Nilla Wafer BonBons & a Book Plug

In the middle of my holiday cookie making frenzy, E asked what bonbons made with Nilla Wafers would taste like. I wasn't sure, but agreed to make some (they look deceptively like the chocolate-peanut butter buckeyes I used to always make at Christmas, in part because I coated them in dark chocolate). What?? A new type of cookie? One where I get to be inventive? Yes please.

The process is basically the same as making tuxedoed oreos -- but (to me) less satisfying. There's something about blending the chocolate wafer cookie with the cream filling that I love. I had to add a little extra liquid to account for the lack of cream filling and the filling didn't initially hold up as easily. I also managed to give myself a first degree burn on my index finger pulling a bowl from the microwave that was oven safe, but apparently (no note on it one way or the other) not microwave safe. Alas, the hazards of the kitchen.

E didn't care for them as much as the tuxedoed oreos (I imagine the nilla wafer version is moderately flavorless moderately flavorless) but was curious what they would have been like with white chocolate. It's an interesting question and a good suggestion. If someone tries them, please let me know what you think. I also think they could be interesting made into smaller balls and served atop frozen bananas (maybe with a dab of chocolate to hold them in place). But then, I think vanilla wafer cookies should really only be used for banana pudding, if they must be used at all. Or spread with PB and stuck together to make little sandwiches.

However, these would be incredibly kid friendly, both to make and eat, much like the tuxedoed oreos. Speaking of kids, Erica, over at Kinds of Honey, just published her juvenile fiction eBook, Riding the Neighbors' Horses. I haven't read it yet, but I hope to soon, because Erica's a talented writer (and crafter, and many other things). I wanted to make sure to pass this information along though, in case you were looking for the right gift-of-words for some young person in your life.

Nilla Wafer BonBons


1 12-ounce box nilla wafers
6 ounces cream cheese, softened
1-3 tablespoons milk
Chocolate for coating (I used a little less than a cup)

Pulverize the nilla wafers using a food processor, or by placing them in a durable zip-top bag and pounding them with a rolling pin.

Combine cream cheese and wafer crumbs in a medium bowl, until well mixed. Add enough milk (if necessary) to help wafters and cheese form a very thick dough that isn't sticky and holds together when rolled in a ball between your hands.

Form balls (mine were a little smaller than ping pong balls) with the dough and place on plate covered with foil or waxed paper and then stick in the the freezer for 30 minutes-1 hour.

Melt the chocolate using a method of your choice either in a shallow bowl (or transfer to a shallow bowl once it is melted). Rolls the balls through the chocolate, using clean fingers or a spoon to guide the ball. Shake off any excess chocolate and then place back on the foil or waxed paper to set (this won't take long since the bonbons are cold). Store in the refrigerator until about 20 minutes before you are ready to serve.

Brown Rice Risotto with Butternut Squash & Swiss Cheese

Sometimes, the road you're on seems to lead no where.  That's when
it's time to decide whether you want to forge your own path, or
just continue down the road and hope for a scenic detour.
(Photo taken October 25, 2011)

I wanted to make a brown rice risotto because I really, really like brown rice--at least as far as rices are concerned. And I've been enjoying the lemon risotto E's been making, but last time she made it, she said we needed to try another risotto recipe--and I thought she was right. I also wanted to figure out how to use up the remaining Swiss cheese I bought for another recipe.

The interwebs didn't tell me much about brown rice risotto that used Swiss cheese. Or about risottos that used Swiss cheese without using other cheeses. And for the brown rice risottos, many seemed to use cornstarch to make it creamy (ick! I'm sure it's fine, but it doesn't sound appealing). I finally a recipe that used just a splash of cream (okay, 1/4 cup) at the end to create this effect and I liked the idea (if nothing else, it would potentially smooth out the flavor at the end) and co-opted it, using milk instead--the milk we had in our fridge. Normally, I might use skim milk if I used a dairy-based milk at all.

I added nutritional yeast to increase the sort of bright flavor that parm usually lends to risottos, and because E said I'd have to be pretty sneaky to get her to eat it (second night in a row, E, second night in a row!). The Swiss lends a lovely nuttiness to the risotto, which complements the natural flavor present in brown rice and also the earthiness of the butternut squash (which for the record, pretty much disappears by the time it's been cooked with the rice, if you're the type that needs to hide veggies from your family).

Because brown rice takes longer to cook than white rice, this risotto takes longer to cook than risottos based on arborio rice. I cooked it while talking on the phone to a friend in the Midwest (who, when he learned I was adding cumin, encouraged me to make it into a palak dal--and I'll admit, it was tempting and maybe a soon-to-eat meal with E) for a while and the rest of the time while E sat our kitchen table talking with me and knitting. I think, from start to finish, I spent perhaps 90 minutes on it (including prep!), which makes it a very time-intensive meal, even for a risotto, but I think it was pretty worth it. It tastes rich and creamy (and is rich and creamy) and has a salty-savory kick that seems especially appropriate for autumn.

This could easily be served as a main dish (how E and I ate it) or as a side dish. Although it's time intensive, it's also pretty easy to make -- you stir often, but not constantly, you can get other things done if you want (such as making puppy chow, like I did). The key is mostly not to get too distracted because brown rice isn't as traditionally starchy as arborio, which is a big part of what makes risotto so creamy.

A quick note about the herb water -- I don't tend to buy veggie broth or keep it on hand. This was my variation of making a vegetable broth. The fines herbes, once the water begins to simmer, steep into a weak tea-color and the salt gets absorbed slowly into the rice. I didn't find it overly salty, but depending on your rice and on your Swiss cheese, you might need more or less.

The picture I was able to get isn't super-great -- the risotto didn't work with the lighting in my kitchen. If I remember to take a picture again next time I make it, I'll post a better photo!


Brown Rice Risotto with Butternut Squash  & Swiss Cheese
6 ounces frozen butternut squash, cubed
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
1/3 large onion, chopped
2 large or 3 medium cloves garlic, sliced thinly
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 1/2 cups long grain brown rice
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
6 cups water heated to simmering with 1 tablespoon fines herbes and 2 teaspoons salt
1/4 cup white wine (optional, but deepens the flavor)
3 ounces Swiss cheese, cubed
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons milk (preferably whole)

Saute the butternut squash in olive oil and butter, over medium heat, for 1-2 minutes, until defrosted and beginning to brown. Add the onion and garlic and saute until the onion turns translucent. Add the cumin and pepper flakes and saute about 30 seconds (until fragrant) then add the rice. Stir occasionally until the rice begins to turn white. Add 1 1/2 cups herb-water and the nutritional yeast to the rice. Stir constantly until the water has mostly been absorbed. Add the remaining herb-water 1/2 cup at a time, stirring frequently between additions, until the water has been used up and the rice is plump and tender. Add the white wine and stir until absorbed. Add the Swiss cheese and stir until the cheese is melted and well incorporated. Add the lemon juice, stir to incorporate, and then add the milk. Taste and add salt, if necessary. Serve hot.

Lemon-y Snickett Risotto

Ingredients, minus dairy products

It's almost Halloween! What better to do than to have Halloween-themed food (which I fully intend to do for at least a couple of posts--hopefully that intention will actually happen!)? This post is inspired by E's recent endeavors into a (wonderful) lemon risotto. She's made it a couple of times now and it seems worthy of sharing with others. I'm not sure which site she got it from originally, either, but I am going to try and write it up to best reflect what she does when she makes it.

So, what makes this risotto lemon-y snickett risotto? Honestly, not much. Okay, not anything. Totally unauthorized re-use of the name (hence Lemon-y with a hyphen and snickett with two "t's") BUT, this basic lemon risotto can be dressed up with little "lumps of coal" (aka black olives), reptile tongues (aka carrot curls), or fire flecks (aka red pepper flakes).

Risotto in Pot

E seems to have endless patience for stirring the risotto rice--but honestly this doesn't take that long to make, as far as risottos go. In the past, I made a risotto that took forever to cook. And I don't remember it being as tasty as this one. The original recipe calls for parsley, but we haven't used it yet. I imagine it would brighten up the flavor nicely and provide lovely little flecks of green to make it look even fresher (serpent scales to go with the theme of lemon-y snickett?). We also haven't used shallots, but instead just use a bit of yellow onion. I suspect that the lightly garlicky flavor of shallots would be beautiful in this dish, so if you can get your hands on it, you should definitely use shallot in favor of the onion. Don't skip the lemon zest. It'll taste fine without it--but you get an extra hit of lemon flavor whenever you bite into a zesty curl.

Like many risottos, this dish is rich. But fabulous. And I would happily make/eat it for breakfast if I wanted something savory/lemony one morning and had all the ingredients handy. I might also saute some mushrooms and add that, but E doesn't like fungus, so we haven't tried that.

Lemon-y Risotto
4 cups vegetable broth
2 cups water
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons olive oil
1/2 cup onion, chopped
2 cups arborio rice
1/4 cup dry white wine

ZestingTools & Zest

1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (about 3 ounces)
3 tablespoons lemon juice (at least!)
4 teaspoons grated lemon zest

Bring broth and water to a simmer in a large bot over medium heat. Reduce heat to low; cover to keep warm. Meanwhile, saute onions in the olive oil and butter over medium-low heat, until tender, about 6 minutes. Reduce heat to low, add the arborio rice; stir one minute. Add wine and stir until evaporated. Add 1 1/2 cups broth; simmer until absorbed, stirring frequently.

Add remaining broth 1/2 cup at a time, simmering until completely absorbed before adding more broth. This will take about 35 minutes. Stir in cheese, then lemon juice. Add zest just before serving.

Risotto with "fire flecks"

Scalloped Potatoes with Chevre

My roommate, E, and I made dinner together Sunday night. She wanted to make her scalloped potatoes with chevre (almost all the ingredients came from our growers market) and asked me to pick up something to go with them. I picked up broccoli crowns (which we steamed) and beets (because I like them and wanted some for the week), which I roasted. More on that later, in a separate post.

E had bought some lovely waxy potatoes from a local grower that were red on the outside with a pink ring in the flesh. After some research, I'm still not sure what type of potatoes these are (and she didn't remember what the grower told her), but I think they might have been red thumb potatoes. These potatoes had a very waxy coating that she had to scrub off thoroughly (it looked a little like she was peeling a sunburn from these potatoes), but after this coating was removed the potatoes had an absolutely brilliant crimson skin. She sliced them thinly, into circles, then layered them with chevre, threw on some whipping cream and topped them with double-seasoned breadcrumbs from a local bakery. Once the potatoes finished baking, the creamy base had turned just faintly pink and the potatoes were tender, but held their shape beautifully.

She didn't use a recipe or measure, so the recipe that follows is entirely my estimation and you should make adjustments as you see necessary (and to taste). We ate this as a main dish, but you could certainly serve it as a side dish.

E's Scalloped Potatoes with Chevre
5 medium, waxy potatoes, thoroughly scrubbed and sliced into 1/8" slices
6 ounces chevre
3-4 ounces milk or heavy cream
Dried basil
Garlic powder

breadcrumbs*
2-3 teaspoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

In a 10" round baking dish, add one layer of the sliced potatoes and then spread a small amount of chevre on each potato slice. Sprinkle with a small amount garlic powder and basil. Top with another layer of potatoes and cheese. Repeat until all your potatoes have been used, ending with a layer of potatoes on top (we had three total layers of potatoes). Pour on the milk or cream. It should not cover the potatoes.

In a medium bowl toss approximately 1 cup of breadcrumbs with the olive oil, garlic powder, and black pepper, then spread the bread crumbs evenly over the top of the prepared potatoes.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes, or until bubbly and golden. Test to make sure the potatoes are tender before serving. Serve hot.

*E used a bread with rosemary incorporated into it already, which is why I referred to them as double-seasoned breadcrumbs. The hint of rosemary helped make the flavor of this dish bright, so consider adding a pinch of rosemary.

Steamed brocs, scalloped potatoes, and roasted beets

If you're making this gluten-free, use gluten-free breadcrumbs or leave them off entirely (though you might want to add a bit of garlic and black pepper to the milk/cream before you pour it over the potatoes--but then I just really like garlic and black pepper).

An Experiment in Mozzarella

A friend and I decided to try our hand at making mozzarella this weekend. Cheese-making has been on my must-learn list for a while, so I was thrilled to learn a friend had the same desire. We looked up a recipe in a cheese-making book, which called for a special mozzarella starter. Our reaction, ha. One, we weren't sure where we would find this if we did want to use it (to the best of my knowledge, our food co-op doesn't carry such things though it does carry rennet*--which I already owned--another necessary ingredient). Two, we didn't need enough starter for 13 gallons of milk (which is apparently what most starters provided). And three, we imagine ourselves better at making-do than that.

We knew recipes existed that didn't call for starter. We remembered reading them. Specifically, we both remembered reading about such a recipe in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which was taken from Ricki Carroll's book Home Cheese Making and which I've copied below. We looked up the recipe for 30-minute mozzarella and that was the recipe we tried. The recipe didn't specify what type of millk to use (i.e. - whole or skim or other), so we used 2%. According to the New England Cheese Making website, it doesn't really matter after all.

This recipe also calls for citric acid. We were skeptical. My friend asked if we could use lemon juice instead. Maybe? Probably not? We weren't sure and before experimenting too much (or, looking it up on the internet), we decided the easiest thing to do would be buying the amount of citric acid we needed from the bulk section of our co-op. It cost less than $1 for a lot more than this recipe calls for--but when I went to buy it, I bought extra on the chance/hope that it would go well and we'd make this again before I moved.

A friend of mine--and I use the term loosely, since I haven't talked to her in three years--makes goat cheese mozzarella with milk she gets from her small flock of Nubians (floppy eared goats, very popular as dairy goats). When she first told me about this, I was both impressed and skeptical. She said it used a lot of water and that the first few attempts had turned out poorly. I wondered what goat's milk mozzarella would taste like.  If you're interested, here is a link for a goat's milk mozzarella recipe--using a starter--from Mother Earth News. For this post, I tried to find out more about the farm my friend runs, Contrarian Farm, near Pittsboro, North Carolina--but could only find a few useful fact-lets about it on the interwebs. If you live near there though, I know they used to show up at the Pittsboro farmers market and I'm guessing they still do--there are enough recent entries on the internet about the farm and its owners. My friend also used to raise meat bunnies.

*Rennet, traditionally, comes from the stomach-lining of young calves, as a by-product of veal production. The rennet we used was a vegetarian rennet. There are a few varieties of vegetarian rennet. Vegetable-based rennet comes from plants with coagulating properties, such as thistles, nettles, and mallow. They can also be grown from microbes, such as Rhizomucor miehei. The type we used ("double strength" where 1/8 teaspoon will coagulate 2 gallons of milk) comes from this type of microbe.

Our Super-Strong Rennet

Mozzarella
1 gallon pasteurized milk (NOT ultra-pasteurized)

1 1/2 level tsp. citric acid dissolved in ¼ cup cool water 

Stir the milk on the stove in a stainless steel kettle, heating very gently.  At 55° add the citric acid solution and mix thoroughly. At 88° it should begin to curdle. 

¼ tsp. liquid rennet diluted in ¼ cup cool water

Gently stir in diluted rennet with up-and-down motion, and continue heating the milk to just over 100°, then turn off heat. Curds should be pulling away from sides of pot, ready to scoop out. The whey should be clear.  (If it’s still milky, wait a few minutes.) Use a slotted spoon to move curds from pot to a 2-quart microwaveable bowl. Press curds gently with hands to remove as much whey as possible.  

Just starting to form curds

Use the pot of hot whey on the stove for the heating-and-kneading steps. Knead the cheese with hands (rubber gloves would be good, according to Ricki Carroll) or a spoon to remove more whey. Put the ball of curd back in with a big slotted spoon, and heat it until it’s almost too hot to touch.  Good stretching temperature is 175 degrees. Repeat 2 times, kneading between each time.

It shouldn't look like this once you've pressed it out (attempt 1)

At this point, salt the cheese to taste, then knead and pull until it’s smooth and elastic. When you can stretch it into ropes like taffy you are done. If the curds break instead, they need to be reheated a bit. Once cheese is smooth and shiny, roll it into small balls to eat warm or store for later in the refrigerator.


***
The first time we made this, we overworked the cheese. The second time, we worked it less, got it hotter, and it made the process much easier. The cheese looked and pulled like taffy and we can't wait to make it again. Tomorrow.

We have smooth, shiny mozzarella balls (attempt 2)