FOOD ON THE FOOD

Cookbook Friday: Butter and Cottage Cheese

            

Willie Mae and Ethel Shepherd (my great grandmother) in 1906 in Price’s Fork, Virginia.

Pearl [Price] and Zack Shepherd had three daughters, Willie Mae, Ethel, and Claribel.  And on their farm, they had a cow (e-i-e-i-o).  They did have one, actually, and Ethel remembered going to the barn with her sisters, each with a half-pint tin cup to fill with fresh, warm milk.  Her mother would then use some of the milk to make butter and cottage cheese.  Here was the basic process in my great grandmother’s words:

“Butter was made from the cream skimmed off the crocks of milk.  Two or three gallons of cream were saved in a big jar, which you would let stand in a warmer temperature to sour to a clabber state.  Then, it was put into a five- or six-gallon wooden churn.  Someone, preferably a teenager, would churn it to butter.  That meant lifting the dasher by the round disk or crosspiece on the handle, and beating it up and down in the cream until butter appeared.  You then had both butter and buttermilk.  Next, you put the butter in a big bowl and poured cold water over it to rinse the buttermilk out.  Finally, when it was free of milk and firm from the cold water, you put in salt and formed it into one-pound prints using a butter printer.  Old printers were round and made a design on the butter.  I used a rectangular-shaped printer so that the butter could be sliced into quarters, like butter comes packaged today.

Cottage cheese was made by using the milk left after the cream was skimmed off.  You left it out to get warm and sour.  Then, you put it into a kettle and set it on the stove, just long enough for it to separate into curds and whey rather than to get hot.  It was strained through a cheesecloth bag, and hung up to finish dripping until fairly dry and solid.  To prepare this for the table, you added cream, salt, and pepper to the crumbled-up cheese.”

I’ve made butter before, but not by this particular method.  It’s what you get if you whip cream with an electric mixer for too long—little waxy flecks of butter.  I discovered this in culinary school, where I was a star pupil. 

But, today’s cream that you get at the store won’t sour.  Raw cream or milk straight from the cow will naturally sour as the existing bacteria consume the lactose.  Pasteurization, however, kills all that bacteria.  Ultra-pasteurized cream goes straight from fresh to rotten, at which point you can’t use it.  So these instructions aren’t intended to mean that you can take your rotten cream and turn it into something.  Please don’t write me and tell me you did this.  Store-bought heavy cream can be used as is and makes a pleasant, albeit bland, sort of butter.

As for the cottage cheese, if you have access to raw milk, let it sour and proceed.  The lactic acid formed by the bacterial action will cause the milk to separate into curds and whey on the heat.  With pasteurized, store-bought milk, though, you’ll need to add acid from another source to make that separation happen (vinegar, yogurt).  I may try it this week and see how it goes. 

But while we’re on the topic of raw milk, has anyone tried it?  I never have and must admit a certain curiosity.  If anyone has some in a five-mile radius of my house, call me.

Spring Stew

I was excited to see that we got some lamb in our latest Stillman’s meat share.  Half of it was ground lamb, which I used for moussaka, and the other half was stew meat.  Warm, bright weather doesn’t make me want to rush inside to braise anything, but lately we’ve been having just as much rain and gloom as sun, so the Le Creuset hasn’t been retired just yet.

For a little springtime inspiration, I leafed through The Cook and the Gardener by former New York Times writer Amanda Hesser.  I like this book not only because the recipes are arranged by month and season, but also because there’s something about the author’s relationship with her timeworn French gardener that reminds me a bit of my Farmer.  Only their dynamic seems a lot less psychotic.  To each her own.

This braise is greener than the average stew, but just as satisfying.  It pairs spring lamb with asparagus, peas, tarragon, and chervil.  Tarragon, I know and love, but somehow chervil wasn’t ever on my radar.  Which it should be.  It has that lovely anise flavor that I enjoy so much in fennel and liquor.  If you know someone who hates licorice, go ahead and taunt them with this dish with extra chervil.  They’re crazy and they deserve it.

I’m submitting this dish to Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Mediterranean Cooking in Alaska.  Look who’s trying to be social again?  Don’t worry, I give it two more weeks, tops.

Lamb Stew with Asparagus and Peas

I served this with roasted potatoes one night and buttermilk biscuits the next.  You need something to soak up all the wonderful gravy, besides your fingers.

2 Tbsp. canola oil
1½ lbs. lamb stew meat (or shoulder or leg cut into 2-inch pieces)
1 onion, sliced thinly
1 carrot, peeled and diced finely
3 Tbsp. flour
½ cup white wine
5 cups beef stock (or veal, chicken, lamb, or vegetable stock, or water)
1 Tbsp. Italian parsley, chopped, stems reserved
3 sprigs thyme
2 bay leaves
10 stalks asparagus, tough ends snapped off, spears cut into 1-inch pieces (or, in my case, last night’s leftover roasted asparagus)
2 cloves garlic, crushed, peeled, and minced
1 tsp. chopped, fresh tarragon or chervil (or both)
1 cup frozen peas
Salt and pepper to taste

In a large, heavy pot that has a lid, heat the oil over medium-high heat.  Season lamb with salt and pepper, and brown on all sides (no bunching up—do it in two batches, if you have to).  Remove meat to a plate with a slotted spoon.

Reduce heat to medium.  To the pot, add the onion and carrot, and sauté until starting to soften, 3-4 minutes.  Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables, and cook stirring quickly for 1-2 minutes.  Add the wine and reduce to 2 Tbsp.  Add the stock and the lamb with its juices, increase heat, and bring to a boil.  Meanwhile, tie the parsley stems, thyme sprigs, and bay leaves together with kitchen string, and add them to the pot (you don’t need to tie them; it just makes it easier to fish them out later).  Once boiling, reduce heat and place cover slightly askew to maintain a gentle simmer.  Cook 1-1½ hours, until meat is falling-apart tender.

While the meat is cooking, bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil, and cook asparagus 1-2 minutes to take the edge off its crispness.  Drain.  In a small bowl, combine parsley, garlic, tarragon, and chervil.  When the meat is almost done, stir in the blanched asparagus, frozen peas, and half of the garlic herb mixture.  Cook 3-4 minutes longer.  Season with salt and pepper, and remove bundle of herbs.  Serve stew sprinkled with reserved garlic/herb mixture.

Source: Adapted from The Cook and the Gardener by Amanda Hesser.

Buzz

The Preschooler’s ladybug larvae have finally arrived!  Thank god.  He got a ladybug habitat for Christmas, and we were waiting for warm enough weather to send out for the eggs.  He’s obsessed with bugs, you see, and drags me all around the yard, forcing me to dig for worms, and capture and correctly identify all manner of flying insects.  He’s finding out what a disappointing lab partner I am. 

Anyway, he’s been despondent with the waiting.  What was taking so long, he demanded?  I didn’t know.  Maybe the lady ladybug wasn’t in the mood?

I’m not sure what this has to do with food (except, maybe, that ladybugs are good for gardens, which I don’t have).  It’s really all just an excuse to show you this: an entertaining/disturbing look at the mating practices of certain insects, as interpreted by one Isabella Rossellini.  Reader Tim sent me the link and said it was safe for work, but it’s not clear just what line of work he’s in, exactly. 

(Don’t miss the bee one.)

Who Wants to Be a Moron? (Major Appliance Edition)

Well, I’m surprised it took me this long to get to our second installment of Who Wants to be a Moron?, but here we are at last.  As always, the object of the game is for you to make me feel better by providing SPECIFIC scenarios in which you were stupider than I was.

First, let me just say that there’s been a lot of vomit in our house lately.  Just the Toddler’s, but what he lacks in size he makes up for in volume and frequency.  As a result, nobody’s been getting much sleep around here, and the laundry and dishes have been piling up.  Not a good time for a major appliance to break. 

The trouble started with a jeweled goblet (doesn’t it always?).  We got one for each kid at a medieval-themed birthday party over the weekend.  The Preschooler became so enamored with his goblet that he has since requested that all of his beverages be supplied in a vessel encrusted with rhinestones.  Luckily, our entire house is constructed of rhinestones, so this is not a problem.

For some reason that even I can’t understand, it ended up in the dishwasher.  By my own hand.  (The left is blaming the right, and the right is blaming the left, but I know my precious left hand would never do such a thing.)

Does this look dishwasher-safe to you?

How about now?

The gems have mysteriously disappeared, which may explain the horrible grinding sound emanating from the dishwasher motor.  It's worse than fingernails against a chalkboard.  I’m sure the trolls that live deep within the manifold (kin to the sock-stealing trolls that inhabit the dryer) are dancing a gleeful jig right now, proclaiming, “We’re rich!  We’re rich!  We’ll never work again!” 

In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out how to break the news to Husband.  Maybe I’ll just wait until he reads it on my blog!

So, spill it, people.  Has anyone ever destroyed a major appliance in a more idiotic fashion?  Please spare me no details.  I need something to carry me through all of the dishwashing that lies ahead of me.  In keeping with the bacon prize theme, I have some lovely bacon band-aids for the person who has the best story.  Ah, the healing power of pork products…

Paper Chef: Fava Bean Bruschetta

I realized the other day that it’s been over a year since I participated in a food blogging event.  The last one was the Great Mac-N-Cheese-Off of January ’07.  What have I been doing with myself all this time?  Being a giant party pooper, I guess.

So, I’m easing back into the party with Ilva’s Paper Chef event being hosted this month by Hank of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.  If you’re not familiar, Paper Chef is sort of like Iron Chef for us non-celebrity Internet folk, in which you come up with a dish using the four featured ingredients.  But unlike Iron Chef, there aren’t any cameras in your face and, since Google is only a click away, it’s really easy to cheat.  Sounds good to me.

I was glad to see this month’s ingredients were fennel, prosciutto, honey, and fava beans.  Not too crazy, right?  Past combinations have struck me as a bit challenging for someone of my particular talents.  Anyway, here’s the simple lunch I came up with.  It was good.

Fava Bean Bruschetta with Prosciutto and Honey with Shaved Fennel Salad

2 lbs. fava beans, shelled to yield about 2 cups of beans
3-4 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, plus 2-3 Tbsp. more for dressing
1 fennel bulb, white part only, trimmed
1 shallot lobe, minced (meaning ½ shallot)
1 Tbsp. lemon juice, plus more for purée
½ baguette, sliced
1 garlic clove
2 Tbsp. honey
3 slices prosciutto (di Parma or San Daniele)
Salt and pepper to taste

In a pot of boiling, salted water, cook the fava beans until tender, about 10 minutes.  Drain and submerge in ice water until cool.  Drain again.  Pop the beans out of their skins (I do this by tearing a hole in the side and squeezing them out with my fingers).  Place beans in bowl of food processor and purée, adding olive oil until it reaches your preferred consistency (I would have liked mine to have been a little chunkier).  Season to taste with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

Cut the fennel bulb down the middle, and lay cut side down.  Cut slices as thinly as possible.  Set aside in a medium bowl.  In a small bowl, combine minced shallot and lemon juice.  Slowly whisk in 2-3 Tbsp. olive oil until well combined.  Season with salt and pepper.

Toast baguette slices until golden.  Cut garlic clove in half and rub on one side of each of the toasts.  Drizzle very lightly with honey.  Top with a spoonful of fava bean purée, prosciutto, and another light drizzle of honey, if desired.  Pour dressing over fennel and serve.  Makes 4 appetizer servings.

Green Monster

In my recent quest to be nicer to my husband, I made the following offer:

Me: Do you want to bring some watercress soup to work?

Him: I think we both know the answer to that question.

Strike 1.

Cookbook Friday: Virginia Cured Ham

Zack Shepherd circa 1900 in Virginia.

This is Zack Shepherd, my great great grandfather, looking a little freaked out.  Don’t worry, Zack, we’re all friends here.  He was born in 1868 to Ballard Shepherd and Virginia Surface, who were both of German stock (their family names were anglicized from Scheppert and Zerfass, respectively).  In 1899, he married Pearl Price and they lived near their families in Price’s Fork, Virginia. 

Zack worked as a farmhand all his life, working dawn to dusk for the Flanagans, three brothers who owned five hundred acres along New River.  On his way to work, Zack would set fish traps in the river (long, barrel-shaped contraptions with a funnel opening at one end) or a trot line (a heavy line with hooks at various points, anchored to a tree on each side of the river), and check them on his way home.  He also carried an old shotgun with him to and from work because the cornfields along the river attracted wild ducks.  Sometimes he would bag three or four ducks as he walked home in the evening, which Pearl would roast in the oven like a turkey.

However, most of the family’s meat came from their pigs.  Zack butchered one or two each year.  This is his method for curing ham, as remembered by his daughter, Ethel Shepherd, my great grandmother:

“To cure ham or any hog meat, he would turn the meat out, skin side up, on a large table, and let it drain for several hours or a day.  You then turn it over with the skin side down and cover it completely with salt.  You renew this every so often, and also sprinkle black pepper on it.  After the salt has gone into the meat, you put some brown sugar on it.  It is left to cure for about six weeks.

If you want to smoke cure it, you then hang it up in the smoke house over a pit above hickory chips or wood that is burning to create smoke.  Or you can get a smoke cure at the store to put on the meat.  Some people put red pepper or saltpeter on the meat to keep flies from contaminating it.  It is bagged with heavy cloth bags or brown paper bags, and hung by wires down from the ceiling of the building so that the mice can’t get at it.”

So, no, I haven’t tried this one, yet.  But when I do, you’ll be the first to know!

Just the Facts, Ma’am

The numbers are in from Drumlin’s Winter CSA:

Cost of farmshare vegetables for the season: $400
If you helped with the farm work: $300
Broken down by week: $20
Pounds of food per week: 22
What it would have cost at the store: $516
Total money saved: $216
Having your heart broken by the local farmer: Priceless.

Definitely Not Survivor Material

I jogged a new route today and found myself looking for excuses to stop and catch my breath.  An Asian woman was foraging for greens along the banks of the Charles carrying a large shopping bag full of them.  Since she didn’t look crazy, I stopped to ask what she was picking.

She didn’t speak any English, but she showed me a particular plant that was growing in bushy clumps along the riverbank and gestured that you could eat it.  It seemed like something I might have seen before, with leaves in threes that were pointy and jagged on the edges like parsley, but floppy like cilantro.  It tasted like grassy sage.  I tried to find out what it was called or what she did with it, but really nothing was getting through.

Having only paltry plant knowledge to exchange with her, I reached down to pull some young leaves from a dandelion plant, trying to explain that you could eat those, too.  She shook her head thinking I was unable to tell the difference between dandelions and the radically different-looking plant she had just shown me.  But I persisted and shoved some of the dandelion greens into my mouth.  She looked at me like I was crazy.  Then I ran away.

The problem is that now I don’t know what that mystery plant was, and it’s going to drive me insane.  If there had been any oxygen getting to my brain at all, I would have brought a sprig home to identify through a series of targeted Google searches (“green plant by river”, “green leaves that taste good”).  I thought I saw the exact plant on my run back, but when I popped it into my mouth, it just tasted like weeds. 

Anyway, here’s the weed that was the wrong plant.  That should be helpful.  Anyone know of a tasty wild plant that looks like this?

The Honeymoon Must Be Over

I’ve got nothing today, so I dug through the 46 pages of unposted crap I’ve accumulated since January to see if I could salvage anything.  I came across this one.  It’s a month old, but somehow still resonates.

***

It was Husband’s birthday, so he took the day off from work.  The kids were at preschool, so it was just the two of us at home.  Hmmmm, what’s a married couple to do when they’re finally alone together in a quiet house?  (I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the same thing you would do pre-vows.)

The answer?  Indian food buffet!!! 

Things went well between husband and wife up until the very end:

Him: I can’t eat another thing.

Me: Me, neither.  But, I still want rice pudding.  I’ll be right back.

Him: Wait, bring me some, too.

Me: Just come up with me.  I can’t carry all that.

Him: It’s two bowls.

Me: Plus spoons. 

Him: You have two hands.

Me: You have two working legs.

Him: But, it’s my birthday.

Me: Did you turn 100?

Him: (sigh)

Me: Fine, but I draw the line at spoon-feeding you.  You might still have one or two good years left.

In the meantime, I might want to work on my bedside manner.