Gorgonzola Cheesecake

I've been wanting to try this Gorgonzola cheese cheesecake since I discovered it in The Great Big Cheese Cookbook last summer. Here's the catch though: I knew I would be going completely over the handle bars if I made the 8 inch size. So this weekend I drove to Kitchen Kapers and purchased a mini springform pan (4.5 inches) for $7.50. I cut the recipe in half and I now have a lovely little cheesecake that will store nicely in the refrigerator for the duration of the week. I'll put a slice on a toasted bagel in the morning. I'll sneak a slice or two before dinner. Hey, maybe I'll give myself a facial with it! And can I just rave about how good a slice goes with a grilled steak? My husband was in heaven tonight when I put a slice next to his grilled flank steak. This cheese cake is so versatile and so easy to throw together. I loved the extra little crunch of the toasted walnuts and the addition of honey gives it a very subtle sweetness. This cheesecake is so sinfully good that I'll probably have to get down and do 100 Hail Marys by the time I finish it off. But it was worth every delicious bite...

2 (8oz) packages cream cheese, at room temperature
2 cups crumbled Gorgonzola cheese, at room temperature
3 eggs, at room temperature
1/4 cup sour cream
2 Tablespoons clover or orange blossom honey
Pinch of kosher salt
Pinch of fresh cracked pepper
1/4 cup of toasted walnuts
1/2 cup caramel topping
red grapes and crackers to garnish

NOTE: if you want a smaller mini cheese cake, cut the recipe in half and bake it in a mini 4.5 inch springform pan

1. heat oven to 300F. Spray an 8 inch springform pan with cooking spray. Line the bottom with parchment paper and spray again.

2. In a large bowl beat the cream cheese until smooth. Measure out 1/4 cup of Gorgonzola and set aside. Add the remaining blue cheese to the mixing bowl. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Scrape mixture off the side of the bowl. Add the sour cream, honey, salt and pepper. Beat until combined. Pour in to the pan.

3. Place a shallow pan of water on the bottom rack in the oven and place the cheesecake on the rack above it. Steam from the water will help prevent cracks in the cheesecake. Bake 40 minutes.

4. Remove the cheesecake from the oven. Sprinkle the reserved blue cheese and walnuts over the top of the cheesecake and bake 10 to 15 minutes more, until lightly browned. Cool in the pan to room temperature.

5. To serve, cut the cheesecake into wedges. Drizzle each plate with caramel sauce. Place the wedge on the plate. Garnish with grapes and crackers.

Yukon Gold potato and Manchego cheese tart

I'm not really sure why this recipe is called a "tart." It's more like a slightly crispy version of Potatoes Au Gratin. All I can tell you is that it's simple to make and delicious to boot. I love the buttery and smooth flavor of the Yukon Gold and the Manchego is a perfect compliment to this dish; not too strong, not too mild. Even my daughter asked for more last night when she finished her first plateful. I think I've got a junior cheese junkie in the making. As is very often the case, I found a nice chunk of Manchego at my local Trader Joe's for less than $5 which covered the amount needed for the recipe and some left over. Manchego melts very nicely. It's a wonderful choice to add to quesadillas, potatoes dishes and omelets.

Let me give you a little background on Manchego:

Manchego (officially Queso Manchego) is a cheese made in the La Mancha region of Spain from the milk of sheep of the Manchega breed, which is aged for between 60 days and two years. Consider this cheese "The Don Quixote cheese."

Manchego has a firm and compact consistency and a buttery texture, and often contains small, unevenly-distributed air pockets. The colour of the cheese varies from white to ivory-yellow, and the inedible rind from yellow to brownish beige. The cheese has a distinctive flavour, well developed but not too strong, creamy with a slight piquancy, and leaves an aftertaste that is characteristic of sheep’s milk.

RECIPE:

* 1 tbsp olive oil
* 6 Yukon Gold potatoes
* 1 tbsp chopped parsley or oregano
* 2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
* 1/2 cup freshly grated manchego cheese
* salt to taste
* freshly ground black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. Heat the olive oil in an ovenproof non-stick skillet over medium heat.
3. Peel the potatoes and cut them into very thin slices.
4. Layer half of the potatoes in overlapping slices to cover the bottom of the pan.
5. Sprinkle with the oregano or parsley, garlic, manchego cheese, salt and pepper (be careful not to sprinkle the cheese on the side of the pan, or it may stick).
6. Add the remaining potatoes in overlapping slices and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
7. Cover the skillet with foil and place it in the oven and cook until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes.
8. Remove the skillet from the oven, remove the foil,carefully loosen the edges of the potatoes and turn the tart onto a plate or platter. (NOTE: at this point I sprinkled some parmesan cheese on top and put it under the broiler for a few minutes until brown and crispy.)
9. Cut the tart into wedges and serve.

Cotija Cheese

A few days ago at Trader Joe's I found a nice slab of Cotija (Ko-Tee-Ha)cheese.

This is a Mexican cheese that is semi-hard and crumbles like Feta. It's flavor is somewhere between Feta and Parmesan. Slightly salty but not overpowering, it works nicely as a topping on tacos, enchiladas, salads and pasta.


I needed to make a quick meal for myself tonight so I boiled up some Linguine and tossed it with olive oil, garlic, baby spinach and fresh tomatoes. The grand finale was a little mountain of crumbled Cotija cheese. Perfect and satisfying!

panko crusted eggplant stacks with red wax gouda

Today I'm showcasing Red Wax Gouda. I'm a shameless cheese stalker at Wegman's Cheese Department and I think they offered me samples of three distinct types of Gouda just to get me to eat something and leave the poor cheeses alone. I settled on the Red Wax Gouda because I loved the mild semi-soft creamy taste of it. I got a nice sized wedge of it for $2.80.



Gouda is an excellent choice if you like semi-soft mild cheese. Not soft enough to spread with a knife but soft enough to cut in to chunks and it melts nicely if you're using it for cooking. In fact, I think that this is a candidate for one outstanding macaroni and cheese dish. But today I decided to make Panko Crusted Eggplant Stacks with Red Wax Gouda for lunch. Oh. My. God. It's so simple, really.

Start off with a nice eggplant and cut it in to some nice semi-thick slices. Coat the slices with an egg wash, dip them in to some panko crumbs and saute them in olive oil on medium high heat until they are brown and crispy. Drain on paper towels and set aside.

Preheat oven to 400.

In the meantime, cut a fresh tomato in to thick slices. Cut your gouda in to some thick slices as well. Line a cookie sheet with foil and let the stacking begin. Eggplant-tomato slice-gouda slice-eggplant, etc...

Today I got a little adventurous. I made two eggplant stacks. On one stack I put some olive tapenade in between the layers and on the other stack I put some prepared pesto in between the layers for some extra kick. You can find both of these delicious products at Trader Joe's.

Here is the stack with the olive tapenade:

Here is the stack with the pesto:

Place the stacks on the foil lined cookie sheet in to the oven and bake at 400 until the cheese melts. About 10 minutes. While the stacks were baking in the oven, I took a handful of wild baby arugula and tossed it with a handful of toasted walnuts and a splash of raspberry walnut vinaigrette. Amazing Grace. Seriously.

Brazilian Cheese Bread

I'm not kidding you when I tell you that this is the easiest recipe I've ever followed. If you have a blender and a muffin tin, you can look like a culinary rock star here. I think these will make a weekly appearance at our house and I would choose them over the Cheddar Cheese Puffs that I made on Christmas.

I seem to be on a cheese bread kick lately. Brazilian Cheese Bread is simply addictive and absolutely delicious. You can play around with different cheese to produce different tastes. I chose to use Parmesan cheese and I added a few turns of fresh cracked black pepper. When these delectable little beauties are baked, the result is a light and airy texture with a nice chewy texture in the bottom of the bread. The recipe calls for tapioca flour which can easily be found at a health food store or Whole Foods store. Once you have secured the tapioca flour, the rest is easy. The best part is that you could whip up the batter and put them in the oven about 20 minutes before serving dinner and you have yourself nice hot cheese bread to serve up. It looks like you spent so much longer but all it involved was a blender and a greased muffin tin. BONUS: tapioca flour is gluten-free for those who eliminate gluten from their diet.

Ingredients

* 1 egg (room temperature)
* 1/3 cup olive oil
* 2/3 cup milk
* Scant 1 1/2 cups (170 grams) tapioca flour
* 1/2 cup (packed, about 66 grams) grated cheese, your preference.
* 1 teaspoon of salt (or more to taste)

Preheat oven to 400°F. Grease a mini-muffin tin. Put all of the ingredients into a blender and pulse until smooth. You may need to use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the blender so that everything gets blended well. At this point you can store the batter in the refrigerator for up to a week.

Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes, until all puffy and just lightly browned. Remove from oven and let cool on a rack for a few minutes.

Eat while warm or save to reheat later.

Enough batter for 16 mini muffin sized cheese breads.

Note that Brazilian cheese bread is very chewy, a lot like Japanese mochi.

Cheddar Cheese Puffs

For Christmas Eve this year I decided to make a huge pot of Minestrone soup and some finger foods to set around the coffee table. It certainly had a nice informal feel to it; each of us could grab a bowl of soup and park ourselves by the Christmas tree. I decided to try my hand at Cheddar Cheese Puffs and they turned out to be a delicious accompaniment to the soup. Perfect for dipping.

These cheese puffs were so easy to make. If you can boil water, you can make these incredibly addictive cheese puffs. It's actually the water in the dough that steams and creates air pockets while the puffs bake in the oven. The result is something like a popover without having to use a popover pan. When you serve these at the table, people will think you probably mastered fancy French cooking when all the while you know it was as simple as boiling water!

The recipe came from Simply Recipes. You can go on over here if you want the step by step pictures.

Ingredients

* 1 stick butter (8 Tbsp or 4 ounces)
* 1 cup water
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 cup all purpose flour
* 4 large eggs
* 1 cup (4 ounces) grated sharp cheddar cheese
* 2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme (or rosemary)
* Freshly ground pepper

1 In a medium sized saucepan, add the water, butter, and salt, and bring to a boil over high heat.

2 Reduce the heat to medium and add the flour all at once. Stir rapidly. The mixture will form a dough ball that will pull away from the sides of the pan. It helps to use a wooden spoon to stir as the dough will be rather thick. Continue to cook for a couple minutes.

cheddar-cheese-puffs-4a.jpg cheddar-cheese-puffs-5.jpg

3 Remove the pan from the heat and let cool for a couple of minutes. Stir so that the dough cools more evenly. You want the dough to be warm, just not so hot that when you start adding eggs they cook as they hit the dough. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring after each addition until the eggs are incorporated into the dough. (Do this part in a mixer if you want, or by hand with a wooden spoon.) The dough should become rather creamy.

4 Stir in the grated cheese, thyme, and a few grinds of pepper.

5 Preheat oven to 425°F. Spoon out small balls (about a heaping tablespoon) of the dough onto a Silpat or parchment lined baking sheet, with at least an inch separating the spoonfuls. Place in oven and cook for 10 minutes at 425°F. Lower heat to 350°F and cook for another 15-20 minutes, until puffed up and lightly golden.

Makes about 2 dozen.

Paneer

I have long been a fan of Indian cuisine. On Friday night, Breen and I went for some Indian food. Usually I order the Dal Makhal but recently I've become absolutely smitten with Paneer in curry sauce. Paneer is a type of Indian cheese which is usually served up in main dishes in the form of dense little cheese cubes. So I had the bright idea right then and there in the restaurant to make Paneer myself the next day.

It starts off with a half gallon of milk (I used whole milk) in a heavy bottom saucepan heated until it boils. After the milk boils a half cup of hot water and a quarter cup of lemon juice is added. This addition causes the milk to separate and solid curds are formed.

After the curds are formed, they get rinsed in a cheesecloth lined strainer.

When you squeeze as much water out as you possibly can, the dense ball of curds gets pressed down with something heavy for 2 hours.


After 2 hours you have a nice block of Paneer which is ready to be cut in to cubes and added to a favorite curry sauce.



That's it. It really is easy and delicious! Try it with a can of coconut milk simmered with curry and a nice handful of toasted almonds on top of some Basmati rice.

Ingredients:

* 8 cups (half gallon) milk
* 1/4 cup lemon Juice

Method:

1. Mix lemon juice in half cup of hot water and put aside.
2. Boil the milk in a heavy bottomed pan over medium heat, stirring occasionally, making sure not to burn milk.
3. As the milk comes to a boil, add the lemon juice gradually and stir the milk gently. The curd will start separating from the whey, turn off the heat.
4. Once the milk fat has separated from the whey, drain the whey using a strainer line with cheesecloth, or muslin cloth.
5. Wrap the curds in a muslin cloth, rinse under cold water, and squeeze well. This process takes out the sourness from the lemon.
6. To take out the excess water, press the wrapped paneer under a heavy pan for about 1 hour.

Tips:

If paneer will be used to make any dessert dish:

1. The most important part of making paneer for dessert is how much water to take out from the paneer.
2. To check if right amount of water is out of the paneer, take a little piece of paneer on your palm and rub with your fingers. After rubbing the paneer for about 15-20 seconds, you should be able to make a firm but smooth ball.
3. For making sweets, paneer can be refrigerated for 1 to 2 days.
4. Paneer from half-gallon milk will make about 15 to 20 rasgullas.
5. I suggest 2% milk for rasgullas, rasmalai, chamcham or any other dish in that category.
6. For sandaish, burfee or any other such dish use regular milk.

If paneer will be used for making main dishes:

1. Before Pressing the paneer knead it enough so paneer is not crumbly.
2. Press the paneer instead one hour, two hours making firmer.
3. Cut the paneer to desired shape. Paneer can be refrigerated for a few days or kept frozen for months.