The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

All Four Food Groups! Including the All-Important Bacon Fat Group!

I almost feel like I should post this under an assumed name, what with all my perky, healthy, Look!  We Grow Vegetables!  posts lately. 

It’s…I don’t even know what to call it, other than one of the yummiest breakfasts I’ve ever had.

It’s a fried egg on top of warmed goat milk mozzarella on top of arugula on top of a piece of leftover pizza dough that was fried in bacon fat.

Yes.  Bacon fat. 

And yes.  It was that good.

Here’s how it happened…

Goats’ Milk Mozzarella

I’ve been making cheese for a few years now, but not as frequently as I’d like, and certainly not as many varieties as I’d like.  I’m hoping to kick myself into a higher gear as this summer flies by, and maintain that gear through the rest of the year.

Cheese Tease

Yesterday I made a batch of goats’ milk mozzarella!

I also made a batch of the 30-minute mozzarella with cows’ milk, for comparison purposes.

Unfortunately I only have about fifteen minutes to type today, so the whole process post with lots of pictures will be delayed a day or so.

FFwD – Tourteau de Chèvre

Hm.

It doesn’t look like I think it’s supposed to look.

For French Fridays with Dorie this week we were to make a Tourteau de chèvre. 

Now, despite what you might think, that doesn’t mean Cake of Goat.  I don’t think anyone’s invented that one.  Maybe a Pie of Goat – you know, like a chicken pot pie, or a shepherd’s pie – exists somewhere…but not Cake of Goat.

No, the cake is made with, among other things, goat cheese.  Pretty interesting, huh?

And a bit more appetizing than a cake made of goat.

Feta Frustration

At the beginning of this month I made a double batch of Feta.  And I wrote about it here.

I was very excited.  I love Feta.  And making it was nice – it was similar, a bit, to making hard cheese like Cheddar, but shorter.  Not so much pressing and air drying and all that.

Half of the curds were tossed with salt and left in the fridge to cure for about 5 days.

The other half went into a brine and would be soaking in that brine for a month....

Unveiling the Short Term Feta

Just about a week ago I made Feta for the first time.  This weekend the short term batch was ready to sample.

Making Feta

At long last, after a summer-long painting-induced hiatus, I’m back to making cheese again.  I missed it.  I especially missed goat cheese. 

Fortunately for me, I had close to 3 gallons of goats’ milk in the freezer from earlier trips to the Farmers’ Market this summer.  I needed to get the milk out of there so I could organize all the soup stocks and bags of clams and conch before chaos took over, so the timing was perfect.  I’d ordered direct set Chèvre and Mesophilic cultures from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company earlier in the week, and they had arrived within a couple of days, so this past Sunday was perfect for cheesemaking.

Mushrooms Stuffed with Chevre and Smoked Trout

I made a batch of chèvre recently.  Have I mentioned how much I love cheeses made with goats' milk?  Something about that tang...yum.  I wish we had more land.  I'd raise goats.

Whole Goat's-Milk Ricotta

 Yes, there are going to be several cheese posts all back to back.  I'm on a roll. 

Blueberry Goat Cheese Ice Cream

I made this toward the end of July, back during my blueberry recipe frenzy.  I was also going to the Farmers' Market every Friday morning and getting my weekly ration of goats' milk and making my own cheese from the milk. 

Lobster and Goat Cheese Omelet

 

Ooo la la.

I know, it would be more ooo la la-ish if there was a garnish of some sort...perhaps a different plate...maybe a bud vase with a freshly plucked rose...a candle...something.

But there isn't.  This is just a straight-up picture of breakfast today.

To rewind a bit...

Last night Uncle Werner (he and his daughter, Beth, are staying with us this week) bought lobsters and littlenecks (Thank you!), which we had for dinner along with a giant (2 lb) pattypan squash that I cut open, baked, and then stuffed with a mixture of black rice, tomato, chives, some of the shredded squash, ummmmmmmm basil, tarragon and I don't remember what else.  It was kind of a warm rice salad, basically, sitting in a squashy yellow serving vessel.

It wasn't the star of the show, but people seemed to like it.

Back to the seafood.

While the water came to a boil in one of Bill's big brew pots outside...

Bill and Joe shucked the little necks out on the deck.

And Uncle Werner and Alex hung out to taste-test the clams as needed.

Alex was especially happy to help.

He likes hanging out with the bigger guys.

Bill looks a bit anxious...like he's worried Alex won't slurp properly.

Not to worry, though.  Alex is a pro.

As is Uncle Werner, though he wasn't caught mid-slurp here.  I only do that to my children.

Anyway, there were over 30 little necks shucked.  There aren't that many in the pan, of course.

If it came down to a competition between Werner and Alex over who could eat the most, I'm not sure who would win.  In my silly little mind I picture them in a darkened room, hunched over their plates, matching each other shell for shell and slamming the empties down on the table after each successful slurp.

Werner's got experience on his side, but Alex has enthusiasm.  They both have that all-important sense of competitiveness, too. 

I don't know. 

But we weren't about to stage something like that yesterday.  The rest of us (most of us) wanted to do some slurping of our own.  (I didn't get pictures of Emily or Beth - I got sidetracked by the eating part.)

Well, all except this guy.

"Hi, Neighbor!"

I didn't take pictures of us all devouring lobster, partly because no one (except my kids) would allow it and also because I needed both hands to crack the shells and pick out the meat.  You'll just have to imagine it.  Think of a school of pirhanas attacking...oh...a big meaty cow leg that's fallen into the water (not sure why it's in there, but just play along with me, okay?) and that's about how we all behaved.

At the end of the frenzy, there were two claws and two bodies left.  (Lobster bodies.)  I picked those clean last night and saved the meat for this morning.

Now, I probably make one, maybe two lobster omelets a year.  I started doing it (I wouldn't call it a tradition, because it doesn't fall on a particular date or anything...just a day after we've had lobster) many years ago (pre-kids) when we had the little boat and Bill had lobster pots.  I remember I made a lobster omelet the morning that we closed on this house.  So it's sort of a celebratory thing, I guess.  But then, it's lobster, so that in itself it something to celebrate.

So, back in the kitchen.

I cut the claw meat into little chunks, and the rest of the meat was already small enough for my purposes.

I picked a bit of tarragon from the garden and pulled up a scallion (it was big enough, and I had permission) and brought those inside, cleaned them off and chopped them up.  I also minced a small clove of garlic and about a tablespoon of onion.

In the past, I've made one or two smaller omelets in my little 8" pan, but this time I decided to make one great big omelet so we could all eat at the same time.

First I melted some butter in the pan (my 14" All-Clad treasure) and added the minced onion, the garlic, and a bit of the scallion.  I let everything soften and then I added a slug of white wine (it was a pino grigio, I think), a sprinkle of salt, and the tomalley (lobster liver) I'd set aside from the lobster bodies.  (Oh, you don't know the restraint I showed by not eating that myself when no one was around.  I love that stuff.)

I stirred the mixture around in the pan until the tomalley had pretty much melted and it smelled delicious.

That was to be the sauce for the omelet.  I poured that in a bowl and started with a fresh knob of butter.  While that melted, I set the oven at 375 and started cracking eggs - 8 of them - into a bowl.  A nice, wide, lightweight bowl, so I could whisk them vigorously and look all chef-like.

When the butter was hot and the eggs were frothy, I poured the eggs into the pan and let them just sit there, on the heat, for a few minutes.

When the eggs had started to set, I added the lobster meat, the rest of the scallions and the tarragon, and little bits of goat cheese. 

Every time I make a lobster omelet, I experiment with different herb combinations and different cheeses.  So I've never made any two the same.  And I think that's part of the fun of it. 

Anyway, I put the pan in the oven and made toast while the omelet continued to cook a bit, and then about five or six minutes later, the toast was buttered and stacked on a plate, the table was set (thanks, Bill!) and hungry people were banging utensils on the table and - okay, that part isn't true.  Besides, the kids had already eaten.

I took the omelet out (carefully!  The handle is hot now!) and ran a thin spatula under the edges to make sure it wasn't sticking anywhere.

And then, with a flick of the wrist, I flipped the omelet out onto a board.  Just like that!

 

Okay, not really.  I used the spatula to flip half the omelet over onto the other half, and then I held the handle and the little...other handle...on the pan and THEN I flipped it over so the omelet (prettier side up) landed on the wooden cutting board I was using to serve it.  (We didn't have anything else big enough that wouldn't break if I dropped the big pan on it.)

I cut the omelet into quarters and served it up to Beth and Uncle Werner and Bill and myself - and Julia, (who has a dog's sense of smell, I swear) who managed to show up just as I was slicing.  Bill gave her two bites of his omelet and I gave her two (small) bits of mine and then we told her to scram.  She begged one slice of toast and then scampered away.

I drizzled some of the tomalley sauce over the omelets (except Beth's - she's not nuts about liver) and we dug in.

Everyone enjoyed it.  Bill said every bite was different - sometimes you'd taste tarragon, other bites you'd get more lobster, others were more goat cheesey.  I spooned some of the leftover tomalley sauce on my toast - oh, I could eat that every day for a month and be quite content, folks. 

There were no leftovers.

Oh, I quite like lobster omelet mornings.

Pretty Cheese

Yes, it's still Blueberry Week here, but I took these pictures last week at some point and forgot to post them, so I'm doing it now.

I made a double batch of goat cheese, and these are pictures I took after the curds and why had separated and I lifted the lid for the first time after that portion of the program.

In the past, I've always scooped the curds out of the whey, which leads to some of the curds breaking up and I end up having to strain a lot of the mixture. 

This time around, I started by ladling out the whey instead, and as I did that, I started to see this swirly shape in the curd part.  So I kept ladling out the whey...

And it kept looking kind of cool and interesting...

I kept ladling, but unfortunately the ladle ended up forming an indentation over there on the left of the curd...but still...rather cool formation, isn't it? 

Anyway, once I couldn't really get any more of the whey out with the ladle without breaking up the curd, I scooped the curd out into a muslin-lined strainer.  Here's the first scoop:

And that's it for the cheese pictures. 

For now.

Squash Blossoms Stuffed with Goat Cheese and Zucchini

My parents came for lunch yesterday, and I thought I'd make something kind of light and summery and from the garden to go with the last of the pulled pork and shredded chicken from Friday and a fruit salad of watermelon, blueberries and kiwi.

I still had some homemade goat cheese, and we had a freshly-picked zucchini, and some squash blossoms.  We also had home-grown garlic and oregano.  Add a bit of leftover marinara sauce, some flour, egg, and bread crumbs, and ta-da!  Stuffed squash blossoms.

Chèvre - My First Batch of Goat Cheese!

 

Would you look at that!?

Okay, it doesn't look all that special.  In fact, if you hadn't read the title of this post, you would be safe in assuming it's cream cheese, or maybe ricotta.

But it's not.

It's goat cheese.  My first batch of goat cheese.  And it's yummy.

Okay.

First thing you need to make goat cheese is the milk.  A gallon of  it.  From, of course, goats.  And you need to pasteurize the milk.

How does one do that?  Well, according to the directions I followed, in the booklet that came with my Goat Cheese Kit from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company (where I want to live, if this whole bedroom renovation project gets to be too much for me), you put your goat milk in a big stainless steel pot, heat it to 145 degrees F, and then keep it at that temperature for 30 minutes.

So I did.  Here's the milk in the pot, and you can see the metal probe of my thermometer over on the left.

 

This is probably the longest and, yes, least exciting part of the job.  The waiting.  And waiting.  You don't want it to heat too fast and scorch the bottom of the pot (so if you've got a nice heavy-duty pot that's what you'd want to use here).  So you stir and check the temp and stir and check the temp.  At least that's what I did. 

I know.  A watched pot of goat's milk never reaches 145 degrees F.  I tried to look away from time to time, but what if it all suddenly surged up to the boiling point and bubbled over the side of the pot and set my kitchen on fire????

This is the sort of thing you have to think about.  It's tough work.

Anyway, at last, my thermometer hit the 145 mark and then came the fun of keeping it at that temperature for half an hour.

I kept it at that temp, or slightly above at times, by constantly adjusting the flame under the pot.  And yes, I pretty much stayed glued to the pot and my thermometer for the whole half hour.  I didn't want to ruin a whole gallon of fresh goat's milk.

Actually, I have to correct that - it was half a gallon of fresh, and half a gallon I'd frozen from the week before.  Goat's milk freezes very nicely.

(And you can see a bit of the frozen chunk in the picture above, actually.  It's the part of the milk that looks textured all around where the light is hitting it.)

Okay, so you've brought your milk to temperature, and you're keeping it there.

While you do that, with your third arm (because one has the thermometer and the second arm is controlling the flame), reach over to your sink and fill it about half way with cold, cold, cold water. 

And get out your little packet of Direct Set Chevre culture.  It came with the kit.  I think I got four of them.  Plus culture to make my own starter, but that's for another post.  I haven't done it yet.  I'm waiting for our house to be free of sawdust and joint compound dust and paint.

So here's the little packet.

Now.  When your milk has been at 145 F for half an hour, plunge the pot (plunge is an action word!  it makes this post exciting!) into your sink of cold water, and stir, stir, stir the milk to bring the temperature down, now, to 86 degrees F. 

When you get the milk to 86, remove the pot from the cold water, add in your direct set culture, stir well, and then put the lid back on the pot.

And now?  Just leave it alone.  I know.  So anticlimactic, huh?  But that's what you do.  You leave it all there, inside the pot, covered, "for 12-20 hours or until firm."

You also need to keep the milk/cheese-to-be at a temperature of at LEAST 72 degrees F in order for the starter culture to work properly. 

I think part of the fun, for me, of making cheese is that it flies in the face of everything you're supposed to do to prevent bacterial growth. 

There's a part of me that feels rather rebelious, leaving that milk out at room temperature.  For 12 or more hours! 

You WANT that milk to change.  You don't want it to just sit there and remain milk.  You WANT that transformation to take place.

Or at least, I do. 

Anyway, even though it's June and it's way above freezing, even at night, I worried that my precious milk would get chilly.  So I bundled it up in a blanket and a towel before putting it to bed on the back of my stove.

I kissed it goodnight at about 8:30 pm, knowing I couldn't check on it until at least 8:30 the next morning.

Oh, the anticipation!

So the next morning I was up at my usual time of somewhere between 5 and 7...way too early to check on the milk/cheese-to-be...so I sipped my coffee and tried not to stare at the bundle on the stove.

As the unveiling approached, I started getting things ready for the next step.

I got some of the butter muslin that came with my kit (it's like cheesecloth, but has a tighter weave) and lined a collander with it, and set the collander over a pot to catch the whey.

And then, gently, gingerly, I removed the towel and the blanket from the pot.

And then I remembered I needed a big slotted spoon of some kind to ladle the curds out with, so I grabbed that and put it in the muslin-lined collander.  And then...

I removed the lid from the pot and peeked inside.

 

VICTORY IS MINE!!!!

Sorry.

But look!  Look around the edge of the pot - you can see that separation has occurred!  I have curds, and I have whey! 

(And with those baby spiders that were in my back yard recently, I really COULD be Little Miss Muffet at this point!)

Anyway, that's what I was waiting and hoping for.  For some reason I worry that I've done something wrong with the preparation...maybe I let the milk go a little TOO high over 145?  Dipped a degree lower than 86 before I put the culture in?  YOU JUST DON'T KNOW!!!  And the suspense was killing me.

But there was no need.  Everything set up just the way it was supposed to.  Hee hee!!!

So now it's time to ladle the curds into the collander.

I took a big scoop - left-handed, so I could take a picture at the same time.  Here it is:

Isn't it lovely?  At this point it reminded me of yogurt.  Kind of silky and smooth.  I scooped out what I could with the big spoon and then poured the rest of the whey through the muslin-lined collander to catch every little bit of curd.

And then I covered it again and let it drain for about an hour.

Just to get rid of the majority of the whey.  See?  It's thicker now.

Next, I took the corners of the muslin and tied them together....

Hung the muslin on a wooden spoon above the big pot I'd orignally cooked the milk in....

Sort of covered it again, and let it sit.  

For 12 hours.  Yep.  More waiting.

You can let it hang and rain for anywhere from 6 to 12 hours, depending on the consistency you want.  I wanted it rather dry and firm, so I left it for most of the day.

And then I untied the muslin and - at last - tasted a bit of it.

And you know what?  It tasted like goat cheese!

Now at this point you can add salt to it, if you'd like.  I sprinkled a little kosher salt over the top and mixed it in with a spoon.  Not too much salt - it really didn't need it, in my opinion.

Then I divided it into some ramekins, covered them with plastic, and stuck them in the fridge.

I also weighed the cheese, just to see if I'd matched the yield given in the recipe.

Now, the thing is, I also have a book, put out by Ricki Carrol, the Cheese Queen, who heads up the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company and gives workshops (which would be SO COOL to attend), and I was kind of referring to both the book AND the little pamphlet that came with the cheese kit.

Everything's the same, except that in the book the yield is a pound and a half of cheese, and in the pamphlet it says 2 pounds. 

I got a pound and a half, and I'm perfectly fine with that!  That's a lot of goat cheese, not that I'm complaining!

I gave some to my friend across the street - she loves goat cheese too, and I wanted her opinion on the taste.  I'll be bringing some more to a little family get together tonight, and that leaves the rest for us.

And then...sigh...I guess I'll just have to make it again!

And again.

And again.

And again.

In Addition to Everything Else

Besides trying to work on Julia's bedroom, plus Bill's project of patching the hardwood floor before we sand and poly the whole thing next week, and a T-ball game today, and a kid's birthday party to bring Alex and Julia to later this afternoon AND a family double birthday party to go to after that, and oh, yeah, return Alex's library books...

I am making goat cheese!

It's actually draining RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE!

And will continue to drain for hours - 6 to 12 of them in fact.

So the saga will not be finished until tonight, and my report on the whole thing will come some time as soon as possible after that.

But I am EXTREMELY excited about this current cheese project.

Stay tuned.

Or at least check back some time.