them mashed, and might even go nicely with roasted potatoes. next time?


the most recent time, i yet again blanched and then sauteed. this time i chopped up an onion and sauteed that first, then added the fiddleheads and some chicken broth and white wine, and threw chicken that i had fried in, and let it cook up nicely for maybe 20 minutes. yum. i felt so accomplished after, like i had cooked a real meal like a real person. i also made some carrots on the side. and quite possibly burned them because i was doing my dishes as they cooked. oops. but still a real meal! with a main course and a side and everything! i feel so grown up....

i dont even REMEMBER cooking some of this stuff

well i have had QUITE the hiatus from actually writing about the food i have been cooking. have still been cooking, and taking pictures of food, but all of those pictures have remained on my camera. because i am lame, and lazy, and have been overworked. so, let me catch up on the posts, and maybe get on a regular schedule.


i think i blocked this out of my memory. because it was...not that great. i really dont know why i made this, i think i just needed to use up some supplies. i had some good bread that was going to go bad, and swiss chard that i didnt know what to do with, and so i made this egg dish, the name of which i am completely forgetting right now (strata maybe?). and i put blue cheese and kalamata olives in it. and it was weird. it was tasty, mostly, but weird. i dont think i'll be making it again. but that might be because i hate swiss chard.


i was so proud of this meal, alothough it looks so ugly on the plate. i bought some lamb, and made a spice rub, and then broiled it. and it was delicious. my first time making lamb steaks. actually might have been my first time making lamb at home. and of course, as i always do with lamb (so often, right) i made a little tsatsiki sauce. yum. but i think the best part of the meal was the beet salad. my CSA finally gave me bunched beets! which means i finally had beet greens! and i found this delicious little salad recipe - roast the beets, and saute the beet greens, and then do a dijon vinaigrette...holy crap it is delicious!! i have made it a few times since then. delicious.


this was my brightly colored vegetables dinner. used up some of my carrots from the CSA, some potatoes, green beans with radishes, and boring chicken. for the potatoes, i attempted to make french fries without frying them. if i am remembering correctly, i cut them up, boiled them, and then baked them in a little bit of oil. they were....boring. just boring. i think next time, i will sacrifice the calories and fry them up. too much effort for boring fries! i also learned that...i hate radishes. like, really hate them. what the hell do you do with radishes? i mean, they are not tasty at all. even with green beans and a dijon vinaigrette. blech. glad i only got them for 2 weeks in the CSA, hope that they dont come back.


oh yum. i needed to use up some of my vegetables from my CSA, and so i chopped up some eggplant, yellow squash, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes, and roasted them up into deliciousness. threw it on top of some penne pasta, which i made a simple cream+goat cheese sauce for. it was...boring. i need to get better at making random sauces. the vegetables were delicious, but the sauce was really lacking something. and i had so much of this leftover! will i never learn?

i am not alone in my cake love!

i know, i generally dont post pictures that have people in them. but i thought that this picture of my aunt with the birthday cake she made me was just so stunningly beautiful i couldn't NOT include her in it. since easter fell right in between my sister and my birthdays this year, easter dessert was a birthday cake for us. a sponge cake, to be exact, using my grandma's recipe and my grandma's pans and gigantic plate. another reason my aunt is in the picture: so that you can see just how gigantic this cake is. aunt joanie is not a tiny person - we're about the same size, i'd say. and this cake is wider than her hips. its a bit absurd. it also has pudding and strawberries between the layers, and whipped cream on top - she had to start cutting it almost immediately after putting the whipped cream on, because the cake started to slide. yes, slide. it was a bit like the leaning tower(/cake!) of pisa...except that its lean kept leaning more and more!

but, a birthday cake on easter? that doesnt seem like the correct dessert, you say! well, my sister had you covered:


mother and sister are HUGE coconut cake fans. and apparently, easter is a good time for coconut cake, because it means you can make a bunny cake. oh how cute, you say? NO, IT IS NOT CUTE WHEN YOU DONT LIKE COCONUT AND ITS YOUR BIRTHDAY.

when i was 3 years old, my birthday fell on the day before easter. so my mother made me a coconut bunny cake, very similar to the one above. i believe we still have the pictures of it. i hate coconut. my mother knew i hated coconut. but noooo, jenn doesnt get to have a barbie dress cake, no no no. jenn gets to have a GROSS COCONUT BUNNY CAKE because thats what mom likes. my childhood was incredibly deprived, i know.

so this year, mother wanted to make a coconut cake, so she made the cake (and the frosting, AND bought a fresh coconut and grated/shaved it, which, let me tell you, takes a LOT of work) and my sister decorated the bunny with jelly beans and twizzlers. and it was adorable. i am told it tasted really good too. i ate matzoh crack instead, as my hatred for coconut has only intensified over the years.

i leave you with this image of the sliding, gigantic sponge cake. may your days be filled with gigantic leaning towers of sponge cake as well:

i know why i stopped updating

its because i cooked so damned much easter weekend that the thought of having to make 3 different posts to cover all the pretty food was just too much for me! never fear, i am back. why? because my CSA is making me so freakin happy right now that i HAVE to post pictures of some of the awesome food i have been making. did you know i got fiddleheads last week? and bunched beets? holy crap that was exciting! but that is for another post (particularly since those pictures are still on my camera at home right now). If you don't belong to a CSA, I highly recommend you join - so far i have convinced my friends emily and bryan to join my farm, as well as my coworker jen, and so far everyone has been really happy about it (as has sarah, who suggested enterprise farms in the first place to me!)

so right now i want to talk about appetizers. appetizers are something i generally struggle with - figuring out what type to make, getting the right balance of tasty but not too filling, with enough variety, and then, of course, having the actual TIME to make them so that they are the right temperature at serving during appetizer time, which, lets face it, is when i am frantically trying to finish cooking those last-minute food items.

easter weekend, the whole [immediate] family was in town - and by that, i mean my sister, my brother, his girlfriend mary, and i were all home, and aunt joan and uncle bill were around. so saturday night, we had AJ and UB over for dinner, and i thought it would be nice to make some appetizers. this of course annoyed my mother to no end, because it meant i was in her way in her kitchen, and filling peoples stomaches, but oh well.


appetizer #1: puff pastry. i HAD to do *something* with puff pastry, it is the king of appetizers. but i didnt want anything too filling, and obviously needed to be savory instead of sweet. i settled with the simple puff pastry hearts and flowers with parmesan cheese on top. except i cheated and used pecorino, because that is what my parents have in a giant wheel from italy. i'm really not kidding about the giant wheel. not bad, but i feel like puff pastry is better for dessert things.


Appetizers #2 & #3: stuffed olives. super simple, but nice flavor. here, i stuffed green olives with blue cheese. yum. nice thing: you can do these way in advance. next to them is another thing that was fun, though i probably should have salted and olive oiled them. it is mini mozzerella balls, wrapped with basil and roasted red pepper. really good flavor combination (but again, the mozzerella needed salt, and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil wouldnt have hurt)


appetizers #4: this was really yummy. baguette, with a slice of green apple (which i had to slice without my mandoline! so sad!), a slice of brie, and walnuts. really good flavor combination on this as well. i think maybe i could have done a honey drizzle, but not really necessary.

end result: the appetizers were really tasty. and we stuffed ourselves on them. but i feel like they were lacking something. i think i need to step it up a bit next time. that, and actually plan in advance instead of thinking of ideas right before running to the store.

baking just to bake

so i finally got some barley flour in my CSA. this was super exciting, as i got barley (grains) twice, and wanted to make barley bread, so i tried to grind them into a flour, but failed at it horribly. luckily, my CSA read my mind, and sent along some barley flour a few weeks later. AND they gave a recipe idea! cranberry sour cream cake/bread with barley flour!


do you know how hard it is to find cranberries this time of year? my recipe called for cranberries in a can. where does one find those? or, you could use cranberry relish. okay....well, i couldnt find canned cranberries. so i figured, maybe there would be frozen cranberries i could throw in! i found frozen strawberries. and frozen raspberries. and frozen blackberries. and freakin FROZEN CANTALOUPE. but NO frozen cranberries! what the hell, supermarket. what the hell. all i could find was cranberry sauce. so i bought a can of cranberry sauce with whole berries in it. not quite the consistency i was looking for. it worked, but it still wasnt right. i made the cake in a bundt pan...and how annoying are those! they NEVER come out perfectly. even if you grease the pan. even if there is a ton of butter in the topping. it ALWAYS annoyingly sticks to the pan. hate hate hate. maybe i will buy a nonstick bundt pan one of these days, instead of using my aunt's old non-non-stick one.


also on the dessert front...i introduce to you: matzoh crack. this is...one of the tastiest treats there is. and there are only 4 ingredients: butter, brown sugar, chocolate, and matzoh. the first time that i made it (AKA, a week ago) i followed the recipe. i grabbed my large pan, and spread 5 pieces of matzoh out, made the toffee, and poured it on top. it looked a bit thin, and i really had to spread the toffee out to make sure all the matzoh got covered. first sign that i should have done something different. threw it in the oven, pulled it out at the right time...second sign: it was a bit burnt. now yes, i know, its caramel toffee...of COURSE its burnt, that is the entire point. but there are levels of burnt-ness. and while this was still edible-burnt, it was still burnt. i covered the top in chocolate chips, let them melt, spread across, threw in the freezer, and voila, when i pulled it out and pulled it off the parchment paper, it was a delicious treat all broken up.

i felt like the recipe could use a little alteration, however, based on the incredible version my coworker donna made. so 2 days later, while home in NY, i went to the grocery store and picked up my 4 ingredients. this time, i used a smaller pan. and only 3.5 pieces of matzoh. and 1.5X the amount of toffee. which i knew was the correct amount when i poured it on top and it completely covered the matzoh in a lovely, thick coating. after cooking (didnt burn this time!) i once again coated in chocolate (miiiight have been too thick this time) and put some slivered almonds on top. this was all lovely, EXCEPT for the fact that mom doesnt own parchment paper. so i used wax paper. NOT the same thing! the toffee stuck to the wax paper. really badly. so that i was peeling off tiny pieces. so depressing. perhaps 3rd time will be the charm.