Savory cheesecake

Recently we were given a Ziploc bag stuffed full of fresh bay leaves; another volunteer at an event we were helping with apparently has a tree in his yard.  We use dried bay leaves in sauces and (when we used to make them) stews, but we'd never used fresh before.  I immediately set about finding recipes to use our bay leaves.

From the trove of recipes I've amassed, I found two cheesecake recipes that would use bay leaves: a savory and a sweet.  Both came from a book that translated Ancient Greek and Roman recipes and adapted them for modern kitchens; incidentally and appropriately enough for April 21, these recipes both came from one of the Ancient Rome chapters.  We tried the savory cheesecake first.

The ingredients for the recipe are:

1 lb. feta cheese
4 oz. all purpose flour
1 egg
2-3 bay leaves [I used way more since we have so many.]

I bought feta crumbles as that was cheaper than buying a larger brick than we would have needed.  However, I found that this led to a very dry dough; the dough would have vastly benefited from the extra moisture that the brine would have provided.  I blame Whole Foods for only having two feta choices!  Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the extensive dairy cases at Michigan grocery stores.

We had only 12 ounces of feta (again, I was too cheap to buy more), so we used 3 ounces of flour.  Obviously we still had to use a whole egg, but I hoped that this would partially make up for the complete lack of brine in the feta.

Other than the low moisture, the dough came together fairly easily; it was almost like making a cheese gnocchi dough.  As instructed by the recipe, I put the bay leaves under the cheesecake/cheesedisk before placing it on the baking sheet, then put a heavy-ish Pyrex dish on top to weight everything down.

The cheesecake/cheesedisk was probably 6"-7" in diameter.  The recipe said to score before baking (like making scones), which I guess was helpful when I went to cut slices.  More like a guideline to follow than any physical assistance with getting the pieces apart.

The recipe said to bake for 40-45 minutes, but I baked for something like 35 minutes and thought that too long.  As it was, the outside edge of the cheesedisk was already brown and, as we would discover, rather tough.  For the thin cheesedisk that we made, I'd probably bake for 25-30 minutes.

The bay leaves came out looking basically like the dried bay leaves you can get at the store.

The final product was interesting, to say the least, especially the flavour.  At first bite there was a subtle non-feta taste from the bay leaves; then the full salty feta taste would overwhelm one's taste buds.  The texture of the non-brown sections was nicely smooth when the cheesecake was warm from the oven, but after a couple days in the fridge, it's gotten progressively tougher, and the bay leaf flavour has sort of dissipated.

Complete delicious dinner.  We didn't put salt in the eggs this time, but the cheesecake wedge definitely made up for that.  The rice helped too.

Would I make this again?  Maybe.  It would make a good appetizer, though I'd want to get a higher quality feta that didn't have such a straight-up salty taste.  We have plenty of bay leaves left to use!

The Classical Cookbook (1996); Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger; p. 93-94

Writeup background noise: well, when I drafted the post originally, it was the 2nd period of the Wings-Lightning game.  Thankfully for me, I decided that the 3rd period was a fine time for a nap.

New Year dumplings: A pictorial

I just discovered a neat new cookbook that focuses on dumplings (mostly Chinese and Japanese, but there are a few other flavor profiles in there as well).  We figured we might as well try some of the recipes now while we have easy access to practically any Chinese or Japanese cooking ingredient; plus, each recipe makes more than one meal's worth of dumplings, so we thought it'd be an economical choice as well.  Chinese New Year provided the perfect opportunity to test the book's pork and shrimp dumplings.

We made our dumplings the day before New Year, and got 39 versus the recipe's yield of 45.  Perhaps we put too much filling in each one?  So far we haven't had any problems with broken wrappers or anything.  These are ready to be frozen, then put into a plastic bag to be cooked as needed.  Easy!

These cook pretty quickly with an almost set-it-and-forget-it method.  We are still working out just how long to cook our dumplings though, since we tend to cook fewer at a time than the cookbook author does.  He's usually hosting dumpling parties.  We are lame and thus do not tend to host dumpling parties.

I made a dipping sauce out of hoisin sauce and soy sauce (about a 2:1 ratio), along with a dash of rice wine vinegar.  Kind of a Chinese barbecue sauce of sorts.

The fillings weren't dense, dry, or falling apart.  I might add some cilantro leaves next time for flavor and color contrast, but that's another recipe!

Hey there, dumpling!: 100 recipes for dumplings, buns, noodles, and other Asian treats (2015), p. 41
Writeup background music: Dido, No angel (1999)

Banh mi

Just the other week Caroline had gotten a craving for some Vietnamese sandwiches known as banh mi (there are some diacritics that I have not added - see this Wikipedia article for an introduction).  We were going to go to a Vietnamese bakery/deli last Sunday to satisfy that craving, but sadly discovered the place is not open on Sundays.  So, we checked out some books from the library and tried (and I would say succeeded) on making them ourselves.

We used The Banh Mi Handbook as our basis.  In the book is a recipe for the mini baguettes these sandwiches are named for, as well as recipes for the fillings.  Our sandwiches had marinated chicken, pickled carrots, cucumber, cilantro, and (on mine) jalapeno rings.  Here are descriptions of the things we made.

Bread:
The recipe goes on for a couple of pages in the book, but only because the author is very descriptive and includes nice pictures on how to form the rolls.  The dough is pretty simple - flour, water, yeast, salt, and a small amount of butter.  The recipe called for extra wheat gluten to be added, but we did not have that, nor was I ready to buy some at the store.  It did mention that if you used King Arthur brand flour, you wouldn't need as much additional gluten.  So, I picked up a small bag of the King Arthur flour for these rolls, and kneaded the dough a few minutes longer than called for.

The forming went very well following the instructions in the book, though I will admit that the three that Caroline formed (the recipe made six rolls) looked much better than mine.

The recipe called for the steam method of filling a pan with water while preheating the oven, but we just spritzed some water on the rolls before baking.  Twenty-two minutes of baking later, we had these:

A finished roll ready to be filled with tasty stuff!

The result, in two and a half to three hours of work: some light and delicious bread for sandwiches.

Pickled Carrots:
Pickled vegetables are standard for banh mi, so we chose carrots.  The book called for a combination of carrots and daikon, but we didn't have the daikon readily available, so carrots alone it was.  It was a simple process that I did while the dough was rising. First I added some salt and sugar to the carrot sticks that were about 3 inches long and 1/4 inch wide.  A couple minutes of working the salt and sugar in and the carrots were getting floppy.  At this point I diverged from the book.  It said to rinse the vegetables and then put them in a water, vinegar, and sugar (1/3 cup) solution.  I thought that sounded sweet, so I left the salt and sugar in the original bowl and put the rinse carrots back in with the vinegar and water.  I was later told that I should probably have gone with the sweeter route.  Ooops...

Chicken:
For the chicken, I did not look at a recipe.  We had some chicken breast tenders, and I made a marinade of soy sauce, hoisin sauce, minced garlic, and a small amount of oyster sauce.  The chicken marinated in that for about 4-5 hours in the refrigerator.  Then, just simple pan frying - we don't have a grill yet... :(

Pan seared marinated chicken - turned out extremely well for guessing on the marinade.

The end result:

Caroline's sandwich.

My sandwich. I took out some of the jalapeno seeds so that they didn't overpower the other filling ingredients.

These sandwiches were delicious and flavorful.  The bread was light enough that with the overstuffing you see above it just deformed around the filling and nothing fell out.  The crust was also strong enough that the hinge didn't give out.  Definitely make again!

Easter picnic

This being the first big holiday spent away from our families, we wanted to do something special for Easter.  There was no way I could prepare a ham for just the two of us, so we hit upon doing a picnic (or, as I like to call it after our Provence excursion last spring, "le pique-nique").  We figured that it would be a good way to explore the state a little more, but even if the weather turned out to be poor, we could just put our picnic blanket out in our living room!  Our menu consisted of sandwiches on homemade baguettes, avocado salad, orange-lime-vanilla fruit salad, and hot cross buns.

Sandwiches

For the sandwiches, we went with prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, and a little drizzle of balsamic, all piled onto homemade baguettes.

• We made the baguettes from the Joy of Cooking recipe; the stand mixer again proved its worth for the mixing and kneading.

Nice crumb!

• We had previously made the mozzarella, though for whatever reason our result was more like a cream cheese spread than regular mozzarella (we have made mozzarella successfully in the past, so it wasn't a first-timers thing).  So we just figured that the cheese could be spread onto the bread before putting all the fillings in.
• The prosciutto came from Venda Ravioli in Providence.  This was our first time going there and it was, I'll admit, a little overwhelming.  It was like a whole emporium for Italian foods; there were even multiple options for prosciutto at the meat counter!  Apparently the "San Daniele" prosciutto was the one to get, but as the guy in front of us requested the San Daniele, we had to 'settle' for prosciutto di Parma so as not to hold up the line.  There were already a LOT of people in line behind us as it was the Saturday before Easter at an Italian market....but I was just really excited to buy prosciutto in the same manner than one might buy some deli turkey for the week's lunches.
• The balsamic also came from Venda Ravioli.  The ingredients list was just one ingredient: 100% cooked must.  So I figured it was the real thing, or at least as close as we can get to the real thing without going bankrupt.  It's sweeter and less overtly acidic than the regular balsamic vinegars.  Well worth it to try!

  

  This is but one reason why I like going to Italian markets.

I made my sandwich with prosciutto, balsamic (sprinkled onto the cut surfaces of the bread), mozzarella, and basil; Dom added sliced red peppers to his.  Both were quite tasty!

That's mine on the left.  Amazingly tasty.

Avocado salad

Just a simple mixed salad of avocados, corn, grape tomatoes, snap peas, and green onions tossed with a balsamic vinaigrette.  We used the regular balsamic vinegar, not the stuff we'd picked up at the Italian market yesterday.  A good mix of colours, textures, and flavours.

Spot all five ingredients.

Orange-lime-vanilla fruit salad

This recipe came from The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays as "orange vanilla fruit salad", though I scaled it down considerably since I didn't want 12 servings.  We used a half pint each of blackberries and blueberries, plus some strawberries and Muscat grapes (they were the same price as the green grapes).  The recipe is pretty flexible as to what fruits to use.

The "orange vanilla" part of the original recipe title comes from the syrup poured over the fruit.  The original recipe called for equal parts sugar and water plus the zest and juice of an orange.  I used less than a quarter cup of sugar, a bit of vanilla, a half cup of water, the juice and zest of one Cara cara navel orange, and the juice and zest of a lime.  I figured that since all the fruits I'd chosen were pretty sweet, the syrup could use some tartness from the lime juice.  There was something between a third and a half cup of syrup after reduction.

Syrup, after reduction.

The result was a very tasty fruit salad; if anything, I would have left the vanilla out.  In fact, I debated for several minutes whether I should even include the vanilla in the first place as the lime-orange syrup already smelled pretty good.  But in the end there were no complaints about the fruit salad!

I usually like fruit salad, but this was really tasty with the zesty syrup.

Hot cross buns

I'll admit it: my only knowledge of hot cross buns before this year came from the first named melody in the music books used by novice instrumentalists, and the incomplete explanation I got about what hot cross buns represent.  I didn't realize until this year that they are an Easter tradition!  And they didn't seem too difficult to make.

I used the Joy of Cooking recipe with inspirations from the version in Nick Malgieri's Bread.  So to the Joy recipe's cinnamon and nutmeg I added lemon zest, cloves, cardamom, and a pinch of ginger, and then instead of currants I threw in dried cherries (being a Michigan native and all).  In place of 1 egg I used 2 egg yolks.  So it was not exactly a traditional hot cross bun, but these were tasty nonetheless.

The icing was confectioner's sugar, water, and a little vanilla.  I had just enough for all 18!

The picnic site

We scoured a very helpful website listing public parks in the state to figure out where to go.  We finally settled on going to the park surrounding Conanicut Battery in Jamestown, which promised to have a nice view of the West Passage of Narragansett Bay.  We ended up having our picnic amid the earthwork fortifications of a Revolutionary War-era gun battery.  Neat!

Upper 50s, sunny, a light breeze, and too early in the season for bugs: could there be any better conditions for a picnic?  I don't think so.

Happy Easter!

Recipes used:

Baguettes: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 601

Fruit salad: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays (2013), p. 108-109

Hot cross buns: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 610; with inspiration from Nick Malgieri's Bread (2012), p. 208-209

Writeup background noise: first it was NBCSports's replay of the Chinese Grand Prix, because while the Red Wings were losing, I commandeered the TV; and now it's the soundtrack from Super Mario Galaxy.