Milk: Yogurt v. yogurt v. yogurt

Do Americans fail to appreciate plain yogurt because commercial plain yogurt is so vile? Or is commercial plain yogurt so vile because nobody really cares? 

I've been making a lot of yogurt lately using Anne Mendelson's super-easy recipe from Milk, and decided to run a test.  I made one batch of yogurt with standard nonorganic whole milk and another with Straus unhomogenized organic milk, a local brand. Full disclosure: I am deeply attached to Straus, which comes in old-fashioned bottles with the cream on top and is incredibly expensive. I need any reason to justify buying it.

Interesting, watching the two milks heat in pans side by side as the supermarket milk was the shocking white of Elmer's glue while the Straus milk was a light buttery yellow.

My father came over shortly after the yogurt was finished, and we did a blind test. His answers were exactly the same as mine. Next to homemade yogurt, the commercial yogurt -- and this was a decent brand, Brown Cow -- was thin, sour, and basically lousy. The other two were almost identical, thick, creamy, and sweet-tart. There was a tiny bit more flavor to the Straus yogurt, but you really had to concentrate to detect it. 

I can no longer justify Straus milk for yogurt making. But I do think that if you want to appreciate yogurt qua yogurt, you need to make your own. It's vastly better. On the other hand, if all you're going to do is put it in a cake or biscuits making yogurt is a waste of valuable time you could spend watching Gossip Girl or reading a good book.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth

Making marshmallows was the bribe to get Owen to finish his homework* on Thursday night, as I'd recently read this by Molly Wizenberg, which made it seem totally doable. (Interesting piece. I love Orangette, but she and I are cut from different cloth. If I'd come home and found my boyfriend making marshmallows, I would have put on a game face but been deeply bummed. I'm more of this type.)

To make our marshmallows, I chose a recipe from Ina Garten. In short, you pour boiling sugar syrup into a bowl of softened gelatin then beat the hell out of it for fifteen minutes, preferably in a stand mixer. Spread the fluff in a pan and let it dry overnight. 

In the morning, cut into squares and dust with powdered sugar. I don't even like marhsmallows, but ate a bunch of these because they were so irresistibly fluffy. 

Fun project. Highly recommend. 

*Homework was a description of someone "important" in his life. He chose me. His opening line: "My mom has brown hair and small brown eyes. "

Emphasis mine.

April 3 $$

So much to report, but I'm too stuffed with pork belly to remain upright. Tomorrow, all about pork belly, plus homemade marshmallows, yogurt vs. yogurt, lemon tart, and our baby apricot tree.

Tonight, just expenses. I made one trip to Safeway because my father was coming over and he likes a martini before dinner. Bought a big jug of vodka (so much cheaper when you buy the giant bottle), a package of cupcake sleeves, and some Kerr canning jars. Do I count the jars and cupcake sleeves as food? Executive decision: no. Vodka? Of course.

Vodka   $28.99

Total:  $28.99

I don't drink vodka anymore, but a girl has to take care of her pops. Plus, he brought me five more pounds of lemons from his insane tree. Man should open a lemon stand. 

All in all, a fiscally decent day.

April 2 $$

I was in San Francisco yesterday and found myself on Clement Street, which is death on the budget because everything is a bargain. Funny how that works. 

-mace, Aleppo pepper, honey candy from Haig's: $7.57

-5 lbs. pork belly, long beans, ginger, kumquats, 4 bunches of green onions from the New May Wah Market: $21.33

-Mark bought a cup of coffee: $1.29

-Owen's school lunch: $4.75

-Isabel's school lunch: $5

TOTAL: $39.94

I have to buy something whenever I go into Haig's because I ardently love that little store and will cry if/when it goes out of business. Also, the mace was in "blade" form. Exciting.

We'll use all the New May Wah purchases pretty quickly. Look at that ginger:

Just incredible, so much fatter and juicier than the shriveled stalks at Whole Foods and it's a quarter the price. It's from China but I don't think you can put melamine in ginger.

The school lunches are stupid and overpriced, but the kids like pizza day and I don't want to be stingy. 

Fat: Just like in that show with Colin Firth

There's a virtuous, pallid and purportedly beautiful young woman we're all supposed to revere even though she's boring as all hell. Let's call her pork loin. She has a saucy, less conventionally pretty sister who anyone with a trace of discernment recognizes as the real prize because she's playful and witty. That's pork butt.

Everyone always ends up coming around to the fun sister in fiction, but not so in the supermarket. I totally do not get why loin costs more than butt when the butt is so clearly the superior meat, moister, tastier, far easier to cook. They practically give it away. Because it's called "butt" instead of "shoulder," which is the anatomically correct designation? Pork shoulder is so declasse you sometimes can't even find it at Whole Foods. White people are nuts.

I know a dozen great ways to cook pork butt, but carnitas is probably the best. I made Jennifer McLagan's recipe last night out of Fat and it was amazing -- succulent, tender, richly satisfying. There seem to be two schools of carnitas preparation: one advocates serving the meat in discrete briquet-like chunks with a crusty fried shell (I had this variety at Mexico DF last weekend) and the other goes for shredded, soft meat with crispy and fatty bits all mixed up together. McLagan's carnitas fall into the latter category which made me happy because it is the better way. 

Her recipe is simple: marinate pork for two days in orange juice, cook slowly for a long time, then evaporate out the liquid and fry. I served this incredible meat with tortillas, avocado, and McLagan's refried beans which were good, though I did think 2/3 cup of lard was excessive for a half pound of dried beans. I'd rather spend calories on carnitas.

 

Dessert was brown butter ice cream which had a lovely nutty flavor, but was -- surprise -- kind of rich and left a film on the spoon. Owen, however, was undeterred and ate two giant bowls. He also had it for breakfast today because he was late and it was a bad morning and I figured: eggs, dairy and sugar are just pancakes in another form, minus the work and flour.

 

McLagan's burnt butter cookies: delicious.

April 1 $$

New month, new resolution to track our food expenses. 

-two chocolates* at Cocoa Bella for sustenance while shopping: $3.75

-Mark bought a microwave burrito for lunch at work: $3.99

TOTAL: $7.74

*incredible chocolates -- one was filled with dried pear. Almost worth it.

 

Jeans are important

If you want food commentary I'm sending you here today, because I have new jeans and I'm so excited I can hardly type straight. It's possible to live in America and not own a properly fitting pair of jeans, but let me tell you, it's horrible. I was three years in the desert trying to work the skirts. I had a too-tight pair of jeans that left welts on my belly when I could button them at all, and a saggy pair that made me feel like a molting snake. Not a long thin snake, a fat snake, like a boa constrictor. Hate those saggy jeans. Hate. 

Fixed all that today. Thank-you Bloomingdale's sale. It's like recovering from the flu, putting on a pair of perfectly fitting jeans. If you're wondering why it took me so long to do something so eminently sensible as shop for jeans in my actual size, you're clearly a sane woman who's never suffered the illusion that the diet starts tomorrow with complete physical transformation to follow. Or, you are a man. These were absurdly expensive jeans, even on sale. Worth it. I bought the boot-cut pair above* and also the gray ones below.

I know. They're skinny jeans. But I had to have them, Layne. Maybe this is my foolish midlife crisis purchase, the equivalent of the balding man's Porsche. But cheaper.

Okay. Satisfaction expressed. Back to food.

*That's not me. As if I really needed to tell you.

Milk: Chicken dinner

  My chicken in milk didn't look like the Kitchn's (above.)  It was slovenly and piebald and both wings fell off. Tasted good, though I will probably go back to roasting for purposes of simplicity and spiffy presentation.

The accompanying barley-and-whey pilaf from Anne Mendelson's recipe was just the kind of rib-sticking porridge you imagine people eating at a creepy inn in a Dickens novel. I mean that in a nice way! But it's not something I'm gonna make very often or ever again, particularly as my offspring were unenthusiastic. Whey's highest and best use is probably in bread dough. 

Although. Do I know that? It could be my imagination that all breads and bagels taste better when made with whey. A side-by-side bakeoff is called for but, man, so much work and who do I think I am, Christopher Kimball?

Milk: I want a cow more than ever

Too tired to structure a narrative, so: 

-Whole Foods charges $6.50 for an eight-ounce tub of mascarpone, but you can make it in your very own kitchen using the simple recipe in Anne Mendelson's Milk and it will set you back just over $3. It's a fascinating and empowering process, making mascarpone, a dairy product I had always assumed you had to be either rich or Italian to keep in your fridge. Incorrect. Here are some other mascarpone recipes, in case you don't want to buy Milk. (Though you should because it's brilliant.) Aside from Lynne Rossetto Kasper's unbelievable semifreddo, I don't currently have many uses for mascarpone but it is so delicious I'm going to find some. 

-Mendelson's saag paneer is vastly better than Mark Bittman's slapdash recipe, reinforcing my theory that he's an admirable generalist but whenever possible you should refer to a specialist.

-Why can my neighbors have a screeching leaf blower and we can't have a cow? Alright, I get why we can't have a cow, but why not two mini La Mancha goats? Is bleating anywhere near as irritating as a leaf blower?

-We're having this chicken for dinner which is from neither of my current cookbooks, but sounded so incredible I had to change plans. Also: barley pilaf cooked in whey from Anne Mendelson's recipe. After an hour on the stove it resembles gruel but tastes like risotto. 

-I've been neglecting Fat, but have a full-Fat meal planned for tomorrow that includes carnitas, refried beans, and brown-butter ice cream.  

Fat: Breton butter cake baked & bees ordered

Pretty and delicious cake made from a Jennifer McLagan recipe, but I'm too distracted and nervous right now to focus on pastry. I just ordered our Italian bees -- two 3-lb. packages -- to arrive on April 25. I feel like the person who sold them should have done an assessment to see if I'm actually a fit keeper for thousands and thousands of tiny lives. I'm not sure that I am, but will try to rise to the occasion. 

Bees: We're getting them

Introduction to beekeeping seminar: huge success. Fellow students were about evenly mixed between hard-of-hearing retired people and scrawny young men with scraggly little ponytails and ear tunnels. And then there was me, the only non-ancient square person. Though I'm not, by instinct, a lover of bees, Doug , our enthusiastic and very entertaining teacher (see left), made me want to install hives not just in my own back yard, but in the yards of everyone I know. So watch out.

It appears we can get completely outfitted for about $300, then spend 30 minutes a week on maintenance, and hope that none of the many sad fates that befall honeybee colonies (diseases, mites, skunks, drought) befall ours. Eventually, if all goes well, we will have a happy garden, happy bees, and absurd amounts of honey.

I'm only worried it's too late to order bees for this spring. Calling tomorrow. Next: chickens.

Will she or won't she?

My grandfather, a cattle rancher, used to let a beekeeper put boxes on his land and one day my family was out riding around and a bee got caught in my hair. I was fifteen or so, definitely too old to be undone by a bee. But I was undone by this bee. It was buzzing in my ear and wildly thrashing to get free of the hair and I began to cry, shaking my head and batting at it and kicking my horse. I behaved about as rationally as the bee; my parents must have been so proud. Eventually the poor bee stung me on the scalp and died. I was very aggrieved because my family seemed to find my panic amusing and uncool.

That was my last close encounter with a bee and it seems doubtful that I'm cut out to be a beekeeper. But I recently read Fruitless Fall*, a beautiful, troubling book about the mysterious decline in the honeybee population and it inspired me to sign up for a free amateur beekeeping seminar. That's today. I like the idea of of playing some tiny role in helping the bees and I like the idea of suburban hives. Good for the bees, good for the fruit trees, good for honey. Plus, the Obamas are doing it.

But liking the idea of something is very different from liking the thing itself, and I remain extremely wary of Apis mellifera. There's the swarming, the tiny, vibrating, hairy bodies, the stinging. I'm going to try to see the beauty and the mystery and master my fear, become an Earth Mother and wipe the knowing smirks of my parents' faces. I'm giving it my all. Will report back.

*highly recommend even if you don't think you're interested in bees as it is incredibly well written and you will soon realize that you are actually very interested in bees.

Fat & Milk: Thin is the new impossible

Eating hot french fries showered in salt at your own kitchen table is an ecstatic experience, especially if you allow yourself fries as seldom as I do. A dish of mayonnaise would have made it even better, but I like to be able to see my feet when I look down. 

I fried half the potatoes in lard, which is what Jennifer McLagan recommends in Fat, the other half in peanut oil, then asked the kids to do a blind taste test. 

Owen declared himself a fan of the fries on the left (lard) while Isabel and Juliet preferred the fries on the right (peanut oil.) I wanted to back the lard, but have to side with the girls. Though it wasn't in any way offensive, lard (this lard, anyway) contributes a faint flavor to a fry that I am at a loss to describe. It's just there. I'm sure oil has a flavor too, but we've come to believe, perhaps wrongly, that oil is just the flavor of french fries.

Hardly matters. All fries disappeared in fifteen minutes, lard and peanut oil versions both. No one bothered with subtle distinctions.

I also served mango "milkshake" which was actually mango lassi made from Anne Mendelson's Milk. Like all mango lassis I've made (which is to say, one, thirteen years ago) this one involved blending yogurt, fresh mango, ice, and a little sugar. Delicious. I probably oversold the drink by promising "milkshakes" but 2/3 of the children present ended up drinking all their lassi. This was the vegetable course.

The shortbread: good, but too soft. I've put it back in the oven this morning to see if it can toast up a little bit. Maybe a wedge before spin class?

Speaking of traditionally-built women, this is very exciting.

Milk & Fat: The children have spoken . . .

and we want french fries. Mark is out of town, in Florida, the bum. So we're eating like they did in Mermaids 'cause women only cook balanced to show off for men. Once the master departs the premises, the nutritional gatekeeper takes a break. Why is that? 

Tonight we're having: mango "milkshakes"* (made from Anne Mendelson's Milk), homemade french fries and shortbread (both cooked out of Jennifer McLagan's Fat.) I was leaning toward McLagan's salted caramel tart, the photo of which is one of the loveliest things I've ever laid eyes on, but Isabel was adamant about shortbread.

Gonna cook some of the fries in oil and some in lard, for comparison purposes. I wish I had some duck fat. (Owen just read this over my shoulder and said, "Well, I'm glad you DON'T have duck fat.") 

 

It's one of those mornings when I feel so lazy I almost want to let him stay home so I don't have to get dressed and drive to the elementary school. Have considered going in my robe, but then how will I ever attract a mate? Oh, wait. . . forgot myself for a moment. Sorry, Mark.

*there's a trick, but I'm not telling until tomorrow when the "shakes" have been drunk.

Milk: Panna cotta

The picture, ugh. Sorry. It was fantastic and really beautiful, trust me. Panna cotta, like puff pastry, is one of those desserts with an undeserved reputation for extravagance. We should all be making panna cotta all the time until the recession/depression ends because it tastes luxurious and isn't. Even using the most expensive local organic milk and cream (Straus), the ingredients to make six servings cost me $4.39. That's roughly 75 cents for a dessert they sell for $12 at glitzy big city restaurants. It'll be plated prettier and gussied up and someone else will do the dishes, but the panna cotta itself won't be any better. Impossible.

 

Panna Cotta (adapted from Anne Mendelson's Milk)

1. Lightly oil 6 ramekins using a neutral-flavored oil.

2. Put 1 envelope of gelatin in a saucepan and stir in 1 cup milk, 2 cups heavy cream (preferably not ultra-pasteurized), 2/3 cup sugar, and a pinch of salt. Bring just to a boil and remove from heat. Cool slightly. Stir again. Pour into the ramekins and chill until set.

 

3. When you're ready to eat, bring a saucepan of water to a simmer, dip the bottom of each ramekin in the water for a few seconds. Run a knife around the edge of the cream, invert on a dessert plate, and shake until it comes loose. Serve with a fruit sauce.*

See how easy? 

*I cooked down some frozen strawberries with water and sugar, then mashed it all up, hence inelegant photograph. Tasted wonderful.

Fat: Lard, no. . . lardons, oui!

More than any other food, fat is a vehicle for our cultural biases, and no fat is more reviled in the United States than lard. (Ok, maybe tallow. Trans-fats don't count 'cause they're fake.) Lard is what the Deliverance hillbillies spread on their Wonder bread before going out to sodomize city slickers. A big iron cauldron bubbling in a barnyard, a screaming pig, a slatternly woman missing a few teeth. . . that's lard. 

Lardo, on the other hand, is the ambrosial Italian pork fat with which Mario Batali tops his expensive pizzas at Otto. What a difference an "o" can make. And lardons? Succulent chunks of bacon on French frisee salads. Not just yummy but healthy and slimming! Clever French people. Duck and goose fat: also glamorous because they're French. Would restaurants still tout their "duck fat fries" if duck were the preferred cooking fat of El Salvador?

 

Meanwhile, chicken schmaltz is considered a little icky because Jews aren't as cool as the French. Chicken fat isn't, however, as icky as lard. No one is lower on the social hierarchy than white trash.*

The recent "nose-to-tail" sustainability movement has redeemed many unpopular parts of the pig and maybe soon we'll get over our silly lard-phobia which, as Jennifer McLagan persuasively argues in Fat, is completely irrational. Today I used some of my (overly) bounteous supply of home-rendered lard in a Shaker bread recipe courtesy of Bernard Clayton's invaluable Book of Breads.

Nothing special, perfectly pleasant,  no telltale "piggy" flavor. 

I also made Spanish-style lard cookies from McLagan's recipe, cookies that I will henceforth call by their daintier Spanish name, polvorones, as I do not want to have to eat all of them by myself.

 

You make McLagan's polvorones by toasting ground almonds and flour, then mixing them with lard, orange zest, cinnamon, sugar, egg, and brandy. Bake for half an hour at a low temperature. I was skeptical of a lard cookie -- I only talk a good game -- but in fact, these were excellent, lightly spiced and shatteringly crisp. It's the lard! Or so I like to think. 

You can read my story about the Obama vegetable garden here. 

*You also find a lot of lard in soul food and Mexican cooking. I rest my case.

Fat & Milk: Food processing

I rendered an 8-pound behemoth of lard on Friday, a peaceful & pleasant all-day process that yielded more than a gallon of liquid pig fat the color of butterscotch. Immensely satisfying, pouring all that lard into little white tubs, labeling and sticking in the freezer. I've rendered lard before, but never this much, and never such expensive (ergo good? I hope? please?) lard. 

What to do with all that pedigreed fat I've no idea, but will figure out. Meanwhile, I put aside a tiny bit to make the lovely, fragile lard pastry from Jennifer McLagan's Fat, which I used for the buttermilk pie out of Anne Mendelson's Milk. The whole thing (see above) was delectable and handsome and, for once, handsomely photographed.

This morning: bagels and cream cheese.

Made the bagels, made the cream cheese. The chewy bagels are baked from the outstanding recipe in Bernard Clayton's Book of Breads. This is the second batch of the week, and I've never made anything more popular with finical children and spouse. I'm not Jewish, I'm not from New York City, and the perfect bagel is not my Lost Chord (that would be the Maddox spoon roll) so I don't claim authority. But I have eaten thousands of bagels over the years, and never encountered any as good as these. More about bagel-making in a future post.

The cream cheese, concocted from Milk, was not so fabulous. You warm up milk, cream, and a little buttermilk, add a crushed rennet tablet (as in Junket) and let sit in a quiet corner for a day where it will ripen into something with the texture of sour cream. You pour this into a cheesecloth-lined sieve, tie the cloth up around the ball of semisolid dairy product, hang it over the sieve to drain for a few hours, then top with weights or heavy cans to press out the remaining whey (which you can use to make incredible bread. . . or bagels.) Sounds complicated, isn't. The resulting "cream cheese" is loose and tart, more suited to topping a baked potato than a bagel. I might try again making some slight alterations. Or not. 

Rendering lard, a tutorial

Almost as easy as boiling water. In the morning, preheat the oven to 250. Start with a chunk of butt-ugly lard that looks something like that, cut it into pieces and place in a wide dutch oven with a cup or so of water that will keep the lard from burning in the early stages and eventually evaporate away. In her fine book, Fat, Jennifer McLagan suggests dicing the lard into small cubes but there's a lot of connective tissue and such that made this too difficult for lazy me, so I just broke off hunks the size of my forearm. All was perfectly well. The pot goes into the oven where the lard gently spatters and melts all day long, filling the house with a mysterious perfume that some might find offensive, but I rather enjoyed.

 

Midway through the afternoon you take out the pot and ladle some of the luminous golden liquid into a cheesecloth-lined sieve set over a bowl. When you've extracted as much as you can, return the pot to the oven where the diminished chunks of fat will continue to melt and shrink for a few more hours. When you've retrieved every precious drop of rendered lard, throw away the greasy, shriveled bits left in the pan. They look like they might be yummy with salt and lime juice, but aren't. 

Lard goes in containers in refrigerator to solidify, then into the freezer.

Far from grotesque, I found this to be a thrilling and primal food processing experience. 

A riveting garden update

Unlike some people, I've been having mixed luck with seeds this year. There's a tiny, tragic graveyard of onion seedlings out on my deck; I set them there to get some fresh spring air, and they keeled over dead. I was sad.

On the other hand, who cares about onions when you have asparagus? See above. Very intrepid and cute. They were the last seed to germinate and I'd despaired, but then they all shot up a few weeks ago and have been impossible to discourage. Also doing well are the tomatoes, eggplants, and artichokes. The cardoon crop has already failed -- I pulled up one of the corpses and it had an 8-inch root, so I think it was feeling cramped in the little pot. I'm going to try planting cardoons directly in the soil when I have found a place for a dedicated bed. You can hardly ever find cardoons at the farmers' market and they're delicious, though I've never figured out how to cook them right. 

Also, I'm worried about the worm box. Essentially, the seething masses of worms have ceased seething. I have theories about what's gone wrong, but it's too disgusting to describe in detail.  

 

Fat: Rhubarb is so pretty

Six months ago we were a dual income family with our pride and our busy schedules and our plans. Now, I'm doing a PhD in home economics, and though Mark survived yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle bloodbath, his spirits and ego and morale have been shredded but good. If you ask me, the writing is on the wall for newspapers. This recession/depression is the Dust Bowl for journalists, and I have no idea where we're all going to end up. Mark watched talented colleagues who've given thirty years to the paper being dumped like migrant day workers following a paint-stripping job. It's enough to make you lose your appetite.

But this is a food blog, and that's the rhubarb king's cake from Jennifer McLagan's Fat, a lovely looking thing that I did not execute quite perfectly. You make puff pastry, mix some frangipane (sugar, almonds, rum, butter), cook rhubarb. Roll out half the puff pastry in a circle, top with frangipane and rhubarb. . .

then top with a larger disc of pastry.  I think I overstuffed it, because juices oozed and made the pastry soggy. I don't have a picture of the finished product; it wasn't a thing of beauty. 

But. . . puff pastry! If I have one thought for these dark days, it's that so long as we can afford the butter, we should all be making puff pastry all the time. I'm always put off by the length of puff pastry recipes but when you actually execute one you realize it contains multiple repetitions of motions any chimp could perform: roll out dough, fold like a letter, put in refrigerator. That's 80% of a puff pastry recipe. And while the rhubarb kings cake did not turn out as I had hoped, the scraps rolled into crispy, sugary palmiers were fit for a queen.

This was also, sigh, the night of the braised oxtail. My stout-hearted father kept saying, don't be a ninny, it tastes just like short ribs. Which it does. The meat was succulent, the flavors excellent, and it's not the fault of the recipe that while I can eat liver, tripe, and marrow the sight of a knobby vertebrae on my plate turns my stomach. This is my second attempt to cook and savor oxtail, and probably my last. 

I also made McLagan's buttery pureed potatoes which were indeed, as she puts it, "worth every calorie." I just wish so-called comfort food really could provide comfort.