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My mother likes to tell people what I said about chemistry class, “I don’t know why anyone would care about the rate of a reaction. I don’t even care about the reaction itself.”
This, coming from the daughter of two biochemists.
I’ve always loved science, but failing at one type forever brands you a flunkie.
And yet, I’ve spent more hours than I can count creating science on the stove, in the oven and, unfortunately, in the fridge of the bluish-green variety.
Chemistry was never so fun than at a recent cheesemaking class with cheese whiz Mary Rosenblum (and science-fiction author). Thanks to SlowFood Portland (organizers) and to Chef Robert Reynolds Chef Studio (use of space).
It helps that Mary has a casual swagger in the kitchen and is a most generous teacher, making you feel as though her 20 years of cheesemaking could be yours if you allowed yourself to experiment and not worry too much. Suddenly, the rate of the reaction and especially the reaction are interesting, and not just because you get to eat the results. Alas, Mary is a storyteller, a science-fiction one at that. I found myself on the edge of my seat wanting to know how the milk thickened.
Most of all, the way Mary taught cheesemaking is how I feel about cooking. It’s not that complicated, mistakes aren’t the end of the world (in fact they’re good teachers), it’s fun and creative. If we demystified cooking, more people would do it.
Among what I learned was:
• A local source for pasture-raised milk, which will produce a better cheese. Or buy raw milk.
• Since spring milk tastes better, you can buy a lot and freeze it. But that shouldn’t stop you from making cheese any time.
• Feta lasts as long as a year if it’s in brine. Mary packs her feta, as well as the soft mold cheese we made, in jars with garlic cloves and olive oil. Great gift idea.
• You don’t have to go nuts with sanitation in the kitchen. Just use common sense. Example: don’t pet the cat and then stick your hands in the cheese.
• Feed your mistakes to your chickens or your neighbors chickens. They’ll love it.
• Do get yourself a cheese thermometer though, as they have finer increments of degrees than a candy thermometer.
• Most store-bought milk has stabilizers that increase shelf life, even organic milk, but produce lesser quality cheese.
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Ricotta Cheese
by Mary Rosenblum
1. Heat a gallon of whole or skim milk on the stove to at least 190 degrees. Remove from heat.
2. Use either 1/4 cup of vinegar or lemon juice, or 1 teaspoon of tartaric or citric acid dissolved in water, and add to the milk. Wait till you see the curd start to separate from the whey (which will be clear). Stir very gently to incorporate the acid into all the milk but be careful not to break up the curds too much. Add more acid if solids don’t separate.
3. When cool enough, drain the curds through a wet, boiled or microwaved muslin (or some other thin clean cotton). It’s okay to let the curds and whey sit overnight.
4. Rinse curds under water if you want to remove the vinegar or lemon flavor. Alternately, you can add a lemon rind for flavor.
5. Refrigerate or freeze. Ricotta is one of the few cheeses that freeze well. Use in any recipe calling for ricotta.
How easy is that?
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Consider becoming a member of SlowFood Portland for other events like this.
…and you feed him for a day; teach a man how to make pasta and you feed him for a lifetime.
Second only to enjoying a bowl of steaming pasta is the pleasure of making your own, which is what five people did here last Sunday. It does involve work. But as several of them said afterwords, “This was easier than I thought it would be!” This was my thought, too when I learned to make several hand-formed pasta shapes at a cooking school in southern Italy. Read the rest of this entry »
As quickly as summer finally appeared in the Northwest, it disappeared just as fast. We’re back to gray skies and cool weather. But a small window of much-anticipated hot, sunny weather was good excuse to whip up some rhubarb strawberry basil sorbet. You can sorbet almost anything. And sorbets are hard to ruin since they are essentially fruit, sugar, water and often lemon. Sometimes even vegetables. They can end a meal along with a cookie, or they can be used as a palette cleanser between courses.
Below is a recipe for the sorbet I made, but there are many recipes out there and they call for wildly different amounts of simple syrup (your sweet base) and even the ratio of sugar to water for the syrup itself. This means there is no right way or recipe. Some recipes called for corn syrup, which I didn’t want to use so I left it out. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Pollan needs little introduction. But even a celebrity journalist can’t rest on his laurels. Much ink is spilled on the common pitfalls of presentations, and the suffering they inflict on audiences everywhere. Yet presentation best practices are still lost on most presenters.
Not so with Pollan who drew a crowd of some 4000 at University of Portland’s Food for Thought conference last Saturday. Pollan, a little incredulous at the crowd’s size, wondered if some of us were in the wrong place. “You’re sure you’re here to see a food writer?” he asked. Read the rest of this entry »
When a friend asked if I was interested in taking a tour of Bob’s Red Mill on a Monday, I decided I could make it a “work-related” event. The boss (that would be me) is a stickler for purposeful hookey. I do write and design a bit about food, especially of the local variety. But Bob needs no promotion from me since his product is sold by every grocery store chain in the U.S. of A.
So I was glad to find some visual treats, like this wall of grain sacks. Read the rest of this entry »
This month marks the final installment of a “Year of Produce” in which I charted my fresh produce purchases in illustrated form for a year starting in April 2010. I was curious to see if I put my money where my mouth is about eating locally and, by definition, seasonally. Yes, 2010 was so last year. But April is so now! Which means you can start all over again if you missed the whole thing. Scroll down for March as well as a mini image of each month that links to that month’s post. Each one has some combination of recipes or recipe links, preparation ideas, thoughts on eating locally and other good stuff. So please explore!
With this final post I offer:
• A tally for the year
• Thoughts on what is local
• My observations on the project
• March recipe links
• How to eat seasonally, affordably (prompted by a question someone asked me) Read the rest of this entry »
At left is my new Meyer lemon tree that I purchased from Graceful Blades (no website) who lovingly grows fruit trees and will be at the next Hillsdale Farmers Market Sunday, March 20, weather permitting. A cheery gift to myself in these dark months.
I wonder if there’s an equivalent phrase like drunk dialing, as it relates to writing blog posts in a weird frame of mind. No, I’m not drunk. Just fried. And why am I posting then? Well, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, “Sometimes you have to go into a blog post, not with the content you want, but the content you have.”
And to quote a former boss, “Done is beautiful.”
This being my my second-to-last produce log for this yearlong project, I had visions of waxing culinarily about the secret joys of eating in winter and the anticipation of freshly cut asparagus around the corner. All lovely stuff. All stuff I have no energy for. This is instructive. I can write a rather long post about what’s top of mind—rush projects, little breathing room to collect oneself or allow for margins of error, the dissatisfaction of churning out work too quickly.
Writing about the nourishing and writing about the sapping both require effort. But each requires a different kind of effort. And to honor the former requires a shifting of gears, a collecting of oneself, allowing oneself to go deeper into a place that isn’t easily accessed when you’re working like a flurry of restless gnats. At a recent coastal writing retreat, one attendee said that she was telling her father how hard it was for her to relax when the opportunity to relax was there. He would always remind her that you can’t go from 60 to zero at the snap of your fingers. Read the rest of this entry »
One benefit of neglecting your garden, especially in winter, is that you might find a surprise if you bother to visit it—such as this lovely rose-like head of chicory (radicchio). I left it alone rather than harvest leaves for salads so I could grow a whole head. Torrential downpours followed by an extended cold snap all but destroyed the plants.
Then, a warm dry(ish) day lured me into the garden, which I had been avoiding because I have yet to remove the last of the tomato plants! The chicory bounced back with splashes of fuschia painted on the leaves. I also discovered so many scallions, I had to force some onto a friend.
This variety—Castelfranco variegata—hails from the Veneto region in northern Italy. There’s a ghostly white variety, too. Its flavor is enhanced by cold weather, like many hearty winter greens. You can buy seeds from Nichol’s, a local Oregon nursery but they’re currently sold out. Who knew it was so popular? Read the rest of this entry »
To spend a quarter of December in Peoria, IL, called for extreme measures. Peoria might have an excuse in winter when it comes to fresh local produce. But from my casual observation, finding locally grown (and human-edible) produce is a challenge. The rich dirt of the vast surrounding farmland is home only to corn used for cattle feed and Twinkies. Rumor had it that a new gourmet market opened. I’d believe it when I saw it. But while an expensive gourmet market might offer better-looking organic produce than the limp bundles of kale at Kroger, it doesn’t address the problem of how little local land is used around the country to grow food for people who live there.
It’s easy for some of us to pass by each minor, or even major, accomplishment and, instead, revisit the list of what still hasn’t been done. Or started. Worse is doing what’s not on the list. That is, if you want to be able to check something off.
The year 2010 was one of self-generated projects. It was a year of deliberately stepping back a bit from work, for better or worse, to reassess who I was doing business with, what kind of work I was doing, and where I wanted to go. It seemed natural, if not exactly planned, to follow where my desire led. Which meant allowing ideas to flourish just a little before tromping all over them. We creatives are masters at self mutilation.
At Seth Godin’s urging, I put together a partial list of what I accomplished this year. According to Godin:
Doesn’t matter whether it was a hit or not, it just matters that you shipped it. Shipping something that scares you (and a lot of what follows did) is the entire point.
In no particular order, a baker’s dozen:
1. Worked with 3 new clients.
2. Became a partner in a new business venture, responsible for branding and marketing strategy.
3. Took the World Changing Writing Workshop and got exposed to some daring, authentic, interesting writers. It left me inspired and supported, if virtually.
4. Had a story published in Smithsonian magazine’s Food & Think blog.
5. Developed communications and helped plan events for AIGA Portland’s Sustainable Design Initiative.
6. Contributed to the collaborative book “The Portland Bottom Line“—sustainability stories from small businesses. Profits support MercyCorps NW.
7. Started a yearlong personal project of illustrated logs of my fresh produce purchases, comparing how I spend my money on local versus non-local produce.
8. Wrote 8 blog posts for the Portland Farmers Market.
Hearty Greens 8 Ways to Sunday
Hazelnuts: A Complete Nut
Solace of Soup
Sponsor Profile: Food Front Cooperative Grocery
The Frenzy of Late Summer Eats
Love Ripens at the Market
Getting Raabed
Kids Cook…If You Let Them
9. Wrote 31 blog posts on design, food and the meaning of life.
10. Finally retired my old G5 Mac that has served me well, and committed to a laptop so I can work everywhere, all the time!
11. Created 15 paintings, mostly abstracted nature, something I haven’t done in years.
12. Gave myself an end-of-year gift to attend Compostmodern conference in San Francisco in January 2011, covering sustainable design practices.
13. Attended WordCamp Portland, which got me excited about redesigning Allegro Design using WordPress. I only got as far as a face lift that puts News and Featured Projects on the home page—a major accomplishment for the self-employed!
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What did you accomplish? Give it a shot, publicly or privately. Make a list of 13 things you shipped in 2010. If you don’t know what they are, ask a good friend or colleague to point them out.
May 2011 bring even more. Cheers!
