Once more it’s time to venture into the highly-terrifying world of traditional recipes. As I said recently, when I wrote about Kleftiko, when you tackle a traditional recipe you can guarantee someone will always pop up and rubbish one of your ingredients or techniques as anathema to their grandmother’s way of doing things. But given that I’m half-Yorkshire genetically, I’m willing to take them on. (Yes, I use nutmeg! Sue me!)
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I’m afraid this recipe doesn’t feature British cheese and that this time I didn’t make the feta myself (although after last year’s home-made feta slime-fest I think my family are probably quite glad). I was going to write a very exciting cheese post but under-estimated how long that particular ‘recipe’ would take to reach its conclusion, so instead I bring you what I had for Sunday lunch: Kleftiko, slow-cooked for five hours with feta cheese.
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I love cheese. And I love chocolate. But, just like a husband and a gigolo, some loves should be kept apart – or at least that’s what I used to believe. A few months ago, I started coming across the odd choc-cheese combo and not just the usual cheesecake suspects; people were combining goat’s cheese with chocolate and even having a go with soft brie-type cheeses. Bringing my two loves together had to be worth a shot and I thought I’d throw blue cheese into the mix, although the internet was fairly quiet on this one.
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It’s rare that there’s such a thing as ‘left-over’ cheese in our house; it usually denotes that the cheese was a bit ropey in some way, or sometimes it happens with a particularly potent washed rind that no-one else will eat but me and I fail to conquer in time. In the case of this Lanark Blue, I just happened to have bought a whopper of a chunk and I thought that, rather than just scoff it all down in handfuls (which I was doing quite a good job of), I’d see if I could cook something with it to complement its striking flavour.
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Despite the lump of impenetrable mousetrap that was my home-made Cheddar, Colin, I was keen to get back on the cheese-making horse but felt that I need to do some limbering up before I tackled anything too complicated. Paneer is about as simple as cheese gets; milk is curdled and then pressed into a lump. It’s difficult to get wrong and suitable even for an inveterate cheese-mangler like me.
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If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If life gives you onions, make…er…bhajis? But bhajis aren’t renowned for their cheesiness (although I’m sure you could probably whack a bit of paneer in there with great results) and so, when I mucked up on a grocery order and found myself with the Mount Kilimanjaro of onions, French Onion Soup it was. Typically French Onion Soup is topped with melted gruyère and so I mused upon British cheese and thought of Lincolnshire Poacher. Poacher is made to a recipe loosely based on West Country cheddar but is also influenced by Swiss mountain cheeses due to the starter culture that’s used. The result is a smooth Gruyère-like texture but with the nutty, grassy taste of a mature Cheddar. Perfect melty cheese.
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I’d made fondue before but this was back in the days when I was under the illusion that all British cheese was good for was toast topping and jacket potatoes, so I’d used traditional Swiss cheeses such as Emmental and Gruyère. Having garnered a reputation as the local ‘mad cheese woman’, I’d been promising some neighbours a fondue knees-up for a while. Once the date was sealed, I decided to try and create a menu from British cheeses, now that I know what a great variety of styles there are available. So, I set off for Borough Market on a cheese-quest (ensuring that I had only a limited amount of cash and no card in my wallet so I didn’t get the Borough Market red mist and end up spending £120 on partridges, quinces and kangaroo salami).
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I was feeling a bit put out the other week when someone ‘fed back’ to me that they thought the design of my blog was a bit awful and the photos were especially dreadful, partly because I always use the same plates. Now, don’t get me wrong, I concentrate on the writing and the cheese, I know I have the design skills of a mole in the dark and I still haven’t got a new camera after dropping mine a few weeks ago. So this feedback wasn’t a surprise. I even agreed. But still, you know, it hurt. So when I got an email from some nice people at a little company called Marbletree, asking if I would like to try out one of their cheeseboards, it seemed like very good timing. A nice new thing to show off the cheese on.
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I was quite excited to find some smoked mozzarella at the local farmers’ market this weekend. I’d been pondering what to make for this month’s Cheese, Please! Challenge but, although I love smoked cheddars, they were leaving me a bit devoid of inspiration. The mozzarella immediately made me think of bread but I wanted to do something a bit different and that’s when I thought of campfires and cowboys and cornbread. All very smoky indeed.
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In the days when I had a proper job that involved changing out of my pyjamas, leaving the house and eating something slightly more varied than fishfinger sandwiches every day, there were many things that I loved about central London. The view up the river from Waterloo Bridge never lost its ‘Wow’ factor. The man selling peacock feathers outside Farringdon station always made me smile. And the winter arrival of the hot chestnut sellers counted down the festive season like some kind of hot nut-based advent calendar.
My two favourite spots were outside the British Museum and on the South Bank, halfway between Borough Market and Waterloo (although I think the latter may have now given way to some sort of caramelized nut thingies, tut). It was the evocative smell – all smoky and roasty – that I loved, as well as the ritual of juggling half-burnt nuts from hand to hand and trying to get the skins off whilst trying to avoid the inevitable shard of shell that gets stuck under your thumbnail.
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Fromage Homage 