Cheese Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Retro Food For Modern Times

Tag: Cheese

28
Jun
2020

Cheese-Stuffed Chillies

categories: 1970's recipes, Cheese, Chilli, Good Housekeeping World Cookery

These cheese-stuffed chillies are based on a recipe from the Ceylon section of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery Book. So…I know a little bit about Sri Lankan cooking and never have I ever heard of a cheese-stuffed chilli. Never. Not once. Just in case I am not being entirely clear – no one in my family, not my grandmothers, not my mother, not my aunts, cousins, no other writers of Sri Lankan cookbooks have ever made or even mentioned cheese stuffed chillies in the context of Sri Lankan cooking.

Until now.

I became a little obsessed with this recipe because I started wondering if this was the original Jalapeno popper. Turns out the term jalapeno popper came to prominence in Texas in around 1972 so the recipes are definitely contemporaneous in time if a continent or two apart in space.

The recipe was vague about the type of cheese to use. Mum said that in Sri Lanka when she was growing up the only types of cheese available were Kraft cheese in a tin and Edam. Neither of which I happened to have on hand.

I did have some goat’s cheese and I remembered that my friend Leesa once brought an amazing dish to cookbook club that was feta baked with thyme, honey and walnut. Which also accounted for the other thing that was bothering me which was the inclusion of sugar in the recipe.

Hmm…so goat’s cheese to sub for the cheese in a tin, honey to sub in for the sugar. Looks like a recipe is coming together!

These cheese-stuffed chillies were delicious!!!!

There was some heat from the chillis, creaminess and a little bit of salty tanginess from the cheeseand the mustard, sweetness from the honey, crunchy toastiness from the nuts and a hit of herbiness from the thyme.

Perfect drinking snack!!!

I could have eaten a dozen of these with an ice-cold beer on a sunny afternoon. And I would have been in total bliss! They were also nice with a glass of red wine on a cold winter’s night too!

A Digression in the World of Major League Eating

Which reminds me. I found this amazing factoid on Wikipedia when doing some research on the origin of the jalapeno popper.

“Joey “Jaws” Chestnut holds the Major League Eating record for jalapeño poppers, eating 118 in 10 minutes at the University of Arizona on 8 April 2006.”

This of course took me down a path of Major League Eating. Turns out our boy Jaws (known on the MLE site as “the greatest eater in history” and “the apex predator” does not restrict himself to the jalapeno. He also holds records for downing Chicken Wings (both long form and 12 minute), pulled pork sandwiches, hot dogs, meat pies, donuts, eggs, asparagus, corned beef sandwiches, pork ribs, Philly Cheesesteaks, funnel cakes, fish tacos, mutton sandwichs, traditional tacos, shrimp wontons, pulled pork, horseshoe sandwiches (???), pulled pork sliders, long form burritos, short form ramen, gyros, Twinkies, boysenberry pie, tamales, gyoza, gumbo, ice cream sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, poutine, shrimp cocktail..there are more but I lost the will to live whilst typing that lot out.

Sadly, the prize for French cut green beans (2.71 pounds in six minutes) went to Joey Jaws arch-rival Crazy Legs Conti. Shine on you Crazy Legged Diamond!

Cheese Stuffed Chillies – The Recipe

I also put my stuffed chillies under the grill to melt the cheese, toast the nuts and get some nice roastiness on the chillies. But you could serve them as is per the recipe if you wanted.

The ultimate verdict on these cheese-stuffed chillies is that they are not at all Sri Lankan but are totally delish! Just don’t invite Joey Jaws Chestnut over if you plan on making them. Or make a LOT!

Next stop on the good Housekeeping World Cookery Tour is China! Let’s see what inauthentic food we can find from the land of dragons and emperors! I’m hoping for some dumplings!

Have a great week!

25
Sep
2016

Repost – Blessed Are The Cheesemakers

categories: Cheese

Hey People of the Internet,

I’ve been making cheese. Actually I made cheese a long time ago and then totally forgot to post it. But, I am thinking of stepping once more into the breach and it inspired me to hunt this down and get it out.

To get me started, I bought a Mad Millie Italian Cheese Making Kit which came with all the bits and bobs, you need, the cheese cloth, the thermometer, a ricotta mould, citric acid, rennet, steriliser, etc as well as recipes for mozzarella, ricotta, salted ricotta, burrata and mascarpone. You can of course do it without the kit and there are some recipes below but I found the kit was very useful in pulling together all the items listed above.

All I needed to buy was the milk. They recommend you buy unhomogenised milk – i.e milk where the milk and cream are still separate. I thought this might be difficult to find but my local supermarket stocked it.

Now make way for a super thrilling picture of milk heating. Here it is, if you can stand the heat, milk in a saucepan. Oh, the cream blobs I’ve circled? Are actually blobs of cream. That’s about as exciting as the first part of cheesemaking gets!

Once your milk gets up to temperature, pop in your rennet and citric acid. And wait a bit. Your milk mix will thicken into gel like consistency.

Now get your knife and slash away. If you want to make that noise from Psycho, go right ahead. After all, you’ve just spent twenty minutes watching milk heat. You deserve it.

And now you have…no, not a dead girl in the bathtub but some slashed up curds and whey.

You then stir some more, heat them some more until they start to look kind of like melted cheese:

Next up, pour the entire mix into a colander lined with cheesecloth. The whey will run off and the curds will remain in the cloth. I deft you not to think of Little Miss Muffet when you are separating curds and whey.

Tuffet optional.

Now take a handful of curds. Drop them in hot water to let them melt a bit.

Now stretch.

Not like this:

Like this:

And when you’re done stretching, form a ball.

Then drop your balls in ice-cold water….

And you’re done! Fresh delicious mozzarella. Perfect for your next pizza or why not try my cheesy eggplant and salami sandwiches?

I also made some ricotta:

Until I made it, I never realised how much milk you need to make cheese. I think I used two litres of milk for the mozzarella and I got five fairly small balls (bigger than a golf ball, smaller than a tennis ball) of mozzarella. With the ricotta, I used a litre of milk and got the cheese shown above which even taking my huge man-sized hands into account, is not all that much! Still, it is a great experience and not at all hard to do – the ricotta was even easier to make than the mozzarella.

In a few weeks, I will be trying my hand at goat’s curd but shh don’t tell my book club, it’s a surprise!

Have a wonderful week!

Signature 1

Save

15
Jul
2016

Cowboys, Caviar, Casseroles and Cocktails

categories: Cheese, Chilli, Chocolate, Cocktail, Corn, Eggs, Kahlua, Salad, Vodka

Dear readers

I had such high hopes for this post. Then they were totally dashed by a twist of fate that…well…I guess if I’d seen it coming it wouldn’t be a twist would it? But I’m jumping ahead of myself. First, I was totally delighted when Greg from Recipes4Rebels asked if I would join in a cookalong for Cowboy Day! This event occurs on the fourth Saturday of July each year and is celebrated all over the world!

Obviously, this is not the fourth Saturday in July, however, as I will be sunning myself on the beach at Sanur in Bali that day, with Greg’s blessing I am posting my ventures into Cowboy Cookin’ early! And it’s a three course meal y’all. (Because 1 that’s how cowboy’s talk and 2 cocktails are a course aren’t they? This one is almost a meal! But again, getting ahead of myself!)

So now onto my foiled grand plans. My idea was that I would find a cocktail called a Bali Cowboy – possibly a more tropical version of this cowboy cocktail and I would make it for my post and then, on the day itself, I would tweet another picture of me in Bali with with my Bali Cowboy and it would in a glass as big as my head and it would be blue and loaded with umbrellas and pineapple wedges and all the other tropical cocktail paraphenalia.

A quick google soon showed me that there is such a thing as a Bali Cowboy. It is NOT a cocktail. Turns out that a Bali Cowboy is a male prostitute who hangs around Kuta Beach willing to sell his services to any rich (ie all) Western women who care to pay for them. So, whilst I’m not 100% ruling out a photo of me with a Bali Cowboy on Cowboy Day, the likelihood of it happening has dropped significantly!

So, new ideas had to be found. Starting with some caviar. Because we’re classy cowboys! It’s Cowboy Caviar of courseWhere has this salad / dip been all my life? If this is what cowboys eat, then I want to be a cowboy. It’s all kinds of beans and corn and tomatoes and avocado . Truly delicious! I loved this!

So, for the second course, I went straight to the top. And by that I mean Mr John Wayne himself.

Turns out The Duke and I share a love of eggs, cheese and chillies. Now, just one thing about the John Wayne casserole…. To my mind, when you combine egg yolks to beaten egg whites with other stuff, in this instance cheese and chilli and you them put that in an oven and cook until it’s all puffed up and golden, that’s not so much a casserole as a soufflé.

You be the judge:

I’ll sit quietly over here and let my case speak for itself.

By the way, cooking this for an hour would be way too much. You are seeing about 35 minutes and I think it was over. I would cook this…half an hour max. Also, the tomato didn’t do much. I would actually leave it out and cook this for 20 minutes total.

The ~~soufflé~~ casserole was good but I think I was so blown away by the Cowboy Caviar that it kind of paled by comparison. I will definitely make it again though!

And now for my grand Cowboy finale, I am turning to to person who started all of this, yep, Greg. This cocktail /dessert is A-MAZING! So, so good. Cowboys and cowgirls, can I present, the Giant Martini!

There is no other word for this but absolutely divine! The giant in the Giant Martini doesn’t refer t to it’s size (but you could scale it up very easily) but to the fact that it was created on the set of Giant by Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson.

Git along little doggie, this cocktail is all mine!

And you too!

Ah yes, Greg’s site on the PC, a cocktail in front of me and The A-Z of Cooking behind it. Just a regular day round these parts!

Many, many thanks to Greg, this was so much fun! Thank you so much for including me! I always say this but you hear so much about the internet being a a horrible vicious place, I am always delighted and totally honoured to make new friends, like Greg, on here.

Ok, I’ve gotta go, 5:30am start tomorrow! But I’m loving and leaving you with some some super rhinestone cowboy singing!

Find out all about the Cowboy Day Cook A Long here. Hopefully my attempts will inspire you to bigger and better things on the day!

The recipe for Cowboy Caviar I used came from Cookie and Kate.

The Giant Martini recipe is here.

Kiss me and smile for me, I’ll be back here in a couple of weeks but if you can’t smile without me, I’ll be tweeting and instagramming from Bali throughout.

Loving you, leaving you, now!

Signature 1

Save

19
Jun
2016

Potted Cheese – Delicious Food, Impossible Ingredients

categories: Cheese, Leftovers, Starters, Wine

Hey there people of the internet!

Take a look at this super delicious snack plate. Good at any time – but my favourite? A snack plate, a sunny Sunday afternoon,sitting on my balcony with a good book and a cheeky glass of wine = heaven!

The star of this particular snack plate is some potted cheese. .

Which sadly relies on two ingredients that may as well be unicorn’s tears and dragon’s blood for the times they have ever been available in this kitchen. Just one of them is nigh on a miracle and as for both, you had better go outside and look up because that moon out there will be bluer than Tobias Funke!

So what are these two magical, nigh on mythical substances?

Leftover cheese
Leftover wine

Whoever has them? No one I want as a friend!

My cheeses were the remnants….actually it even pains me to say that. The cheeses were items from a cheese platter (probably the previous weeks snacking plate) that I had just not got around to eating yet. And I cheated and opened a bottle of wine to make this.

I used a goat’s cheese, a blue cheese, a pecorino pepato and some cheddar. You can use any cheese you have.

First up, place all your bits of cheese into a food processor and whiz it up! Then add in your flavourings – I added port, a splash of red wine, Worchestershire sauce, cayenne pepper and then, because it was a little dry after the first whiz through, a little more port and a bit of cream. My recipe is based on a classic one by Jane Grigson but you can play with the flavourings to suit your palate and your mix of cheese.

Once you have whizzed it all up , pop it into a pot:

The next step is optional but traditionally the pot was then sealed with a layer of clarified butter:

Why Potted Cheese?

The idea behind potted cheese is simple. Back in the day when refrigeration was not as it is today, cheese was far more perishable than now. Potting your ends of cheese prolonged it’s life – I’m guessing the booze helped to preserve it whilst the clarified butter seal stopped bacteria getting in.

Nowadays, it is done more because it tastes delicious than for the preserving factor.

What Can You Do With Potted Cheese?

OMG, so much. Have it on crackers with a glass of wine! Quick, easy, delicious.

Replace regular cheese in a grilled cheese sandwich! Here is my salami, potted cheese, red onion and tomato version. With a pickle to add some sharpness.

So much oozy goodness!

I haven’t made these next lot but I think potted cheese would be delicious used in the following ways:

Replace sour cream in a baked potato. Or add it to chips and gravy for a take on a poutine.
Saute some bacon or steam some broccoli (or do both), cook up some pasta, top with potted cheese and stir through the bacon or broccoli
Fill celery sticks, add a topping of chopped walnuts
Replace crackers on a snack plate with slices of apple or pear
Heat up a dollop, add some more cream if necesary and use as a mornay or gratin sauce over anything you want to mornay or gratin
Spread it on bread, make up a savory custard and you have a super strata to go!

[yumprint-recipe id=’67’]So, it’s Sunday and whilst not balcony sitting weather at all, I’ve got the fire going and Hollow City, the second book of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children good to go, so excuse me, I have a potted cheese snack plate to prepare! Dammit! Speaking of YA literature just made me realise I should have saved this for when The Cursed Child, the new Harry Potter comes out. I could have filled it with Harry Potter of cheese gags! Stay tuned for the re-post!

Have a fab week!

Signature 1

Save

08
Jan
2015

Cucumber Catamaran with Carrot Paprika Balls

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, Carrot, Cream Cheese, Cucumber, Starters

They say the devil will find work for idle hands to do.

And when I say they, I mean Messrs Morrissey, Marr…and….ermmmm…. the other two. AKA The Smiths. I’m not sure where the original quote for that comes from. Shakespeare? The Bible?

Wouldn’t it be fabulous if I had a little box and I could type questions into it and get almost instantaneous answers to questions like who were the other two and where did that quote come from?

But, no time for that sort of sorcery right now….these idle hands built a boat!!!

Not a real boat, I haven’t spent my holidays tinkering around the backyard with a hammer and some hickory barky bark, but a boat nonetheless. A catamaran to be exact!

Remember when I made the Hayman Island Chicken Salad? That post contains this photo amazing photo of a catamaran table.

And now, in the spirit of a Russian Doll, imagine a smaller catamaran. Maybe one that could be placed on the catamaran table, filled with some cheesy balls o’ goodness.

Et voila…

The cucumber catamaran.

Now, I”m not saying she’s the best looking boat in the world. She’s a bit wonky. But she is quite obviously a boat.

In case you need some work for your idle hands, here’s how to make your own:

The paprika carrot balls weren’t bad either…recipe below…

The Smiths are one of my favorite bands ever. I spent countless hours of angsty teenage emotional turmoil locked in my bedroom listening to “How Soon Is Now” and “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”, countered only by and the sheer manic malicious exuberance of “Panic”.

So here’s a little treat for me you!

This week, I’ll be “spending my warm summer days indoors, writing frightening verse to a buck tooth girl in Luxembourg”…

Otherwise known as doing this. Which I guess makes you my bucktooth girl.

Where ever you are.

Have a great one!

[yumprint-recipe id=’17’]