Nibbling Along

Baby Goats

We visited Harley Farms in Pescadero the other weekend to taste some delicious goat cheese and to see the baby goats. I even got to hold one of the wee little kids, and let me tell you, baby goats are freaking CUTE. You just want to snorgle those little faces and scritch da widdwe ears...If I could possibly have taken one home with me, I totally would have. Measure actually got a little jealous, I think -- he wouldn't pet the baby goats, and he kept telling me to "put him back!"

Although Measure wasn't totally enamored of the baby goats, he still had a good time on the tour -- in the cheesemaking area, he got to decorate a wheel of chevre with edible flowers. Then we got to taste the result in the farm's beautifully decorated barn loft, which is where they hold their seasonal dinners.

 

Beautiful and delicious.

Cheesy Bread!

Jason keeps bugging me about the cheesy bread.

"You should blog about the cheesy bread," he says. He's been saying this for months now. (Sometimes I think he should get his own damn blog. He doesn't like taking photos though, so it'll never happen.)

He's right about the cheesy bread being awesome, though. Maybe it is a little cruel of me to have been so lazy about blogging about it -- all these months, you could have been making delicious garlicky cheesy bread, if only I had gotten my act together sooner.

Our cheesy bread experiments were inspired by the delicious cheesy toasts the Crepe and Brioche bakery sells at their stand at the San Mateo Farmer's Market. Sometimes they use olive bread for the base, sometimes they use their flaxseed levain, sometimes they use their regular dark levain. They are all delicious. The cheesy topping is nicely browned, never greasy, and with a nice warm infusion of garlic flavor. To reproduce it at home, we decided the way to go would be to use a bechamel sauce as a base, then add tons of good cheese and garlic. This creates a spreadable gooey cheesy sauce which isn't greasy, as so many melted cheese goodies are.

Ingredients
8 slices crusty bread (toast the bread if you are going to be preparing all of the slices at once on a sheet pan. If you are going to prepare only a couple of slices at a time in a toaster oven, you can omit this step.)
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 cup whole milk
2 large cloves garlic
3 1/2 ounces shredded cheese*
1/4 cup grated parmesan, or to taste
salt and pepper (preferably white pepper, if you have it) to taste

*For the cheese, use whatever suits your fancy; I always use at least two. Gouda, madrigal, and gruyere are some of my favorites. If I use a very dry hard cheese, like a very aged gouda or cheddar, I try to balance it with something more moist, like madrigal or monterey jack.

If you are going to be making the toast in the oven under the broiler, arrange the toasted slices on a sheet pan and preheat your broiler.

Melt the butter in a small pot on medium heat until it is foamy. Pull it off the heat to whisk in the flour, then return to the heat and cook until the flour no longer smells raw. Drizzle in the milk, whisking vigorously to prevent lumps. The mixture will thicken. Using a garlic press, crush the two garlic cloves and add them to the mixture. Stir in the cheese. Add the parmesan a little at a time -- if the other cheeses you are using are very salty, you may not want to add too much of this. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Spread the cheese mixture on the bread slices. Place under the broiler and cook until the cheese turns brown and bubbly -- this takes only a couple of minutes with a very hot broiler, so watch your toast carefully! Serve warm.

Noni's Eggplant Parmesan

Oops, didn't mean to disappear this week...School has been keeping me busy. The composition class I'm taking involves a ton of reading (and writing...not surprisingly) and we're about to start our big project for the semester, designing the first unit for an integrated reading and writing course. It's always a challenge hitting this point in these courses: we've been digesting huge quantities of theory, and now we have to get down to the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts, and figure out how to make the theories we've adopted manifest in the classroom. It's a juggling act.

But unless you happen to have a thing for composition pedagogy, I'm sure that's less than fascinating for you. So hey, how about we talk about the cheesy, gooey, savoury, slightly crunchy, herby goodness that is eggplant parmesan? Jason and I made some a couple weeks ago, using his Noni's recipe. Well, sort of. As I've mentioned before, Noni's recipes are...inexact. They aren't chemistry, but alchemy, and I suspect that Noni herself was a kind of Philosopher's stone in the kitchen, turning ordinary ingredients into comfort food gold.

When Jason's mom recorded Noni's instructions, she tried to capture her voice, and it comes through -- here's the full text of the Eggplant Parmesan recipe:

Eggplant
Tomato Sauce
Mudiga -- bread crumbs, parsley, cheese

Cut eggplant in half then slice. Salt generously and let sit about half hour, til it makes the water.
Squeeze out really good, then wash them really well. Then fry in hot oil (1/8 inch) til browned on either side. Layer: first sauce, then eggplant, then mudiga, sauce, etc. Top with a layer of sauce then cover and put in oven until ready to serve.

See what I mean? Virtually no exact measurements, no oven temperature or cooking time...just the basics. Perhaps more accurately, the essentials. Noni's definitely right about salting and draining the eggplant, which we did not cut in half, but sliced lengthwise into planks a little less than 1/2" thick. You will need 3 slices per serving, so keep that in mind when deciding how many eggplants to buy. The salt sucks a lot of excess water out of the eggplant, which makes it easier to fry and brown. Just be sure to rinse it, as Noni says, or the dish will be way too salty.

Aside from the eggplant, you will need fresh mozzarella, stale bread, parsley, parmesan, and tomato sauce (see below.)

Breaded Eggplant:
The one real change Jason and I made to the recipe was to coat the eggplant with the mudiga (the herbed bread crumb mixture.) To make the mudiga, we combined a couple of cups of bread cubes cut from very stale bread with a couple of tablespoons of parsley and parmesan, and pulsed it all in the food processor. It doesn't adhere perfectly, but that's ok.

Heat a thin layer of olive oil over medium to medium-high heat (a drop of water tossed in the pan should sizzle, but you don't want the crumbs to instantly scorch) then fry the eggplant slices in batches, making sure not to overcrowd the pan. (If a lot of crumbs start to fall off and blacken, take the pan off the heat, clean it out, and add fresh oil. We didn't end up needing to do this, but it's hard to get every crumb out when you remove each batch, so just keep it in mind.)

Tomato Sauce:
If you really, really love a particular store-bought tomato sauce, you can of course use it, but it's so simple to make your own at home, there's really no reason not to. Just sweat a little diced onion and garlic (I sometimes also include a little grated carrot and/or zucchini for added sweetness and body, but it's totally optional), then add a can of tomato sauce and simmer, seasoning with salt and pepper. That's really all there is to it. You can add a little basil, oregano, and parsley to taste, but if you're just making the sauce for the eggplant parmesan, I'd keep it simple in order to let the parsley flavor in the breadcrumbs shine through.

Assembly and Baking:
When the sauce and the eggplant are both ready, slice up the mozzarella, heat your oven to about 400 degrees, and start layering. Put down a dollop of sauce, an eggplant slice, more sauce, a slice of mozzarella, and grate a little parmesan. Repeat with two more slices. Some recipes construct eggplant parmesan more like a casserole -- layering eggplant and sauce like you would a lasagna. We prefer this method, because it allows each serving to brown around the edges. It's also a little more elegant, if you're going to be serving this to guests. Be sure to sprinkle more of the breadcrumb mixture and a little extra parmesan over the top of each serving, so it will crisp in the oven.

Everything is already cooked, so the eggplant parmesan doesn't need to spend a lot of time in the oven -- just enough for the cheese to melt, and everything to get piping hot. If you've assembled everything while it's still warm, you could even choose to just run it under the broiler. Before serving, top with a little more fresh parsley, for a nice fresh flavor.

Add a loaf of crusty bread and a bottle of wine, and you've got a perfect meal.

Sweet Squash

My love of orechiette is well-documented on this blog. For lunch today, I decided to make a fall version of my favorite summer pasta dish -- and what's more appropriate for fall than butternut squash?

This is pretty easy to make, especially because you can roast the butternut squash a day or two ahead of time. If you roast a couple at once, you can also whip up some butternut squash soup...I've got an easy recipe for that, too, which I promise to share soon. In the meantime, if you want a simple pasta dish, enjoy this one. Recipe here.

Eggplant Sandwich

You read the words "eggplant sandwich" and you probably think to yourself, "self, I think I am going to be reading about eggplant inside a coupla slices of bread." But no! In this case, the eggplant is the bread. There is no bread! (Doesn't "there is no bread" sound like one of those Zen koans? Something to think about -- on a mountaintop, perhaps, while drinking green tea flavoured with yak butter.) This is basically a grilled cheesey kinda thing with eggplant instead of bread, topped with tomatoes and parsley, and I totally ripped the idea off from Mr. Red-Clogs, Mario Batali. He had a last step to the recipe which involved putting the whole shebang -- including the topper tomatoes -- back in the oven, but I said "pah!" to that and decided that I wanted to contrast the molten mozzarella goodness with fresh tomatoes. When we get a little further into fall though, and fresh tomatoes are no longer available, I imagine this same little nosh would be very good topped with a little homemade tomato sauce. Recipe here.

Custardy Quiche

Quiche is good for brunches, of course, but I really love it as a light summer dinner. A slice (or three) of silky, custardy quiche, a little salad, a glass of crisp white wine...good for company, too, because the quiche can be made the day before.

When I'm in a lazy mood and don't want to wash so many dishes (this happens, not surprisingly, pretty often) I just buy a premade pie crust. Shocking, I know. There are a couple of good ones out there, though. Whole Foods carries a "natural" pie crust which tastes pretty good, but is prone to cracking in the freezer (and later, in the oven) which is kind of a problem for quiche because the egg mixture seeps under the cracks. I like the flavor, but I'm irritated about the cracking problem. Pillsbury makes a rolled-up pie crust which is usually sold in the refrigerator case along with the tubes of cookie dough and cardboard cylinders of biscuits and crescent rolls. I don't know how they do it, but it's actually quite decent in both flavor and texture -- rare qualities in this type of convenience product.

This recipe is pretty much taken from Alton Brown's quiche in I'm Just Here for More Food, though I use less milk and cream and eliminate the pancetta. Not that I have anything against pancetta, I just don't like anything getting between me and the flavor of the goat cheese. I use Laura Chenel goat cheese, or Humboldt Fog, because they're both good and produced regionally. They come in 5oz logs, so after making a quiche I usually have enough left over to make a grilled cheese sandwich or two.

If you are smarter than I am, you will probably remember (after making the quiche for the billionth time) that chives will float straight to the top of the quiche if they are not restrained. To keep them in the middle of the quiche, either smoosh them into the goat cheese, or make sure they are partially covered by the onions and cheese before you add the egg mixture to the dish. If not, no big deal, the chives are good wherever they are. Sound good? The recipe is here.

Begin with a Nibble

When I have company over, I always like to have a little cheese tray out so everyone can have a little nibble, drink some wine, and chat. It's a really classic, elegant way to start a dinner party, and it takes a hell of a lot less time to put together than a tray of fussy hors d'oeuvres. I think that doing a good cheese tray requires some thoughtfulness and planning, though, so I thought I'd give a little explanation of how I do mine.

My game plan for a cheese plate is to have something sweet, something savoury, some good bread or crackers, and maybe some marcona almonds or other good nuts. Sometimes I put out a few different kinds of cheese, but the other night we just had Jason's friend Ed and Ed's six-year-old son over, so I went with just one wedge of a standout cheese -- creamy, buttery St. Andre. This has been one of my favorite cheeses since college, when my roommate and I would breakfast on little slices of St. Andre toasted in whole wheat pita bread.

I always, always, always want something on the plate to cleanse the palate -- especially if I'm putting out olives (don't forget a little plate or bowl for pits), or a really strong cheese such as a gorgonzola. Grapes are perfect for that. I also like to put out two kinds of bread or cracker, since not everyone likes the same kinds. On this plate, I used original flavor Mary's Gone Crackers, which are really cruncy and nutty and delicious (and gluten free, to boot), and theoretically chive-flavored crackers from the Fine Cheese Co. I say "theoretically" because even though these crackers looked like they had little flecks of green, I could not discern any chive flavor. I won't be buying those again -- they were okay tasting, but not good enough to justify the price.

When I'm putting out more than one cheese, I try to think about what my guests like and how the cheeses will go with the meal as a whole. I think it's a bad idea to use a really pungent cheese before the meal, because such strong flavors can blow out your palate too early in the meal -- though if you're doing a cheese tasting at the end of a meal, a really stinky Gorgonzola would be great (I'd like it with some dried fruits and toasted nuts). To make everyone happy, I usually include one brie-like cheese and one sharp cheddar, and then go with whatever I feel like having for a third cheese. Cheeses should always be served at room temperature to really show off their flavors, so be sure to take them out of the fridge a couple of hours before your guests arrive.

One last thing I always try to think about is color -- cheese and bread alone on a plate is monochromatic and boring. Depending on what you're serving, use grapes, olives, roasted bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, fresh herbs, apples, pears, or other fruits and vegetables to brighten things up. Use a plain, clean white plate as your canvas, and all the colors will stand out beautifully.