Bird and Little Bird

Good Soup for Cold Days.

 

Minestrone is, in my humble opinion, kind of perfect food.  My family isn't always quite as enthusiastic as I am, neither Dan or Mariam are big soup people.  But I do all the cooking, so this soup is one that gets made a lot.  

Before I share the recipe, I should add one caveat.  I am definitely a "kitchen sink" variety of soup maker.  Meaning, I throw in anything and everything that seems like it might work okay.  So, this recipe is more conceptual than anything.  I'll give you the basic idea; you fill in the blanks.  Here goes:

Minestrone Soup 

What you will need:

1 medium sized yellow or red onion

3 medium to large carrots, peeled and diced

3 stalks celery, diced

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

olive oil

sea salt

1 parmesan rind*

water or stock

1 cup crushed or finely diced tomatoes

2 cups cooked cannelini beans

1/4 pound pasta (optional)

various vegetables (think green beans, potatoes, parsnips, turnips- whatever you've got handy)

parsley

* A parmesan rind is the hard bit left over when you've grated the parmesan down as far as you are able to.  I always save them for soup making!

What you will do:

Warm a few tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Add the onion, carrots and celery and sautee until they are brown.  Add the garlic and sautee just a bit longer, and then add six cups of water or stock.  Add in the tomatoes, the parmesan rind, and any other vegetables that need to cook for a longer period of time (roots especially).  When the rind has melted into the soup and the vegetables are cooked through, add the pasta.  When the pasta is soft, add in any vegetables that you want to retain their color (green beans, for example) and then add in the cannelini beans.  Chop up a few tablespoons of parsley and throw that in just before serving. Season with sea salt as needed, garnish with grated parmesan.   

Coconut Oatmeal Pancakes for You!

There is a great local restaurant in Burlington that makes excellent oatmeal pancakes that you can customize with things like chocolate chips and various bits of delicious ripe fruit.  Our favorite are the oatmeal coconut pancakes, and Mariam and I both woke up with a craving for them this morning.  We didn't have quite enough time before violin lessons to go out for breakfast, so although I could only assume we might not be able to truly replicate the pancakes in our own kitchen, I thought I might give it a go all the same.  I used Deborah Madison's Oatmeal Pancake recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (great cookbook, by the way!) as my jumping off point, but ended up with something quite different from her original recipe.  I think we were all pleasantly surprised by how well these turned out; a perfect combination of delicate coconut flavor and chewy oat goodness.  Definitely a keeper and super good with a dollop of blueberry jam or a nice puddle of maple syrup. 

Coconut Oatmeal Pancakes

1 1/2 cups rolled oats

1 cup coconut

2 cups milk

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1/4 cup canola oil

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup flour

Mix the oats, coconut and milk together in a bowl and set them aside for about twenty minutes to soften up a bit.  Beat the eggs, vanilla, brown sugar and oil together and stir this mixture into the oats.  Combine the flour, salt and baking soda and add them to the oat/coconut mixture.  The batter will be slightly runnier than you might normally associate with pancakes, but this is fine.  Pour 1/3 cup batter into a hot skillet and let cook until bubbles appear in the top of the pancake batter.  Flip and cook the other side of the cake.  Serve hot with maple syrup, fruit jam or a dollop of vanilla whipped cream. 

Cheesemaking 101.

On Sunday afternoon, feeling a bit adventurous (early spring sunshine will do that to a girl), I decided to try my hand at a bit of cheese-making.  I am extraordinarily pleased (and more than a little relieved) to report that the project was a rousing success.  And, better yet, it was really pretty easy.  So, in the event that you or someone you know has been itching to know how one makes mozzarella in their own kitchen in under an hour, here it is:

I started out with this cheese-making kit from Urban Cheesecraft.  It has a thermometer, citric acid, vegetable rennet, cheese cloth, cheese salt and a couple of recipes.  Pretty handy.  You can also find what you need here.  

I chose to use a different recipe from the one that came with the kit but since the ingredients themselves were all the same, I still used the individual components of the kit, albeit in a slightly different way than I would have had I used the kit recipe.

We get our milk locally, from a farm that sells raw milk from their very small herd of cows (I believe they milk about five at any given time).  The recipe that I used comes from the farm as well.  You don't need to use raw milk for this cheese, just don't use ultra-pasteurized.

For one gallon of milk I used:

1 teaspoon citric acid crystals (apparently you can substitute 2 tablespoons vinegar here)

1 cup cool water (I boiled it and then cooled it in the fridge to get rid of any chlorine)

1/4 tablet rennet (I used vegetable rennet, either would work fine)

Salt

Start out by setting out three glass or ceramic bowls and a large cooking pot.  Don't use aluminum or cast iron for this.  I used glass bowls and a stainless steel pot.  In one bowl, make an ice bath/brine for the finished cheese by mixing ice, water and a few tablespoons of salt together.  You'll add a bit of whey to this later as well.  In the second bowl dissolve the 1 teaspoon of citric acid in 1/2 cup cool water.  In the third, dissolve the 1/4 tablet of rennet in 1/2 cool water.  Measure out both the rennet and the citric acid very carefully. 

Pour the cold milk into your pot and gently stir in the citric acid mixture.  With the stove on medium-low, slowly heat the milk mixture to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (use a cooking thermometer to carefully monitor the temperature as it rises).  When the mixture is at 90 degrees, remove it from the heat and gently stir in the rennet.

Let the milk mixture sit undisturbed for ten minutes.  It should start to solidify and take on a look like soft but firm custard.  At the end of ten minutes, press gently with a spoon to make sure that your liquid has become a mass of soft curd that will break cleanly if cut with a knife. 

Because cutting it with a knife is exactly what you are going to do next.  Take a long knife and cut the curds into cubes, about one inch square.  Begin to heat the pot back up, gently stirring the curds as you do so.  

Continue stirring the curds gently as you monitor the temperature of the liquid in the pot.  As the pot heats up, the curds will begin to change texture and stick to themselves.  It is kind of remarkable actually; it's almost as if they are magnetically drawn to each other.  When the curds reach a temperature between 130 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit, they will become gooey, stretchy and will be stuck together in one big mass.  At this point, throw on a pair of rubber gloves and reach into the pot and pull the mass of curds (which is basically now cheese!) out.

A word about the gloves:  At this moment, we are dealing with a 140 degree mass of gooey cheese, so they are undoubtedly necessary for safety and comfort.  That being said, you aren't going to be cooking this cheese any more before finishing it off, so I'm thinking that using your dishwashing and or housecleaning gloves for this would be bad form.  I bought a new pair of gloves for this project (expecting that I'll be doing this more than once) and I might suggest that you do the same.  Just a thought.

Once you have removed the mass of curds from the pot of (what is now) whey, gently and briefly stretch them out and work them a bit.  A bit being operative here, folks.  Ten seconds or less is plenty of time if you want unrubbery cheese.  No, "unrubbery" is not really a word.

If you want to work in any cheese salt, now would be the time.  I did fold in about a teaspoon, but I think that in the future I might leave it out and just rely on the brine to salt the cheese for me.

Form the stretched curds into a ball and cut the ball into two equal sized pieces (or as many as suits your fancy).  Form the pieces into oval-shaped balls.  Measure out a few tablespoons of the whey and mix it into your cold brine mixture.  Drop your mozzarella balls into the brine.

And done!

A couple of notes: 

I've heard that the mozzarella is supposedly best if you eat it right away but I was much, much happier with it after it had soaked in the brine overnight.  Immediately upon finishing it I felt like it was a little dry and maybe even rubbery.  However, after a soak in the brine, it was absolutely perfect the next day.  Like, best cheese ever. 

I did feel like one night in the brine was plenty.  I don't have any proof, but it does seem like if I left it in longer than that, the cheese might have gotten overly soft and gooey on the outside.  I was not into that idea at all, so I took it out of the brine and wrapped it up tightly with a bit of plastic wrap.  There might be a better storage method than this and depending on how dry your cheese turns out, leaving it in the brine might well be fine.

Here is the finished product with a bit of olive oil and balsamic on a bed of pea greens and some toasted squash cornmeal bread.  Ridiculous. 

The Benefits of a Little Organization.

After stalking it via internet for many, many months, I finally decided to actually buy the 1Canoe2 recipe card box.  I'm very happy with myself about this, actually. 

There are lovely little tabs for organizing sections according to recipe type and the multi-colored recipe cards are in bright shades that complement the simple pine box nicely.  Um, I really like it. 

One of my primary motivations for finally getting a proper recipe card box was the realization that I'm starting to gather tons of bits of paper with recipes scribbled across them in a totally haphazard way.  I generally manage to keep tabs on the favorites for some period of time before inevitably losing them under the refrigerator or some such thing.  I got Dan's grandmother's famous cheesecake recipe from my mother-in-law this last weekend and since it is like a family institution in and of itself, I felt like I should write it down someplace other than on the back of my hand, you know?  So, the recipe card box finally made it into the Etsy cart.  And now, theoretically, I will be able to locate the recipes that I want to use in a timely fashion.

The cheesecake rocked, like it always does.  The recipe is easy, good, and thankfully, very reliable.  There is some debate about the origins of this recipe.  It may or may not be from The New Settlement Cookbook.  There is a cheesecake recipe in there, and Dan's grandmother did apparently have that book, but none of us who make this recipe passed down from her seem to have a copy of the book handy to verify that it is from there.  Then again, it might not have come from there at all.  Anyway, it doesn't so much matter.  What matters is that it is really, really wonderfully good.

Nana Ruth's Cheesecake

Filling:

18 ounces cream cheese

3/4 cup heavy cream

3/4 cup sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

Crust:      

  20 graham crackers

6 tablespoons melted butter

3 tablespoons sugar

Topping:   

    1 cup sour cream

        2 tablespoons sugar

    1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Make the crust by crushing the graham crackers in a food processor and mixing them together with the butter and sugar.  Press onto the bottom and sides of a buttered springform pan. 

While you are doing this, put the filling ingredients into a stand mixer and mix together with the paddle attachment (on medium speed) for approximately forever, or, about 15 minutes.  You want the mixture to be completely smooth and free of any lumps. 

Pour the filling into the prepared crust and bake at 350 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes.  Start checking the cheesecake at about 30 minutes to make sure that it doesn't get overdone.  I have been told (in the most emphatic terms) by Dan's mom that this is the most important factor in whether or not this recipe works well for you.  The cheesecake should appear to have firmed up but still shimmy slightly when you shake the pan gently. 

Remove the pan from the oven and cool the cake completely.  Mix the topping ingredients together until smooth and spread over the finished (and cooled!) cheesecake.  Bake for five minutes at 375 degrees.  Remove from the oven and cool completely before serving. 

Really Very Good.

You may find this news surprising, but you actually need to make a batch of these muffins.  Right now.  They are so, so ridiculously good.  I lack vocabulary to express this well, so I will share the recipe instead.  It came in the newsletter that comes with our weekly CSA box.

Squash Molasses Muffins

1 stick butter
1 1/4 cup cooked, pureed squash
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg
1 3/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Like so: Beat the butter until fluffy and then add the sugar, molasses, egg and squash and beat until smooth. Combine the dry ingredients and sift them into the wet ingredients, mix until just combined. Bake in a muffin tin at 375 for 20-ish minutes.  Eat them all with salty butter. Yum.