I don’t generally like lactic coagulated cheeses. They are usually just one-note sour, without much depth or complexity. And I’m not sure how much I like B. linens (stinky feet) cheeses, not because I dislike the stink (I kind of like it, go figger) , just because they’re also IME pretty one-note. So an Epoisse combines both, lactic boringness and stinky feet.
. . . or does it (ominous music)?
They get their semi-daily bathing in either a salt or brandy brine.
After two months, despite the “peau de crapaud,” (toad skin), they are kind of pretty in their ugliness:
And so wildly different in taste, depending on where from the cheese you take them. Some parts just very lactic and sour tasting, others a sort of mild and fairly characterless paste, others with a surprising depth.
And the rind wasn’t bad, either.
Now they are going into the fridge. They did make me reconsider lactic cheeses.
My Parmesan/Romano cheeses got their monthly rubdown with olive oil. Sadly, the oldest is only five months old, so I have some time before I can try them.
This is a Manchego, technically not in the same category, so I won’t have to wait as long as all that. Caldwell says it’s okay to treat this as an oiled-rind cheese.
I’m worried about this Parmesan. The first two I did, I used yogurt and followed the recipe on cheesemaking.com. This one, from about two months ago, I followed Caldwell and used Aroma B. It almost immediately blew up, and has stayed that way.
There are so many random spores and bacteria (Propionic?) in my house now that it could be almost anything. Worried about it, but I won’t find out for many months!
The Norwegians call this the “weldens beste,” the world’s best. This is my attempt at a visual recipe. Let’s see . . .
Just a pretty picture, strawberry flowers.
I don’t know if this is the world’s “best cake.” It’s my second time at making it . . . the first time it was waaay tooo sweet, so I reduced the sugar by half.. Nice texture from the cake layer, the meringue, and the almonds, and the richness from the (non-sweetened) whipped cream was excellent.
This is a followup to my post about my Ste.-Maure cheesemaking experience, https://tiabr.com/ste-maure-cow-vs-goat/
So now it is about a month later, almost two months since I made the cow, a week less since I made the goat. The cow (left) has been in the fridge, wrapped, because t’other one basically fell out of its rind. The goat has just been in usual conditions.
The cow was really good. I was surprised at its depth of flavor, since I generally find lactic cheeses (at least the ones I’ve made 🙂 ) pretty sour and one-note, but this was good, and the rind actually made it better. Maybe all this cheese-making has given me a taste for mold.
Here’s the goat:
This was somewhat better than before, less chalky, but still not very “goat-y,” as in the tang I expect from a goat cheese, and the rind was extremely bitter. I’ll try it again in another month.
When I first moved to DC in 1985, it was a cultural wasteland, in terms of Chinese food. The Chinese takeout two blocks up the street was typical — stacked behind the counter were boxes of frozen (but not any more) pre-cut vegetables and bucket after bucket of sauce — both kinds of sauce, “brown” and “sweet sour.”
In the past few years, there’s been a Cultural Revolution, and we now have excellent restaurants, many of them specializing in regional cuisines. I’ll just mention one, Hong Kong Palace, which despite its name serves really good Sichuanese food.
I don’t often order Chinese delivery, but tired of North China Cafe’s inconsistency, decided to try a new resto, Happy Family. Urgh…..not only the worst Chinese food I’ve ever had, but some of the least appealing food of any type I’ve ever eaten.
Despite only one lonely floating mushroom and some other floating unidentified object, the hot and sour soup looked appetizing.
Except….it didn’t have any flavor. It wasn’t hot, it wasn’t sour. It didn’t taste of chicken, it didn’t taste of pork….it was like eating a bowl of hot water. One of the most tasteless things I’ve ever had.
I’m more and more convinced that as soup goes, so does the restaurant. If a restaurant is willing to put time and effort into getting something as simple as soup right, they’ll probably get a lot of other things right too.
So let’s move on to the main courses, beef with broccoli and Hunan pork.
First of all, note that there are two entirely different versions of fried rice. One tasted old, the other fresher….but they were both nearly tasteless. Give me a handful of cooked rice, an egg, and a teaspoon of soy sauce, and I can cook up something better than that.
Notice all the beef in the broccoli and beef?
Me neither!
As for the Hunan pork, it was 90% chunks of uncooked cabbage, 5% slices of overcooked carrots, 5% sauce…oh, and somehow, a few slices of pork.
Maybe I have become a bit of a food snob, and certainly with the influx of great Chinese restaurants the bar is a bit higher. But I wasn’t expecting greatness, just fresh, tasty food, which Happy Family didn’t deliver.
If you read their Yelp reviews, what comes up repeatedly is how bland the food is, and how small the portions are.
Joe likes his chicken soup to be made from fresh. But honestly, it takes a long time. We have to drive out to Uncle Henry’s farm, and Joe always complains about having to cut the head off the chicken. Every time, he says he’d rather stay at home and choke the chicken, which I don’t get, since we don’t have chickens.
Then I have to gut and pluck the chicken and then after everything else I have to do, that doesn’t leave much time for hoovering, koffee klatches with the gals, and those darn (excuse my French!) PTA meetings!
Midge usually makes soup from a packet. I’d never heard of that, but Midge is a modern gal.
Midge says that some of them, like Lipton’s (despite their excellent tea) aren’t very good, but she likes some from Jamaica, which I believe is somewhere in the country of Africa.
This is Midge’s favorite.
I made some for Joe, but he said he didn’t much care for the taste of Cock.
I would like to serve it both at my next dinner party, but no housewife wants to give her guests too much soup. My fear is that if they eat too much Cock, they won’t be ready for the rump roast.
Staging isn’t really meant to make
your house warm and inviting. Rather, it’s a process of dumbing
down your living space and making it as bland and generic as possible,
so that potential buyers, most of whom lack imagination, can imagine
themselves living there.
That’s why real estate agents say, “de-clutter, de-clutter,
de-clutter!” Any little distraction can queer the buying process.
My agent is great, and I’m doing my best to follow her advice and get rid of any distractions. But I love my house, and have too many things I like to look at, which I guess makes me the real queer.
I love bananas. I love banana bread. I’ve been searching for a good banana bread recipe for a while. “Doesn’t seem like a difficult task,” you may be thinking, but I was seduced into trying recipes that included things like cloves or ground ginger. Recipes that include spices are the painted whores of banana bread recipes, seductive in their cheap and easy appeal, but in the end, unsatisfying distractions from pure banana-y goodness.
This recipe is excellent, no distractions and full of banana appeal.
The key to good banana bread is ooverrrrripe bananas. If they look ready to throw out, in a few days they’ll be ready.
These could have used a few more days, but I was impatient (And you need about two more for this recipe.)
So:
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 C. (one stick) butter at room temperature, or wave it in the micro until soft
3/4 C. brown sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2-1/2 cups mushy mashed overripe banana
Method:
0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees or 175 decimal degrees, and lightly grease a 9 x 5 ” loaf pan.
Cream butter and sugar:
2. Add the eggs to the bowl and beat with a fork.
3. Whisk together flour, baking soda and salt.
Add everything and stir. As much as I love banana bread, its consistency is a little dull, so I add chopped walnuts. And you can add anything like raisins, currants, dates, etc.
After ovening it, be patient for an hour or so . . . then the usual check with a toothpick that comes out clean. This is a very dense bread.
