HomemadeCreamCheese

It's simple, quick, cheap and easy. Almost curiously unmysterious. And, with thirty minutes of your time, you can cook up a half kilo of creamy and uncomplicated deliciousness. Unsalted, unsweetened, and with no additives.

2 litres of goats cheese, badly strained, yielded about half a kilo of cream cheeese. The texture was smooth, melting nicely in the mouth, no graininess, and fatty enough to make me think about adding extra flavours to the cheese itself. It gave a smooth and sweet, not sour, hit with some light and nutty undertones.

As it sat in the fridge, the taste developed, the texture bacame denser - though still creamy, and the taste...becomes cheesier. Deeper, with a hint of lactic sourness.

A perfect replacement for store bought cream cheese, or Ricotta.

We served it up in canneloni, with chard from the garden (recipe and video to follow), and a slow cooked sticky tomato sauce, and also straight, on homemade bread courtesy of the Gorgeous C's delightful baking art, with a sticky, sweet and ecstatic red onion jam.

Ok, ingredients.

2 litres of milk (I used organic goats milk, cows milk is fine)
250 ml of double cream (next batch I'll try without, for comparison purposes)
1 tablespoon of lemon juice, strained, per litre (add more if necessary)
Thermometer (useful, though not absolutely necessary)
Mix the milk and cream together in a thick bottomed saucepan - Quite important this, as the milk may burn and stick if not.
Heat to 85Degrees C. Stirring occasionally. If you don't have a thermometer, wait until you can see the milk beginning to steam a little.
Add the lemon juice.
Heat until it hits 90 or 95 degrees (I went for 95), or until you see the curds separate from the whey - the milk will look really grainy.
Strain - I scooped out the curds into a sieve, and a lot of curd slipped through the sieve. Ideally, line a sieve with cheesecloth, and filter it through this. Leave it sitting in this for several hours to drain to the consistency you want.
Tip out into a bowl, and refrigerate. Or eat.

Above, the video for making cheese

Heres the video run-through on making Cream Cheese

On a mission from dog.....

Above, photographed is the final course of the dinner cooked for the Gorgeous C's departure from these rain sodden shores.

From the top......

Pan fried scallops, with a ginger, lime and olive oil dressing, sprinkled with chives.

Insalata Caprese, a firm favourite, made with organic tomatoes, and Mozzarella di Bufala. Black olive bread on the side.

Grilled Cep Salad, with a lemon and olive oil dressing, and mixed greens.

Boiled globe artichokes, with a lemon and butter sauce.

Pan fried sea bream, with black olive paste, on a bed of boiled asparagus, with a balsamic dressing.

Scallops.
For the dressing, heat 200ml of oil. Saute a half a very finely chopped shallot until soft. Grate in a 3/4 inch cube of fresh ginger. Stir for 60 seconds on the heat. Remove. Let it cool. Squeeze in roughly the juice of 1 lime, and the zest (mix and taste repeatedly. the lime should be present, and not overpowering). Season with salt and pepper.

Trim the red coral from the scallops, leaving just the luscious eye. Heat a skillet, add a teaspoon of oil, and fry off the scallops until just browning on both sides. Not more than 90 seconds say, on either side.

Place on a heated plate - as large a dinner plate as you can conscientiously muster. Drizzle with the now cold dressing. Black pepper and chopped chive the plate for presentation. Perfection.

Insalata Caprese. Enough said.

Grilled Cep salad. I used dried ceps, as the ignorant moron epsiloning his way around the market wouldn't let me near the mushrooms. Bizarre. But it looked like he though I was going to steal them. I guess he felt he couldn't catch me with the knuckle dragging friction co-efficient going on.

Hey Temple Bar moron. If you're reading this, I'm surprised that you are literate.

Anyway. On a griddle, of, preferably, a barbecue grill, cook the mushrooms. Rub a serving plate with a cut lemon. Arrange your mixed greens. For 200 mls of Olive oil, mix in the juice of a lemon, and some zest, and a pinch of salt in a jar. Lid the jar, shake like a bastard. Arrange your ceps on the serving plate with some mixed greens. Drizzle the lot with the oil. Serve.

Artichokes. Boil for 45 minutes. Drain. Melt a little butter and mix in a little lemon - taste, and adjust as necessary. Plate each artichoke, and drizzle with the butter. Leave top rest for 20 seconds - the butter should drain onto the plate. Strip each leaf from the artichoke, and nibble off the soft pull at the leaf base. Dip in the butter as you do. When you get down to the small leaves, cut off at the base - about 3/4s of the way down, at the ridge. Squeeze lemon on the bottom bit, and nibble off the pulp, leaving the rough fibres still attached to the stalk.

Pan fried Bream.

For the black olive paste. 2 anchovy fillets. Black pepper. A tiny amount of salt - which may not even be necessary. Deseeded olives - the best you can buy. 2 cloves of garlic. a squeeze of lemon juice. Olive oil. Half a chili - optional. Blitz everything, except the salt, and olive oil. remove to a bowl. Add oil to attain your desired texture. For this dish I used very little.

Fillet a whole bream. Do this by making a vertical cut from top to bottom perpendicular to the head, until you hit the backbone. Talk off the tail, and fins. from the head - which should still be attached, slip the knife under the flesh so the knife blade comes flat against the backbone. Slide the knife down the bone to remove the fillet. It should stay in one piece. Repeat on the other side.

Boil the asparagus in lightly salted water for 5 minutes, using an asparagus pot with lid - the tips should be steaming, not boiling.

While that's happening, add 2 teaspoons of sunflower oil to a skillet, heat, and ass the fish, skin side down. Don't touch it for a minute. It should sizzle, and begin to curl. Smooth it back down onto the pan with a fish slice after 1 minute. Soak up the excess fat that drains from the fish with some paper towel. Flip it when the flesh turns opaque about two thirds the way up the fillet, and remove the pan from the heat. Let the fish finish in the pan for two minutes or so. Mix uo a balsamic vinaigarette - I like about a 2 to one mix in favour of the balsamic.

Drain your asparagus, and toss in the vinaigrette. Lay out on a serving plate, and pour over the last of the drerssing. Lay the bream, skin side down on top of it. Spread some paste (less than I used) on the Bream, and serve.

Damned fine.

The 30th birthday post will follow, when I nab the photos. Far too busy, and bolloxed on the day to photo myself.

Baked beans on toast.

I cooked up a batch of cannelini beans in tomato sauce, a rough and rude take on salsice fagioli. And not that crudely processed Heinz like super smooth sauced concoction those swine in Dunne and Crescenzi have taken to foisting upon their poor clients.

Without the salsice, its a fine thing nonetheless, and perfect for heating up cold souls on the wintry days of an Irish spring. Good for the heart. Good for the soul. And a reminder of sun in the taste of the thing. Which taste rolls off my tongue like the words that cannot entirely do the recipe justice. But hell. Such is life. Welcome to the human race, in the words of wiser, deader men than me.

But to the meat of the thing. A recipe, heavily adapted from several sources - Tessa Kiros's Twelve (nice interview in this link), Locatellis' Made in Italy, and the ever present in my cooking Carluccio.

You will need....

A Gogol Bordello cd. (Failing that the Breeders, and enough enthusiasm to make up the chaos. Rigoletto will fit the bill finely if neither is available.)
The gorgeous C. (for which, of course, no substitute is possible)
A rake of gorgeous C relations planning to deluge suddenly upon the house in a hungry horde of mouths. (Another, entirely unique and welcomed phenomenon)

Also

Italian spicy sausage. Taste of Italy do a fine batch of the things from Negrini. Fine, herby, meaty fat filled little blighters.
Two tins of organic whole tomatoes, or a half a kilo of skinned tomatoes.
One can of cannelini beans, or circa 250g of dried beans, soaked overnight.
Sage leaves, 10 (though fresh rosemary or oregano make an interesting, and perhaps more robust, alternative)
2 undeniably fresh cloves of garlic, crushed under a chefs knife.
Sea salt.
Black pepper.
Olive oil, for frying and to drizzle when serving.
Parmesan.
Bread to serve with.

To skin the tomatoes, if using fresh, boil up a saucepan of water. Cut a small cross in the skin of the base of each tomato, and drop them into the boiling water, a few at a time. After 30 or 40 seconds, plunge the tomatoes into cold water, and the skin should start to wrinkle, and be easy to just shrug off. For this dish though, good quality whole tinned tomatoes are fine. Organic seem to be particularly excellent. I used Biona, and the strong fresh scent of tomato filled up the kitchen in seconds.

Heat some olive oil in a cast iron pan, or a large saucepan.
Pop in the garlic, and saute. Do not let it brown. Really. Add most of the sage leaves (though I tend to use oregano or rosemary), and some salt. Be careful not to burn them. Dump in the tomatoes after 30 seconds or so, and higher up the heat until the tomatoes begin to bubble, stirring briefly, and then lower down the heat.

Leave for about 20 minutes, without stirring. Then....

In another, cast iron (no skimping here) frying pan, heat up some more olive oil, and fry off the sausage quickly, browning lightly. I generally use four. This recipe is fine without them, as a vegetarian option. Fish out the sausages before they are cooked through. With a superbly sharp knife, cut them up into thick slices, maybe an inch apiece, and dump into the tomato sauce to finish off for about 12 to 15 minutes, at a low heat. Avoid stirring too much.

Finally, if using canned cannelini beans, open em up, and wash them out in the tin under running water. Most varieties only need to be reheated in boiling water - they come precooked. Some don't, and may need cooking for longer. Check the can. In which case open them up earlier in the recipe. If using dried, cook them first, as they need about 1.5 hours. When the beans are cooked, add them to the tomato sauce mix, and cook for a further five minutes on a gentle heat. Avoid stirring, except to mix in the beans.

Taste for seasoning.

Add the remaining herbs, on top, without mixing - roughly chopped, and serve, with a small amount of grated Parmesan. Drizzle with a little extra virgin.

Ideally the tomatoes should still retain some texture, they should still be chunky. If necessary bulk out the sauce with some reserved chopped tomato at the end.

A good accompaniment is ciabatta bread, rubbed with raw garlic, and toasted briefly in a gas mark 4 oven, or straight and plain. The fact that its a third of the price of the somewhat processed crap being served up in that unfortunately voracious city centre eatery only adds to the taste.

I'm looking for suggestions for a herby vegetarian sausage, homemade, to replace that earthy Negrini taste. Any suggestions are welcomed.

Raving. About Ravioli. I know. I know.

Well, I largely finished off the Juniper Berry cured pancetta from a while ago. I cooked up an Amatriciana with it, and finished off the last of it in some bacon and potato hash, with dried chillies and plum tomatoes. I think I favour the bay leaf cure thusfar. A nice, deep, sweetly subtle taste. Next up is the crushed coriander seed cure. And after that, I think I'll experiment. Black mustard seed. Fennel seed. Honey cured. The skys the bacon-based limit.

Consumed too quickly to photo, I'm afraid.

The next project was supposed to be some guanciale, air dried and salt cured pigs cheek. Its getting too close to summer for air drying though. And pigs cheek is difficult to track down. After 7 or 8 attempts, I finally tried Buckleys in Moore street, who will sell me an entire head, which I can take home and chop up myself. €5. Bargain.

Needing a break from the heart halting porkfest of death the last few weeks have presented, I wound up cooking for some Italian friends recently. A terrifying experience, as I cooked Italian food. Two Northerners, to be precise, a sommelier friend of mine, and someone I used to work with. As they talked about their plans to start up an import business - more of which, hopefully, i the following few months, I put the finishing touches to the ravioli I had prepared that morning, and served it up in a butter and lemon sauce, with some pate and pork rillette on the side. Beautiful. And it went down a treat. As good as homecooked Italian apparently.

To make the pasta dough.

1 egg per 100 g of doppio zero pasta flour - available from the best of Italy, or any good food store - is the recommended amount. But in Irelands humid climate, I tend to use less egg than this. I used about 350 g of flour, and 3 eggs. Make a volcano with the flour, sprinkle with a little salt, and crack the eggs into the well of the volcano. Using a fork, gradually break up the eggs and incorporate flour, a bit at at time, caving in the sides of the volcano as you do. Eventually, the mix becomes thick enough to mix all the flour together. Working it into an elastic dough, as it begins to come together, stretch the top of the dough slightly, and pull it back towards you over the rest of the dough and press it in with the heels of your palm. Turn the dough often. Add flour as required, or, if the dough is too dry, dip your fingers in a bowl of water, and continue mixing. Repeat as required. After the dough has initially come together, 10 minutes working it should suffice. Roll out the dough, to maybe a 1 inch thickness, and then clingfilm it, and allow to rest for 1 hour.

For the filling.

Spinach leaves.
Good quality ricotta.
Black pepper.
Fried pancetta cubes - small.
Fresh nutmegs.

Quickly wilt some spinach, circa 300g, in a little water - just the water used to wash the leaves - adding some sea salt. Drain in a colander for an hour, and allow to cool. Sqeeze out as much water as you can from the cooked leaves, and chop them roughly.

In a bowl, mix 250g of good quality ricotta - you have to go to a specialist deli for this - with some freshly grated nutmeg, some chopped and fried pancetta, and black pepper (the pancetta, or home cured bacon, should add enough salt). Mix in the chopped spinach, and add some egg to bind the mix. I normally use half an egg, lightly beaten just before adding.

Take your dough out from the fridge, and leave, wrapped, on the countertop for half and hour, to heat up. Flour a work surface with doppio 0 flour. Cut your pasta dough into quarters. cover three of the pieces with a damp towel, and roll out the fourth piece into a rectangular shape, about 1-1.5cm thick. Feed this pasta into your pasta machine rollers, starting at the highest setting. Pass though the machine once for each setting until you reach the thinnest. You should have a long, slightly oval shaped piece of pasta, partially translucent. Fold it over on itself several times lengthwise, until you can feed it back though the thickest setting, and again, run it through the rollers several times, dropping down one thickness at a time. Again fold it over, but this time, turn the sheet 90 degrees and pass it through the pasta machine from thickest to thinnest using this different orientation - this stretches the pasts in all directions. Refold along its length once more, and without turning 90 degrees, again pass though the rollers, from thickest to thinnest setting.

To make the ravioli.

You will need, a small spoon, a pastry brush, a pasta cutting wheel, and some lukewarm water. Flour a work surface, and lay out the by now several foot long sheet of pasta on your surface, Dot the pasta with small spoons of the filling. I tended to use a heaped teaspoon of filling, fitting the dots in rows of two halfway down the pasta. Lightly brush the channels between the fillings with water, and fold over the rest of the pasta, laying it lightly on top of the fillings. Working from the open top, press the upper sheet down on the lower, starting from the centre of the sheet, and moving out, trying to push out any air bubbles. Seal up the separate ravioli carefully, making sure there are no gaps, or trapped air bubbles, and cut using the wheel, or a scissors or serrated knife.

I'd suggest using them immediately, though if you do store them, lay them out in single layers. They stick very easily. To freeze, lay them out in single layers on a floured tray, in the freezer. When they freeze, you can bag them.

To cook, add them to boiling water (use a large full pot), and scoop out after three minutes - when cooked they change colour, and float to the top of the pot. Plate or bowl em.

For the sauce.

Juice of half a lemon.
Black pepper.
Butter(circa 200g).
Sea salt.
Fresh sage leaves(optional)(5 or 6 whole, two roughly chopped)

Heat the butter in a small saucepan, or cast iron frying pan. When the butter begins to froth add in whole sage leaves, and stir. Add the lemon juice, and some zest if you like. Grate in black pepper. Add salt. Taste, and adjust seasoning, and lemon as necessary. Take out the whole sage leaves. Pour over the pasta, and sprinkle with chopped sage leaves. Serve.

Pesto Genovese

Easter weekend. A gooses egg, quail eggs, more bacon, and Pesto Genovese.

We fried up two eggs on Saturday. A giant, heartstoppingly big, blood clottingly giant goose egg, which took up most of the frying pan. Delivered to Dublin in the gentle care of the gorgeous C.

It took up most of my frying pan. Two thick slices of country batch sacrificed as cholestorol soldiers. As it were.

Delicious. It tasted incredibly fresh.

On Sunday, I whipped up another batch of homemade bacon, this one made with juniper berries. I'll report back later in the week when it's cured.

But this afternoon. I made one of my most beloved foods. Pesto Genovese. On the left, a young basil plant. For traditional Genovese, the plant should be less than 8 inches high. After a certain point of growth, the taste of the leaf changes, losing that almost electric sense of freshness the young plant has, and becoming a more mellow, and softer taste, that most of us are used to. Any older than this and it is not actually a Genovese pesto.

The only way to ensure this is to grow your own. Something I should do a lot more often. Garlic - as fresh as possible. The garlic used in pesto is raw, and the other ingredients are quite subtle to taste. So ensure that your garlic has no green shoots, is fresh, and still moist. Bitter garlic will run through your pesto and ruin it. Tear off as many leaves as you can safely harvest. I took about half the leaves from this plant.

Pine nuts, lightly toasted. There are a couple of ways to do this. I normally put some in my omelette pan and put them on the stovetop. Take them off the heat as soon as they even begin to hint turning brown - they will cook some more off the heat. Tip them into a cool container, and wait until they cool down. Extra virgin olive oil. The best you can buy. Pamesan - ungrated - and as good as you can get (or Pecorino) . Again, I recommend Best of Italy on Dunville Ave, D6 for Parmesan. Sea salt crystals, unground.

For this batch I used, roughly

• a half teaspoon, level, of seasalt


• half the pictured basil plants leaves


• two small, fresh, cloves of garlic, cut into rough chunks


• about 4 level tablespoons of parmesan, freshly grated


• about the same of toasted pine nuts


• enough extra virgin olive oil to cover the mix when ground

Put the salt crystals in the base of a stone or marble pestle and mortar. Whole crystals help grind down the other ingredients. Add everything else, apart from the cheese and olive oil. Grind in a pestle and mortar. It must be a pestle and mortar. Not a food processor. Far too much of the taste and texture gets lost in the heat and violence of a processor. The difference is very noticeable (cheap stone pestle and mortars are available from the Asia market, at the back of Georges Street in Dublin). It takes about ten minutes to get that rustic texture. (below)

Add the cheese, and mix in. Then top up with olive oil until the paste is just submerged in oil. Leave for four hours on a table top, covered with a plate. Uncover, taste - you may need to add salt - and top up with olive oil as required.

Its best kept until the next day, and eaten on open sandiches, or dipped with fresh foccacia, or ciabatta. It's good with fresh pasta - don't cook it at all, or the taste will evaporate, just mix in on the plate with roasted cherry tomatoes and some oil.

If covered with oil, this will keep in the fridge for a lot longer than it takes to eat it. The colour of the leaves will darken and change, but its fine to eat, the taste deepening over time.

It tastes like summer.

If anyone out there actually understands how to edit images in bloggers editing software, without actually causing ones head to explode, please leave a comment.

Failing that, help me track down the bizarre and atavistically twisted freak who designed it.

Artichokes. Because I can't think of any more inspring a title.

Two ways to skin an artichoke, courtesy of Google video.

Catalan style and footage from the vegetable market in Venice. In the market, they leave the top on, apparently. Presumably the tops are cut off at home. Ditto the final trimming of the leaves, and scooping out the furry choke. Guv'nor. Sorry. Gorgeous knifework though.

Chuck them into acidulated water, with the lemon husks. And rub the artichokes with lemon while prepping to prevent discolouring.

The Seattle times have a worthwhile AV presentation, to initiate ingenues like me into the arcane mysteries of artichoke prep, with clear instructions on how to prepare one. As a rider to this, there are other ways. With especially good artichokes, about an inch and a half of the stem can be kept attatched, peeled back to the whitish core, and pared to a point, and this can be boiled, sauteed, or fried. But the artichokes have to be particularly good for this. Apparently.

Last time I cooked them, I prepped as above - but without the stems. I boiled them in salted water for 30 minutes, then drained, cooled and patted them dry. Sliced them up into fours, and dipped them in flour and then egg, deep fried them, and served with a generous squeeze of lemon and some black pepper, along with some similarly cooked fennel - boiled, quartered, fried, and lemoned. Gorgeous.

That said, I'm far from an expert.

Thanks to both RandomGrub and Bibliocook for the links.