yonmei

11:27 pm: Mmm, cheese bread
I found a wrapped soft cheese at the bottom of the freezer, so I cut off the crusty rind and kneaded most of the rest into the spare piece of dough (there is always a spare piece of dough: it never quite works out trying to make exactly enough for 24 rolls: the difference between flour and yeast in each baking always changes the dough, and this is why the French Revolutionary Government declared it a scientific heresy that bakers were responsible for short weight loaves, and why you can buy bread by the gramme or the kilo in France today). I formed it into four rolls, topped each with a piece of the remaining soft cheese, and baked in the oven till brown and crusty.

OMGdelicious. It was really difficult only eating one. The other three will freeze nicely, though.

I finally got to see The Devil Wears Prada. The novel was an interesting example of "fiction for women", the kind that makes you think about how this culture is for women, and how skillful writers can play on the edge of what-we-accept/what-we-resent to create the best of what we unfondly call "chicklit". I'd heard the film substantially changed the novel, and it does - I suppose they couldn't bring themselves to make Meryl Streep play a woman as dislikable as Miranda in the novel, a woman with no redeeming characteristics. There were a handful of other changes - Miranda pays much more individual attention to Andi in the film, instead of barely noticing she's there, and Meryl Streep delivers the best Miranda lines in style. It remains utterly unrealistic about the fashion industry, with much more prurient gaze at women's bodies: the best part about "chicklit" is that it is unabashedly aimed at women, which films are not.

I finally succumbed and bought the first season of Cagney and Lacey on DVD. There won't be any more after that and this makes me sad: please sign the petition, if you haven't already.

Tags: baking, bread, cagney and lacey, cheese, feminism, films

11:07 am: This little dragon-hatchling has 22 hours to live!


In other news, I got Camembert half-price at the farmer's market this morning. The rewards of getting up early. It's miserable weather by the way.

I am about to go up to the Green Fair. I have bought five books for 50p each to read-and-abandon on the Redemption trip, and I spotted a really weird little ceramic cooking gadget that looks as if it was made for poaching quail eggs. Could this be? Who needs to poach quail eggs so often they buy a gadget specifically to do so?





Tags: cheese, dragon eggs need clicky, redemption

11:08 pm: A toast to kasha
Kasha is a fundamentally simple recipe.

Buy some roasted buckwheat. (Or buy it unroasted and dry roast it yourself, in a heavy frying pan or saucepan. I haven't tried this, but according to this you can do it.)

The basic recipe is this:

Melt a little butter in a heavy pan, add buckwheat, stir as if for risotto, pour on water, bring to boil, and simmer until all the water has been absorbed by the buckwheat grains. The proportion of liquid to roasted buckwheat is two cups liquid, one cup buckwheat. This makes enough kasha for a main dish for two people, easily.

My recipe is this:

One cup roasted buckwheat
Two and a quarter cups water (or vegetable stock)
1 egg
Dried mushrooms, and a mushroom stock cube, and a clove or two of garlic, and maybe a smoked chilli pepper.
A little butter.

Put the water on to boil in the small lidded pan. Add the dried mushrooms and the chipotle and crumble in the stock cube. Keep an eye on the water and when it starts to boil, turn it down to a simmer till you're ready to use it.

Melt the butter in the heavy non-stick pan. Chop the garlic. Add the garlic to the butter and fry gently for a very little while - just enough to soften the garlic.

Measure out your cup of buckwheat and pour it into the pan.

Crack the egg and pour it on to the layer of buckwheat. (The first time I did this I beat the egg first in a separate bowl, and the second time I just added it from the eggshell, and I noticed no difference between the two except that it was simpler to do the second and saved washing the bowl and another fork.)

Stir the egg vigorously into the buckwheat, and stir the buckwheat grains around the pan. You can smell the buckwheat as you do this - a warm smell, slightly dusty, slightly sharp, appetising and welcoming. I love this bit. So did M.F.K. Fisher: she wrote about it lovingly in How To Cook A Wolf, which I have collected in The Art of Eating: she calls it a nutty smell.

When all of the egg has been absorbed by the mixture, and the grains of buckwheat are separated as you stir them round the pan, you can add the hot water. Fish out the chipotle if you added one. Stir the mixture as you bring it to a gentle boil, and then leave to simmer until all of the liquid has been absorbed by the buckwheat. You have a dark brown, rather salty dish (all kasha recipes say "add salt", but the stock cubes I use are salty enough for me), well-flavoured with mushroom and a little chilli taste.

That's kasha.

To me the essentials are the butter and the egg and the stock cube in the cooking water. M.F.K. Fisher assures me that the water must be hot before it's poured onto the roasted buckwheat, and other authorities agree with her. She is also right about the egg. If you have a problem with even a small amount of butter, substitute some kind of vegetable oil.

The dried mushrooms (there need not be many) are not essential, but very, very nice. Sometime I must try this with smoked tofu: or fresh mushrooms: or walnuts might be nice (and the oil used at the start could be walnut oil...).

---
Update: Walnuts toasted in walnut oil are very nice with kasha. I used a plain vegetable stock for the liquid.

Update, September 2008:

Malaysian kasha, or Afrai's kasha, a fusion cuisine variant:

Peel/chop one aubergine and cook in a non-stick pan till tender (in butter or olive oil or what you will). Add at least one tablespoon of soy sauce to the aubergine, and fry a little longer until the aubergine has sopped up the soy sauce (this won't take long). Then add the cupful of toasted buckwheat to the pan, and stir over a low heat until it's giving off that lovely toasty nutty smell. Now add a couple of tablespoons of tamarind paste, and stir it into the buckwheat, until it's all mixed together. Now add the two cupfuls of boiling water, and stir occasionally for 15-20 minutes until the kasha has absorbed all the liquid. And, well, that's it.

It will be noted that this variation has the advantage of being basically vegan kasha. Further discussion 13th September 2008.

Tags: aubergine, cheese, chilli, kasha, mushrooms, my recipes

06:45 pm: Recipe: M.F.K.F. Cauliflower Cheese Casserole
In The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher wrote:

...in Dijon, the cauliflowers were small and very succulent, grown in ancient soil. I separated the flowerlets and dropped them in boiling water for just a few minutes. Then I drained them and put them in a wide shallow casserole and covered them with heavy cream and a thick sprinkling of freshly Gruyere, the nice rubbery kind that didn't come from Switzerland at all, but from the Jura. It was called rapee in the market, and was grated while you watched, into a soft cloudy pile, onto your piece of paper.

I put some fresh pepper over the top, and in a way I can't remember now the little tin oven heated the whole thing and melted the cheese and browned it. As soon as that happened we ate it.

The cream and the cheese had come together into a perfect sauce, and the little flowers were tender and fresh.

I have wanted to make this casserole for a long time, and last night I did.

I had an organic cauliflower from EcoBox and three kinds of cheese in the fridge. No Gruyere, but Emmenthal, a reasonably good cheddar, and Edam. I also had 4 fluid ounces of single cream, a jar of Colman's yellow mustard, and some matzo crumbs.

I greased a wide shallow casserole dish with a lump of ghee. (This is an ancient brown ceramic dish that belonged to my great-aunt, and came to me after she died: it's useful rather than decorative, but I find it comforting.) I cut off the thick stem of the cauliflower, and separated the florets into tiny white floral bits, and rinsed them thoroughly under the tap. I grated about four ounces of three different cheeses, mixed about a teaspoon of mustard into the cheese, and mixed the grated cheese with the cauliflower in the casserole. (Small quantities of mustard in cheese, if anyone doesn't know this trick - my great-aunt taught it to me - doesn't appreciably affect the flavour of the cheese, but makes any cheese dish taste more cheesy.)

I carefully poured the contents of the 4 oz pot of single cream over the casserole dish, filled the pot with milk, and poured again. I sprinkled the top with matzo crumbs.

Then I baked the dish in a hot oven for about 40 minutes, or until the top was browning.

It was delicious. I cannot see how it could avoid being so, unless you make the mistake of using poor-quality cheese.

Tags: cauliflower, cheese, cream, family stuff, my recipes, someone elses recipe