New Soup: Zuppa di Zipper

It's the week before payday again and I have the added hitch of having been teaching for 5 weeks now without somehow having been *hired* for one of my classes. So I received only 2/3 of my paycheck and am s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g my resources. In rooting through my pantry, my fridge shelves, and scouring recipes online, I decided to concoct an Italian-ish garbanzo soup that I figured would be high protein, low fat, comforting, and absolutely not costing me a dime. Everyone's really happy with the results, so I give you my

Zuppa di Zipper (Starving Artist Minestrone)

Saute 1/2 diced yellow onion with 1 minced garlic clove in about 1 tsp. veg. oil.

Add

2 medium peeled, diced potatoes

1 qt. vegetable broth

1/2 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes. I squished them in my fingers as I added them to the soup and also added half of the juice from the can.

1 can garbanzo beans (drained, rinsed)

1 carrot, diced

1 rib of celery, diced

1" whole sprig of fresh rosemary

1 bay leaf

1 tsp. dried oregano

1 tsp. dried thyme

Simmer these for 10-15 min. until the potatoes and carrots are tender. I also added about 1/4 cup of leftover cooked penne pasta noodles that I cut in half. Once these are heated and all the veggies are cooked and the herbs all mingle, you're ready to go. Garnish with fresh parsley, salt and pepper to taste, and maybe toss in a little parmesan cheese. When I do it again, I hope to have some zucchini in the fridge (or breadsticks!), but this will tide me over just fine!

Adventures in Mozzarella-Making

I have been holding on to a June/July 2008 copy of Mother Earth News magazine for, well, two years now because of a single page. It has directions for 30-minute mozzarella cheese. As you probably know, I am a HUGE fan of fresh mozzarella, and when I saw that this was even remotely do-able, I decided to finally tear it out, recycle the rest of it, and give it a whack.

It turns out to be really easy, after finding a couple of ingredients that were not hard to find at all, even in this po-dunk town, and finding a couple of websites for moral support and to supplement instructions and photos of the process, and how to approximate since I didn't have a thermometer that could measure as low as 55 through 175. Ricki the "Cheese Queen" has wonderful step-by-step photos, and a kind of shortcut using a microwave that I appreciated. And I found another link that had some helpful steps and photos.

30-minute Mozzarella

1 gallon milk (Mine's from Albuquerque, the closest to local milk, that I bought at the local hippie co-op. I also used whole milk.)

1 1/2 tsp. powdered citric acid dissolved in 1/4 c. cool water (this can be bought at a grocery store in the baking/canning supplies)

1/4 tsp. liquid vegetable rennet diluted in 1/4 c. cool water (I found this at the local co-op after asking. It was in the dairy case in a small box. I found animal rennet tablets at a different market, but had to keep looking: "complex of enzymes extracted from the stomachs of cows, often veal calves" *shudder*)

Begin heating the milk and when it's 55 degrees, mix in the citric acid solution and stir it thoroughly.

Continue heating it until it's 88-90 degrees. It will begin to curdle. If you don't have a thermometer, you can approximate this (in a super-hygenic way) by sticking your clean finger into the warm milk. If it's starting to thicken, you're good. Once it's 88-90, add the rennet solution and gently stir for 30 seconds. You'll see it's starting to curdle. This is good.

Continue heating until it's 100-105 degrees. Again, if you can't measure the temp scientifically, you'll see the curds begin to pull away from the walls of your pot:

The Cheese Queen has you note the clarity of the liquid, which is whey, and the color, which has a kind of greenish yellow tint (yum!). I guess if it's still white or milky, you need to keep heating. Once it reaches this temp/ stage, you can turn the heat off. At this point, I scooped out all the solids (curds!) and put them in a sieve over a bowl to let the whey continue draining out:
Now the instructions in Mother Earth News got really complicated at this point (it involved heating the whey to 175 degrees and dipping the curd into it with a ladle to heat it through until it's melty and stretchy), so I followed Cheese Queen, who said to put your curds in a bowl and microwave it for a minute. You'll see that more whey has separated out, so pour it off, and zap it for another 30 seconds. Repeat the draining of the whey and sprinkle in some salt. I used some fine popcorn salt, maybe a 1/2 -1 tsp. and nuked it for 30 more seconds.

When it was done, I dumped it out on the (clean) counter as you can see on the left:
You get to start kneading/stretching it and getting it all smooth and cheese-looking. Since it's so hot right now from the microwave, you'll want to start pressing and folding the smooshy curd pile with a wooden spoon:
And after a bit, even though it's still pretty warm, you can use your hand to press and fold the cheese like kneading bread dough. **revision: Apparently draining out all the whey and stretching the curd too much results in a tough cheese. Mine's a little less than ideal now that it's had a day in the fridge, so next time, I'm going to follow the technique described in steps 7-14 in the link from chow.com. When I try it again, I'll post!**
When it's smooth, you can roll it into a ball and YOU'VE JUST MADE CHEESE!!!!
I immediately sliced up some tomato and avocado and basil. And then glutted myself.
Cheese Queen says to store it in cold water in the fridge for up to a week.

Practice Makes Perfect (Pasta)

One (okay two) of the amazing gifts I got last christmas was this pasta and ravioli maker-- neither of which have seen the light of day since December. In the great unpacking, I decided there was no good reason not to break it in. I'll spare you my lamentations-- I didn't read or follow the instructions very closely in my feverish desire for handmade noodles. It turns out I am as impatient and haphazard a pasta-maker as I am a baker. The pasta dough (very simply, 2 1/4c. flour + 3 eggs mixed, kneaded, rested) seemed incredibly hard and impliable. I didn't run it through the machine on its fattest setting 10 times before I started thinning it. I made fettuccine instead of spaghetti (I was too scared of them jamming, sticking, becoming a giant mess that I'd have to convince everyone was spaetzle!).

And yet it all turned out deliciously!!!!!!!!! I may have screwed myself into having to make fresh pasta from now on. Sure, it's a bit cumbersome, but the REWARD! Here you can see the evolution of my technique from the overfloured, crumbly noodles at the bottom right to the delectable longer noodles to the left.

Zips made up the sauce while I did the noodles. They literally cooked in boiling water for like a minute. ONE minute. Maybe one and a half.

Later that evening, with the handful of noodles left over (and okay that I hid from everyone else) I whizzed up some of my pesto and had a midnight snack!

And today I busted out the ravioli attachment. I decided to mix it up and follow the recipe for spinach pasta (whiz up a cup of wilted baby spinach with a tablespoon or two of water, mix the spinach paste in with an egg, then mix yer green eggs into 2 c. of flour, knead, rest) and add a simple ricotta cheese filling.

The ravioli attachment requires a more refined hand than I had. Although my pasta-rolling skills have improved exponentially from yesterday, I still had sheets that weren't quite wide enough to accommodate the ravioli-filling rollers. It was a mess. Technically, it still is a mess, since I haven't pulled myself up from my pasta coma to go clean up.

Zipper was fascinated. Interested in the machine itself (since I was paying more attention to it than her). Interested when I cut the raviolis apart. Really interested in the ricotta filling.*

The spinach-ricotta ravioli was another smashing success. I think tomorrow or soon I will whip up a ton of noodles and let them dry for us to use or freeze. It's really exciting.

* full disclosure: I couldn't keep Zips out of the ricotta. And I still ate these raviolis.

Homemade Pizza, Handmade Crust!

So before I knew it tonight, it was dinner time and we had no concrete plans and no particular set of ingredients for anything special. After ruling out quesadillas or tacos (a favorite standby) and shoving the leftover lasagna to the side of the fridge to look behind it, I decided on a whim to try making pizza dough from scratch. Even though our kitchen is about 65% packed (both in terms of tools and pantry ingredients), I found a packet of active yeast-- possibly leftover from Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner-- and after looking through a couple recipes online, realized we had just enough of everything else for this to go down. Now I'm admittedly a haphazard and impatient baker. Despite my impatience, this turned out nicely, and much tastier than any prepackaged pizza dough we've ever popped out of a biscuit package.

Zipper's Easy Pizza Dough:

1pk active dry yeast

1 c. warm (not hot) water

let the yeast proof in the water for 10-15 min. (If you're impatient and paranoid like me, you can sprinkle just a little sugar into the water/yeast to make sure those little puppies are alive and, well, active.)

Meanwhile, combine 3c. all purpose flour (one recipe I found called for bread flour, which I didn't have. This worked just fine. Maybe I'll have to get some bread flour for future pizzas, though. Also, recipes asked for anywhere between 2 to 3 1/2 c. flour. I started with 2c. which gave me a gummy, gluey dough, and sprinkled in more flour until I got to a nice sticky dough at 3 c.)

1 tsp. salt

2 tsp. sugar

yeast/water mixture

2 Tb. olive oil

Mix these together until you have a stiff dough. Now recipes I found used conflicting terminology and actions at this point. One recipe describes what you may have as a "stiff dough," another asks for a "smooth elastic ball." What I had at this point was a sticky ball and no flour left. (Also, I mixed the dough with a fork then a whisk then my hands. I don't have a KitchenAid mixer or a dough hook. Yet.) So I winged it, kneaded it carefully to preserve as much as possible (about 3 min.) and left it in an oiled bowl with plastic wrap and a kitchen towel over the top for about 40 min. Meanwhile I made PESTO (with sweet basil from our garden)!!!!

The dough rose and I pressed it down and let it rise more about 10 min. Then I cut of about 1/3 of it to make my own mini pizza with just pesto, mozzarella and slices of our roma grape tomatoes (from our garden). The dough was pretty easy to work into a flat, thin pie crust (and no, I don't know how to toss it. Yet.)

For the rest of the fam, I used the other 2/3 of the dough for a larger pie. This time it was harder to work. Some areas were too threadbare, so I balled it up and actually rolled it out with some effort, a sprinkle of corn meal, and the *very* last of the flour. The rolling-out actually produced a very nice, soft, smooth pie crust. So I topped it with tomato sauce, garlic, onion, tomato, fennel, basil, and some leftover veggie italian sausage (the best is Trader Joe's!)

Here's my finished pesto pizza! I baked them for 20 min. at 350. They were a huge hit!

In the future, I'll work on making the crust a little more exciting. They turned out a little blonde. Perhaps if I brush them with some olive oil? We're all in pizza comas now. nom nom nom nom.

Favorite Thing: Panino Caprese a Zips

It's like Insalata Caprese.. with bread.. and avocado. As my cooking philosophy goes: Too much of a good thing is Even Better! I first ate Caprese when I went to college in northern California and worked in a shi-shi (I am being corrected. It's chichi. It's French!) restaurant. Totally became one of my favorite luxury foods. Fresh baked baguette, fresh mozzerella, garden tomatoes, lovely amazing garden sweet basil, and some delicious fruity extra virgin olive oil. (On a budget, Bertolli's is excellent. When being totally indulgent, perhaps after tax returns or something...Lucini's is divine). And one day the clouds opened up and a light shone down from the sky and I thought "avocado would be SO good on this." Must stop. Drooling on keyboard.

Baby Pies and Cannellini Crostini

Summer school is starting soon, so we're trying to get in as much picnicking and adventuring as possible. Today I packed up the cooler with mini blackberry and peach pies, and a cannellini bean salad with crostini...but after our adventures, we ended up eating it all on the couch at home. Here they are before the mini-lattice tops:

And after...

Zips prefers the blackberry. After all, her proper name, Zarzamora, means blackberry. Can you believe we forgot to snap a photo after they were baked?? It's definitely TOO LATE NOW!

The cannellini bean salad is an approximation of a vegetarian dish served at Edo's Squid in Richmond, VA. I've never been to it, but my partner had a job interview in Richmond. Eating at Edo's and indulging in the ginger sesame dipping sauce for vegetable tempura at TJ's (which I've never visited, but of course will have to figure out the recipe for) were the highlights of her trip. In any case, I've got a pantry stocked with cannellini's and some panko crumbs for the future.

Cannellini Salad:

2 cans of cannellini beans (I use Bush's)
1/4 c. red onion THINLY sliced
1/4c. parsley (flat or curly.. I prefer flat) chopped
2 roma tomatoes chopped
1 tsp. lemon zest
2 Tb. lemon juice (or more to taste)
3 Tb. extra virgin olive oil (ditto)
salt and black pepper
The longer it sits, the better it gets...

Zips' big sister Mini checks out the crostini.