Calçots At Home

What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you because of a delayed flight? 

Despite the frecuency of my airline trips, I've been quite lucky up to now.  But this year, a delayed flight (not mine, but one of a friend) caused me to miss one of the year's most important traditions: the calçotada. We had the weekend planned in one of Spain's little coastal villages, but a late flight left us stranded at home in San Sebastián.

My friends being my friends, however, they gifted me a bundle of calçots upon their return to cook up at home (they also gifted me a tub of romesco, but we're going to pretend like that didn't happen since it somehow got devoured before it made it to the refrigerator).

What is a calçot? The calçot is an onion, a generic onion, pulled from the ground, allowed to sprout, and then reburied. The farmer then continues heaping soil over it during its growing period, preserving the whiteness and the slim shape, similar to a leek. Typically, they are charred over open fire and left to rest in newspaper, but you can create a similar effect right at home in your own oven, which is what we did.

The traditional dipping sauce served with these charred alliums is romesco. I have a version here, but lately I have been making with tomatos, almonds, and roasted garlic as well. Make plenty of romesco....it won't go to waste. Trust.

calçots at home

• one bunch of calçots (you could try subbing baby leeks or green onions)
• olive oil
• salt
• romesco sauce (one version here)

Preheat oven to 475º. Peel off exterior layer of calçots. Rub or rinse off any remaining dirt. Set on an oven tray, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.  Pop into oven, rearranging occasionaly, until calçots are both charred and tender. Serve with romesco.

In the Reno Gazette-Journal

Yesterday's Reno Gazette-Journal featured an article of mine.  I wrote, photographed, and recipe engineered it.  Hope you like!

You can read it here.

I guess I should credit my hubby for taste-testing? A hard life, sampling gildas, braised beef peppers and chorizo cooked in cider.

In the New York Times

photo : Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

It's a cool feeling to see your name printed in the New York Times, even if it's just for a recipe.

I don't know how they made that cake look so beautiful...it's an ugly one, but definitely one of the most delicious around.   You should make it! Alternately, just read the article and salivate.

But I already had the Irish whiskey on the counter to use in Marti Buckley Kilpatrick’s Chocolate Whiskey Cake (a recipe she adapted from Dol Miles, the pastry chef at Frank Stitt’s Bottega restaurant in Birmingham, Ala.).

Ms. Kilpatrick, who lives in San Sebastián, Spain, describes the cake as an ugly frog of a confection, but promises that anyone willing to bet a smooch would be amply rewarded. I thought the cocoa-colored cake, lightly dusted with powdered sugar, was perfectly presentable — especially after I tasted it and then gorged on it.

As Ms. Kilpatrick noted in her description of the recipe, the interplay of coffee, black pepper and cloves is subtle but powerful: “none of these suggests itself, but they unite ... to form a deeply flavored cake ... so moist, so dense, so amazing.”

Exactly.

Homemade Goat Cheese + Giveaway

Now I understand the cheesemaker. A person who has decided to devote their life to curdling milk and playing with it until it tastes completely different and utterly delicious.

Making your own goat cheese is addicting. Since I first made this recipe last week, I've already made goat cheese two more times. It couldn't be easier, and it's so satisfying.  Three ingredients:

Goat's milk, lemon juice, and salt. You can't go wrong: just heat, mix, and hang to strain.

A tip from my boss, who happens to be one of American's best cheesemakers, is to let it hang at least two hours. A particularly succesful batch for me was the one I forgot about for seven hours. Squeeze to dry.

Now, my boss also happens to have a brand new cookbook out, and along with her I am giving away a free signed copy of her book to one lucky winner. Simply leave a comment below and, for an extra entry, tweet this contest using the handle @martibk, @BelleChevre AND the hashtag #tasiastable.

goat cheese
from Tasia's Table

• 1 quart goat milk
• Juice of 1 lemon
• Salt
• Cheesecloth or cotton kitchen towel (or Hakei shoe bag;)

In a heavy-bottomed pot, bring goat milk to a boil over medium heat. Take off the heat. Immediately stir the lemon juice into the milk. Let stand for a couple of minutes, so the milk can curdle. Lay out a cheesecloth (or a cotton kitchen towel) in a bowl. Pour in the milk-lemon mixture. The curds simply resemble curdled milk at this point so don’t worry that they will pour right through the cheesecloth— it will catch them. Tie the ends of the cloth together so it becomes a bag. Hang it on a wooden spoon and let the bag hang free. The whey should strain out of the cheesecloth for at least two hours. Before taking the cheese out of the cloth, squeeze the cloth to extract more liquid from the cheese. Transfer the cheese from the cloth to a bowl and season it with salt.

Here's a list of participating bloggers, all lovely, talented ladies!

• Cooking With Books   
• Cheese And Champagne
• Deep South Magazine
• Sale e Pepe
•  Eggton  
• La Buena Vida
• Susan Greeley
• Bibberche
• Cactus & Kudzu 
•  Story of A Kitchen
• Sugar and Spice by Celeste
• Once Upon a Cutting Board
• 30AEats
• Miss in the Kitchen
• The Picky Eater

Mamia: Basque Dessert Recipe

The state of Basque and Spanish desserts? Lamentable. Out in a restaurant, you often get premade, frozen industrial versions of French style puff pastry type sweets.  The worst of the worst.  If you're lucky, you may find a decent homemade arroz con leche, but let's face it: that's old rice, milk, and cinnamon. Wah-wah.

The Basque dessert par excellence is a lesson in simplicity itself. Mamia, known in Spanish as cuajada, and in English as 'Basque sheep's curd dessert' (the typical horrible translation found on menus here), is nothing more and nothing less than sheep's milk, heated and curdled with rennet, then served with the local bounty of the earth: honey and walnuts. Ingredients all found in your surrounding hills.  Traditionally made in the ancient receptacle, the kaiku, it used to have a burned wood taste to it. Nowadays, that taste is often chemically added if you purchase the more industrial versions of mamia.

This is an acquired taste, but it's a beautiful, beautiful example of a local dessert. Of eating like your ancestors ate, using only ingredients that are easily available.  In summer, sheep's milk is available in bags from larger farms, but the best time to make this is in season, when sheep are producing milk naturally and Idiazabal cheese is being made.

I almost held off on this post, which I've been meaning to put up for a while, because I've got another mamia-related item coming up next week. But then I thought, hey, since when is there such a thing as too much mamia?

Mamia

1 liter sheep’s milk

20 grams rennet (cuajo)

Distribute the rennet equally between 4 bowls. Bring the milk to a boil then remove from the heat. Allow to cool to 37ºC / 98ºF and pour into the bowls. Stir quickly and leave to stand and cool, without moving or stirring.  Serve with