Gone and Goner

Hi. It’s been a while, but Trieu and I have had some big changes in our lives. We have moved from “our little place” (see About tab) to “our new little place” in Boulder, Colorado.

We occupy the top floor, above our super-cool landlords, Bill and Cher, and their super-cute dog, Tongue-a (not sure about the spelling here … definitely sounds like Tonga, but I know the name was inspired by said pup’s tongue). Our place is now literally little, especially the kitchen. This has presented many challenges to the anal-retentive perfectionist cook in our household (ahem … me). First and formost is the oven. Compare and contrast Santa Cruz (at top; the oven is barely in the picture … but note how there was enough space for both of us to cook (gasp) at one time) and Boulder (at bottom):


While our new oven has its advantages, e.g. it heats up in about 20 minutes, it can’t fit a baker’s half-sheet. The springs that hold the door closed are also broken, which accounts for our super-high-tech bungee cord closure system. I have already built up some aggression toward this oven, and it has only been two months. I’m working on letting go …

Next on my hit list is the lack of counter space. Whereas in Santa Cruz I could create messes anywhere I pleased and not really be hindered, in Boulder I have about four square feet to work with. So if I leave something out, I fully have to deal with it. I am hoping this helps me become a better clean-as-you-go kind of cook. Or at least improves my ability to be patient in the kitchen. Or something.

Finally, there is the altitude. It’s really tough to bake here. I mean really tough. The first cake I’ve attempted was carrot cake from The Silver Palate cookbook, which has a really firm crumb. Mistakenly, I thought it would hold up. I did all the stuff recommended in various sources: cutting back on leaveners, adding more flour, less sugar, etc. etc., but my cake still sank in the middle. Yikes! I’ve got to work on this.

Our old view.

Trieu is working pretty long hours at his new job while I finish up my dissertation, and I’ve been thinking that I should be more dilligent about this blog. I have some free time, and I would like to catalogue the big adjustments I am making in terms of ingredients and my cooking style, which will hopefully become reflective of our new home. Colorado has been good to us thus far, and has provided plenty of new cooking challenges. I can’t say I haven’t missed Santa Cruz, the ocean, or the abundant and cheap farmers market. I definitely have my moments. But for the most part, Trieu and I are trying to make the most of the mountains, the prairie, and new friends and foods.

Our new view.

Chocolate Ecstasy Cake

Ingrid makes the best chocolate cake in the world. I’ll leave it to her to reveal her secret, but here’s a picture for you to drool on.

Neufchatel Cheese

It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything. That’s not only because we’ve been lazy, but also because we’ve been gone to Hawaii (please shed a extra tear for us). Actually, we’ve been quite busy and have not fulfilled our blogging duties (esp. Ingrid!).

Since the last posting, Ingrid has been on a broth kick. She’s made veggie soup broth and a seafood broth that required us seeking out a whole fish head. This is not so uncommon to my upbringing, but Ingrid was a little grossed by the process of de-braining the fish head. I have to say that she was quite a trooper about it though, much more than the duck we prepared a few years ago. Anyway, she made Tom Yum with the broth and it was truly Tom Yummy. We went to Corralitos meat market last weekend and got not only the best sausages in the world, but some beef bones to make more broth. I made about a gallon, so our freezer is official brothed out.

I have also been busy making bread. I’ve finally found a good recipe for a baguette from “The Village Bakery,” which is written by the people at Gayle’s in Capitola. I also got some good tips/inspiration from Matt Johnson down in Pasadena. In the meanwhile, the weather has been crazy here, oscillating from record highs to much-needed torrential and persistent downpours. Our garden plans are getting a little whacked where things are already flowering, and yet the blooms are getting knocked silly from the storms. Deniers of global climate change, where are you now? However, we have managed to turn in the fava beans and our compost to fix the soil. The compost was really nice this year with lots of worms, so it looks like we’re ready to plant soon. Now to some cheesemaking…

I made Neufchatel cheese by a similar process as the Lactic Cheese. However, Neufchatel has a wayyyy fancier name and includes a little bit of cream. Unfortunately, we don’t have any liquid rennet so I had to try to dilute the tablet and so the amount of rennet is really unknown. Tip to cheesemakers everywhere: Never buy tablet rennet. Get liquid rennet only. That’s my one gripe with Ricki Carroll’s New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, why do you provide tablets in any kit? Anyway, here’s the recipe:

1. Combine half gallon of pasteurized whole milk and 1 cup of pasteurized heavy cream and heat to 80 F (pasteurized is important because you’re not heating it very much).
2. Add 4 ounces of mesophilic starter (this is the one that Ingrid made and we froze).
3. Add 1 teaspoon of diluted rennet (3 drops in 1/3 cup cool unchlorinated water).
4. Cover and let set in > 72 F for 12-18 hours until a yogurty curd forms.
5. Pour the curd into a colander lined with butter muslin, tie, and hang for 6-12 hours until the desired consistency.
6. Put the bag in a colander lined with butter muslin, place the colander in a pot, and place a weight (2 bricks) on a plate on the bag.
7. Cover the pot and refrigerate for 13 hours.
8. Remove he cheese from the bag and put in a bowl. Knead briefly by hand and add salt/herbs if desired.
9. Shape into patties and wrap in cheese wrap.

Here’s where we deviate: Instead of using liquid rennet, I just used 1/8 of a tablet and tried to dilute it in water. I had to let it sit for ~21 hours in step 4 because the timing wasnt right. I also left it in the fridge for about 16 hours instead of 13. I doubt that makes a difference.

The cheese tastes very similar to the lactic cheese though the consistency is a little firmer. It looks pretty much the same too. We’ll probably enjoy it this weekend with our family after spicing it up a little bit. I may make some bread for it. We’ll see.

Silence of the Lamb Chops

A week ago we had Yvonne, Myla and Jeremy from the lab over for dinner, and I was going to make stewed osso bucco. But we had an unseasonably warm week, and somehow a heavy, filling stew just didn’t seem right. So I kept with the lamb but tried to lighten it to match the weather, which to me felt like late summer/early fall. The recipe I used was an adapation from Donna Hay’s Instant Entertaining, and is the perfect match of savory to sweet (in my opinion). The only other noteworthy thing about the meal was that Myla is gluten-allergic, so all the food was gluten-free, with mixed success. Below are some polenta flats I attempted to make. They were probably the worst part of the meal, actually. I boiled 3 c water with 1 c polenta and 2 tsp salt for about 10 minutes. That was way too much salt! After the polenta was done cooking, I put it in cleaned and lightly oiled cans (we made burritos the night before so I used the refried beans cans, but one could make them any size one wanted) and refrigerated until cool. When I pushed the polenta out, Trieu sliced it into rounds. That is about all he did for the meal (but it was an important job, actually; I am terrible at slicing things uniformly). Then I broiled the rounds. This was also a mistake – or at least I went about it in a mistaken way. I should have broiled on high for a short time so that the rounds were mostly soft. What I did was broil on low for a long time, so when the rounds cooled, they were hard. They looked nice, I guess.

I made a spread of olives, tomatoes and artichoke hearts with roasted sage. We also put some of our homemade lactic cheese out, rolled in chopped pistachios and bibir (pepper flakes we discovered in Turkey. I think the closest thing to it around here would be pimenton, which is a spicy form of paprika. One could add a little ground red chili for good measure).

Below is the lamb before it was baked. I pan fried the chops to brown and then smothered them with fresh mint, honey and whole-grain mustard. The chops were rubbed with a generous dose of salt and pepper before I fried them, of course.

A nice picture taken by Jeremy. The side dishes were potatoes and lemon-butter spinach, which leads me to the second-worst part of the meal: the potatoes, which weren’t cooked all the way through. I was too cheap to pay for the delicious fingerlings at the farmer’s market, so I chose something inferior and saved myself $1.50. Lesson learned.

But all in all, it was pretty fun, and pretty good eating. There are no pictures of dessert, which was a New York cheesecake with a gluten-free crust (1c. finely chopped pecans, 2c. Pamela’s baking flour, 1/2c. brown sugar, 2/3 c. cold butter, cinnamon; this makes too much for a 10-inch round). I was amazed at the crust, which was soft and sweet and a little crunchy from the pecans. It was a completely different, but not inferior, alternative to graham crackers. The cheesecake was a little heavy for the meal and appetizers, but I had been craving it for a while, so I selfishly went with my gut. Hopefully, Trieu was the only one I gave indigestion with this meal…

I don’t have good wine suggestions because I don’t know anything about wine. But I will think about it.

Lemongrass is always greener…except with turmeric

We have a beautiful lemongrass bush growing like mad in the garden. Last night, I decided to try to use it and recreate an old Vietnamese dish from my mom. Lemongrass sells for $18 a lb at New Leaf so it’s nice to be able to use a shovel to break some off, rather than spend a fortune on it. here’re some pictures before I slaughtered the lemongrass stalk:

yup, looks like grass. Anyway, I used a lb of firm tofu and about a lb of red snapper (only to remember that snapper is one of the “bad” fishes to get after I got home). Here’s the recipe for the tofu (the fish is the same):

1. Clean and grind up a few stalks of lemongrass in a food processor (you can save the unused lemongrass in a ziploc bag in the freezer).
2. Cut up the tofu to whatevever size you want, let the blocks drain, and pat them down with a paper towel to get as dry as possible.
3. Place 3-4 tablespoons of ground lemongrass in a container (that fits the tofu) with a tight lid (tupperware works fine).
4. Mix 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric with the lemongrass.
5. Add salt and fresh chili pepper flakes to the mix and shake the container to mix the marinade.
6. Place tofu in the container, close the lid, and shake (not too hard or the tofu will break up).
7. Let marinate.
8. Pan fry or deep fry and serve.

I deep fried the tofu and the fish, but really should have pan fried them as the deep-fryer knocked off a lot of the lemongrass and pepper. Also, I did not dry the tofu (or fish) well enough. The drier the better.

You can serve this with anything you want. On saturday, Ingrid and I went to the farmer’s market late and they were closing down their stalls. We decided to split up to expedite the shopping. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a plan so we ended up buying the exact same things: two bunchs of chard and two heads of cabbage. When life deals you chard and cabbage, you make chard and cabbage stir-fry.

In the end, it turned out ok, but nothing like how my mom makes it…

Lactic Cheese

Last night and today, Ingrid and I decided to make lactic cheese. We have only recently started making cheese (I’ve made a few batches of mozzarella that turned out OK) and all of our cheese knowledge comes from Ricki Carroll at the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. She is known as the home cheesemaking queen and clearly has more cheese knowledge than I can ever hope to have.

Also, we would like to tell you all about Strauss family creamery where we have started to get most of our dairy products from. Strauss milks comes from those re-usable glass jugs like in Leave it to Beaver. Unfortunately, we don’t have a milkman delivering the milk (enter milkman joke about my wife here).

Lactic cheese is an easy-to-make soft cheese that you can season with whatever you want. Here’s a brief recipe (see Ricki Carroll’s book for the full recipe):

1. Heat 1 gallon of pasteurized milk by using a warm water bath.
2. Add 4 ounces of prepared mesophilic starter and mix thoroughly.
3. Add diluted rennet (just a little bit) and slowly stir gently in milk.
4. Cover and let set for ~12 hours at room temperature until solid curd forms with a yogurt consistency.
5. Pour curds in a colander lined with butter muslin (a finer cheesecloth).
6. Tie the muslin and hang for 6-12 hours at room temperature.
7. Add herbs and salt as needed.
8. Cover and store (should make ~2 lbs).

We didn’t quite follow the recipe that well. Of course we deviated like hell and it was a bit of a sloppy process (fine by me, not fine by Ingrid). We don’t know the conversion from rennet tablets to the drops of rennet called for in the recipe so we just guestimated (we used 1/8 of a vegetable rennet tablet in 1/3 cup of water). We used tap water instead of unchlorinated water. We didn’t have direct-set mesophilic starter so Ingrid made fresh mesophilic starter (using the recipe from Ricki’s book). Also, since it’s winter, we struggled to keep the temperature above room temperature; we put the pot in a water bath in the sink. The bath water started at ~90 F and cooled to ~65 F by morning. Here are some shots of the process:

The texture turned out great considering all of the above deviations from the recipe. There was enough cheese so Ingrid seasoned 3 different batches separately. One only has salt. One is sweet with nutmeg and honey. And the last (shown below) has paprika, green onions, salt, and pepper.

yogurt, as easy as yogurt

This post is copied over from our previous attempt at a blog that ran into technical glitches.

This page is to log our home creations. Currently, we are working on making cheese, butter, bread, and are looking forward to home brewing. There’s no method, only madness, to these logs, but hopefully they’ll be useful to us or someone else.

One of the lessons you should get from these blogs is that if I can do it, anyone can. I’ll start with Yogurt-making, which is so easy a monkey can do it:

1. 8 cups of milk – heat to 185 F.
2. let cool to 110 F (use water bath to speed this up).
3. add 1 cup of yogurt, stir well until the yogurt is thoroughly mixed in the milk.
4. keep yogurt between 90 F-110 F for 8-12 hours.
5. put yogurt in the refrigerator for 8-12 hours and enjoy.

To maintain the yogurt at a high temperature, I usually put the yogurt in jars and place the jars in a cooler filled with water at ~110+ F. Depending on your cooler, this should keep the yogurt above 85 F for 12 hours.

The yogurt keeps for at least a week and can be re-used for the next batch. Usually, the longer you allow it grow, the more sour the yogurt will be. If you don’t mix the yogurt thoroughly, you will get a ricotta-like texture (I’ve done this and had to throw away a quart of yogurt). More recently, I’ve decided to just eat the ricotta-yogurt. I haven’t died or gotten sick…yet.