Buttermilk Week 2008: Closing Remarks

Ladies and gentlemen, as Buttermilk Week 2008 comes to a close, I look back on it fondly, as I hope you all do! There were ups and downs, but overall I think we shared a lot of successes! Many new things were tried! Many friendships were made! Much buttermilk was consumed! I consider each and every one of you a friend and I look forward to seeing you all at next year's "Office Escape 2009!" Plenty of funtivities will be planned and a good time will be had by all! Whether they like it or not! Your end of the year bonuses depend on it! Those of you who were unable to have a good time this week need to learn more about about being part of a team! May I remind you that there is no "I" in "team"! !!! !!!

Ahem. I'm so glad I don't have to work in an office and participate in group activities and listen to boring, poorly written speeches by my boss. And, by the way, there may not be an "I" in "team," but the letters can be rearranged to form two important words. Those words are "at" and "me," as in "Everyone is looking AT ME, because I am so special!" So there. I hate catchphrases. They're so lame.

Seriously, though, the buttermilk is almost gone. I used some of it in a broccoli, spinach, Cheddar and Parmesan quiche that's in the oven right now. It was great in the cauliflower and Gruyère quiche we had a few days ago and I have high hopes for the one in the oven. I also made a vinegar pie (I swear they're good!) with buttermilk a few days ago, but I didn't love it enough to give out the recipe. I did, however, love it enough to eat most of it. I promise to tinker with it and come up with a better version.

I have about a cup left of the buttermilk, which happens to be cultured. Cultured buttermilk is made by adding lactic acid to milk. Lactic acid is also known as...drumroll...ALPHA HYDROXY ACID! Yup, ladies, the stuff that can cost a fortune and makes your dry, winter skin soft and smooth for summer. Cleopatra was supposed to have bathed in sour milk to keep her skin soft. Sour milk, you say? Otherwise known as...buttermilk! I plan to take the rest of the buttermilk and dump it in my bath. All I need is a Star Magazine to read while I soak. I think I'll light an orange scented candle, because according to aromatherapists, citrus scents can alleviate depression and stress, as common as dry skin in the winter*. Plus, the combination of orange and milk will smell like one of those orange creamsicles, and those are awesome. Yeah!

Namasté, y'all!

* That is not a fact. I made it up.

Most Hi-Class Tuna Casserole

Did you grow up in the seventies? Did you love your mom's cooking? Do you want to impress your friends? Have I got a recipe for you. This is not your mother's tuna casserole. This is hi-class, super fancy, sophisticated tuna casserole. I hate things that are so fancy that they don't taste good. I'm all for fancy, but in the end, you have to eat the thing, so it should taste good. I also like cooking appetizers, because my kids will eat anything, as long as it looks like party food. If I wrap it in nori or phyllo dough and arrange it on a tray with parsley, they'll eat it. Even better if they can eat it with a toothpick. If I put crap on a cracker, with a garnish, they'd eat it.

Tuna Casserole Triangles

In a bowl, mix the following:

• 2 small cans of tuna, drained.
• 1 heaping cup shredded cheddar cheese.
• a heaping 1/4 cup mayonnaise.
• 1/4 cup buttermilk.
• 1/2 cup slivered almonds.
• 1 cup frozen broccoli florets. Chop up the big pieces, but you don't have to go nuts about it.
• A spoonful of mustard.
• A few shakes of salt.
• A few shakes of pepper.

When you mix it all together, it should look like this:


Now for the fancy part. Earlier in the day, you have gone to the store to get frozen phyllo dough. And, though it was frozen when you bought it, you have put it in the fridge to thaw. Get it out now. If you are a young woman raised in the Orthodox Church (Greek or otherwise), you know good and well how to work with phyllo. If you are not that young woman, never fear. It just takes practice.

Pour some olive oil in a bowl and get out your pastry brush. Lay out one sheet of pastry on the counter and slice it into five pieces, slicing the short way. I suggest using a pizza cutter. In fact, I suggest using a Zyliss pizza cutter, because it is so awesome*. The sliced sheet of dough will look like this:


Brush the strips with olive oil. Hold the end of each strip lightly and brush from your fingers up to the top. Don't be shy with the olive oil**. Put a dollop of the tuna mixture at the end of one strip, about an inch from the top, like this:


Fold a corner over, like this:


And keep folding, like a flag, until you have a little triangle. Don't try to fold it too tight, because the paper will tear or it will explode in the oven, which would be fun, but a b***h to clean. Repeat the process until all of the mixture is gone. Put the triangles on a greased baking sheet. You should have about twenty, but you could easily double (or triple! or quadruple!) this recipe for a party or for leftovers to freeze (more on that later).


Brush the top of each pastry with more olive oil. Put them in a 350° oven for about 25 minutes or until they're golden brown.

As promised, here are the directions for leftovers. These will freeze really well. After wrapping them, but before brushing with the final coat of olive oil, put them in a freezer safe container between sheets of waxed paper. When you're ready to cook them, take them out, put them on a greased baking sheet and brush them with olive oil. Cook them at 350° for 45 minutes or so. Don't thaw before cooking; they'll get soggy. Here's a cooked one:


According to my children, I'm the best cooker ever. So there.

By the way, for those of you who follow these sorts of things, the buttermilk is almost gone!

Namasté, y'all!


* And, I've said it before and I'll say it again, probably more than once, you can buy it at Mary and Martha's, one of my favorite kitchen stores in town. Here's the pizza slicer:


** That's what she said. Ha!

Guess what I made with buttermilk today?

Pear clafoutis. If the French had their way, I wouldn't even be allowed to call a dessert involving pears "clafoutis." Actually, if the French had their way, I wouldn't be allowed in the kitchen. According to the ultimate authority, Larousse Gastronomique, clafoutis is "a dessert from the Limousin region of France, consisting of black cherries arranged in a buttered dish and covered with fairly thick pancake batter." The pits of the cherries, incidentally, are not removed and you have to spit them out as you eat. This sort of thing is very typical of the French, who are required by law to suffer a little, even when eating something nice. My mother-in-law makes it the correct way and it's delicious. When I told her about my plan to make it with pears and buttermilk, she winced in a way that only the French can and quickly changed the subject. That was kinder than telling me exactly what she thought of my idea. But I digress.

Pear Clafoutis (With My Apologies to the French)

I waited until she was gone and I peeled, cored and sliced four pears. I sprinkled them with a quarter cup of sugar and put them in the fridge in a closed container. According to the true recipe, you should do this to the cherries and let them sit for at least thirty minutes, so that's what I did. To the pears.

In a bowl, I whisked the following:

• one heaping cup of flour.
• a pinch of salt. I hope I get credit for this: It was French sea salt.
• another quarter cup of sugar.
• 4 well beaten eggs.

Now add (quel horreur!) one and a quarter cups of buttermilk. And whisk a little more.

Butter a round baking dish. The Larousse says to use a baking tin, so you might want to try that.

Put the sweet pear slices in the dish, sugar and all, and sprinkle the zest of one lemon on top of the pears. Now pour the batter over the whole thing and cook it at 350° for 35-40 minutes. let it cool to lukewarm before serving. You can sprinkle it with confectioner's sugar to make it look pretty if you like.

Et maintenant, je vous présente... Le Clafoutis aux Poires avec Babeurre!


Namasté, y'all!

Onion Tart...with buttermilk. (Alternate Title: Do not fear the pâte brisée.)

Yesterday, I recommended saving the rest of an onion for an onion tart, or tarte à l'oignon, as we say en France. Guess what I couldn't stop thinking about? If you answered "a nice bottle of Sancerre accompanied by an onion tart", you would be right. The Sancerre was easy enough; I had to go to church last night to set up for a service*, but I didn't have to actually sit through the service and there was just enough time to slip out to the package store**.

Earlier in the day, I had made the pâte brisée, which was chilling in the fridge when I got home from church. I couldn't do it during Baby J's nap time, because I didn't want to risk waking him up with the Cuisinart. Now, my French mother in law can whip up a pâte brisée by hand. I'm sure I could, too, but it's much easier in the Cuisinart and the Larousse Gastronomique*** approves. Pâte brisée is a fancy name for basic pie crust. Don't be intimidated, it's easy. You will need a food processor, though. If you want a free one, I recommend going to someone's house who hates to cook but got married in the eighties. I guarantee they'll have an unused food processor. I personally burnt out the motors of three never-used, hand-me-down processors before my sweet husband bought me a Cuisinart. And don't be mad at him for giving me an appliance. I wanted it real bad and it flipping rocks. The cheap ones are fine, by the way, they just won't last long if you use them a lot.

Pâte brisée

In the food processor, dump the following:

• one heaping cup of all-purpose flour. By heaping, I mean don't skim across the top, just reach into your bag of flour with the measuring cup and take a big scoop.
• a pinch of salt. Using imprecise measurements will make you feel more French and your food will come out better.
• a heaping spoonful of sugar. The sugar is actually optional, so use as much or as little as you like.
  
• a stick of butter, cold and chopped into pieces. The pieces don't have to be very small, maybe 8-10 per stick.

Switch on your processor and pulse until all the ingredients are mixed. It should look crumbly, about the consistency of potting soil.

Now add two tablespoons of very cold water. Make yourself a glass of ice water and take it from there. If you're making the pastry for someone other than immediate family, spoon the water out before you take a sip. Or before anyone sees you take a sip.

Use the pulse button again. After a few seconds, the dough will bind and pull away from the walls of the processor. Take out your dough blob, make it into a ball, wrap it in tin foil and put it in the fridge for at least an hour.

Onion Tart

If your baby is still behaving, you can now caramelize the onions. In addition to the onion you saved from yesterday, you should slice two more onions. Red onions are best. It doesn't matter if your onion from the day before was red or white or yellow. Slice the onions very thin. If you have one, use a mandoline. I have one, but I forgot to use it and the onions were fine...but I almost sliced my finger. You should end up with about eight cups of sliced onion. Put them in a container and dump a small half cup of buttermilk over them. Cover the container and put it in the fridge. Go console your baby and read him that stupid Wheels on the Bus book for the fifty millionth time. Give him a dried fig to distract him so you can go cook the onions. He likes dried figs.

In a big frying pan, melt a chunk of butter and add a splash of olive oil. Dump the onions in, buttermilk and all. Sprinkle salt on the onions and cook them, stirring every so often, until they're translucent. That should take about ten minutes, enough time to read the stupid Wheels on the Bus book a couple more times. Lower the heat and cook them for a long time, until they're nice and brown. That's going to take about thirty minutes. You can read the stupid book twenty more times or you can distract the baby and waste some time read fascinating and informative blogs like this one on the internet.

When the onions are browned, splash in just a little balsamic vinegar, no more than a teaspoon or two. Continue cooking and stirring the onions for a few more minutes to distribute the vinegar. You'll probably have to just hold the baby while you do it, which you can count as your weight lifting for the day. Make sure you hold him away from the stove, though. The pan should be on the back burner. Duh.

Turn the heat off. Leave the onions on the stove (no need to dirty another container) while you go pick up your big kids from school. Bring them home and referee whatever fights they might have while simultaneously making them do their homework. Take them to their weekly Kid Yoga class, which seems to really mellow them out. While they're at Yoga, take the baby to the grocery store and buy a hunk of Gruyère cheese. And bananas. And olives. And milk. And a cookie for the baby, because he's darn cute. Pick up the kids from Yoga and take them home to do more homework, which they'll now do with pleasure, because they're all Yoga'd up.

For the next couple of hours, do whatever it is you do this time of day, until you're ready to make the tart.

Open the bottle of Sancerre and pour yourself a glass. Isn't that nice? Preheat the oven to 450°. Take your pâte brisée out of the fridge and leave it on the counter for about five minutes while you grate about a cup of the Gruyère. Eat some olives if you're hungry.

Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to about a ten inch diameter. Put it on a baking sheet. Technically, you're supposed to put it on parchment paper on the baking sheet, but I didn't have any and my husband was still at work, so I couldn't go out and get any. According to the world wide internets, paper bags can catch on fire at 475°, so I decided not to use one of those. I just put the dough right on the cookie sheet, ungreased. I recommend heavy duty aluminum sheets, because that's what I like.

Sprinkle most of the cheese on the pastry, reserving a couple of spoonfuls. Put the caramelized onions on top of the cheese, leaving about two inches of pastry around the edge. Fold the extra pastry over the onions. You'll have a hole in the middle so the onions can peek out. Don't fold it too precisely, because you want it to look all French country cooking. Also, you've probably had a second glass of wine by now and you won't be able to be too precise anyway. Brush the pastry with buttermilk. When it's cooked, that'll give it a nice glazed look, kind of like your eyes are glazed from the wine. Sprinkle the rest of the cheese on top and put it in the preheated oven. Bake it for about ten minutes, enough time to clean the counter and eat some more olives. Lower the heat to 350° and cook for about 25 more minutes, until the crust is brown and looks just right. Make sure you let the finished tart sit for a few minutes on the counter to cool before you cut into it.

By the time it's ready, your husband should be home from work, the kids will be asleep and all will be right in the world.

Namasté, y'all!

* Yeah, I'm an old lady, in case you hadn't guessed that. I'm on Altar Guild at my church. As far as volunteer work goes, it's great, because you do it by yourself. Volunteer work with others can be very annoying for a control freak like me.

** Further evidence that I'm an old lady. Instead of liquor store, which is so boringly obvious, I call it the package store. Did you know that term originated in 1933, after the repeal of Prohibition? It was a small concession to the anti-liquor people. Liquor could be purchased, but had to be concealed in a package. Fascinating.

*** Please pardon all the footnotes. I stayed up too late. If you don't already own a copy of the Larousse, get one. I got mine when I was in college and I refer to it all the time. It's kind of a time suck, though, because looking up one thing always leads you to look up another. Kind of like the internet.

More buttermilk!

Prepare to endure a week of buttermilk, because that's about how long the buttermilk in my fridge will keep and I want to use it all. I could freeze it in ice cube trays and save it for later, but I don't want to. It's a buttermilk kind of week, m'kay?

Last night, I made stuffed tomatoes with, you guessed it, BUTTERMILK! I think they'd make a nice side dish for just about anything. Veal comes to mind. Here you go.

Buttermilk Stuffed Tomatoes

This recipe can be multiplied by as many tomatoes as you need. I made two, but you could make fifty, if you're having fifty people over for stuffed tomatoes or you need to use up a lot of buttermilk.

First, hollow out your tomatoes. Cut the top off, making a little bowl. Rinse out all the seeds. It's just fine to leave a little of the tomato meat. When they're as hollow as you can get them, turn them upside down on the edge of the sink, so any remaining liquid will drain.

In a bowl or cup with a spout, mix the following, multiplied by the number of tomatoes you want to stuff:

• 1 tablespoon crumbled Gorgonzola.
• 1 tablespoon buttermilk.
• 1/3 cup frozen spinach, thawed and pressed between towels to remove the liquid. You'll end up with less than 1/3 cup after pressing.
• 1 egg.
• A healthy shake of crushed red pepper.
• Salt and pepper to taste. And don't start screaming at me about tasting raw egg. If you buy your eggs fresh, from the person who gathered them, you'll be fine*.
  

Slice an onion. Find a slice that will work as a stand for each tomato, so they don't tip over while cooking. The onion also adds a little bit of flavor. My brilliant French mother-in-law taught me to use onions as a roasting rack for fish. No more gluey fish yuck. Hooray! Now I use them for everything. Save the rest of the onion; you can use it for soup another day. Or maybe an onion tart...with buttermilk...hmmm...

Put each tomato on an onion slice on a baking sheet and fill with the egg mixture. I told you to use a bowl or cup with a spout and I hope you did, because that makes this step a lot easier.

Cook at 375° for thirty minutes. Let them cool for ten or fifteen minutes while they set.

One thing I didn't add that would have been nice was something crunchy and salty on top. Down heah, we love to add bread crumbs (good), crushed Ritz Crackers (better) or potato chips (best!) to the top of any dish. I say go for it.

Namasté, y'all!

* I got over any squeamishness I had about raw eggs when O. was a toddler. I really wanted to take a shower (trust me, this is going somewhere) and I could not distract the over-socialized O. I hate being cold and it's unacceptable to me to have a toddler pulling back the curtain and creating a draft while Princess Me is trying to shower. I'm not proud of this (well, maybe a little), but I let him play in the fridge while I took my shower. It was the only thing that would occupy him for any length of time. He was a very careful child and could spend twenty minutes rearranging things on the shelves without making a mess. When I finished, I went to the kitchen to assess the damage. He had bitten the top off of a raw egg and was drinking it. Yum!

Inspired by buttermilk.

Yesterday, we went to the last All-Local Farmers' Market at Yo Burrito. Starting the fourth Saturday of next month, it'll be at Rosewood Market. I've talked about it before, so I'll spare you, but you really, really shouldn't miss it. Really. See you there!

I've tried plenty of Happy Cow Creamery's* cheeses and we love them all and I couldn't live without their butter, but yesterday I felt compelled to buy buttermilk. It just seemed so...homey. My little pescetarians have been in the mountains with their grandparents this weekend, so I thought I'd make them some soup. They love soup and I love them. And I wanted to use the buttermilk, so here's what I did.

Soup for My Babies

Splash a little bit of olive oil in a soup pot. Heat it up and add:

• One chopped onion.
• About two cups of chopped cabbage.
• 3 medium zucchini, cut in half lengthwise and sliced into half-moons.

Sauté them for a few minutes, stirring every so often with a wooden spoon. I don't know why I like to sauté my veggies for soup. I just do. I think it tastes toastier.

Add a large can (28 ounces) of diced tomatoes or about a pound of chopped, fresh tomatoes.

Add a small (6 ounce) can of tomato paste.

Use the little can to add water. Add three cans worth.

Stir in the following:

• 1/4 teaspoon salt.
• 2 teaspoons coriander. I don't know why, but I'm obsessed with coriander in soup at the moment.
• 1 teaspoon Italian Seasoning.
• 1 teaspoon sugar.
• A few shakes cayenne pepper, depending on how hot you like it.

Bring everything to a boil, turn down the heat and let it simmer for a little bit, about enough time to get yourself a Diet Cheerwine** out of the fridge, open it and read a sweet email from your husband. Stir occasionally (the soup, that is, you should stir the husband more often).

Add a cup of frozen, shelled Edamame for protein.

Just before serving, stir in a half a cup of buttermilk.

And I'll leave you with a picture of the lovely flowers I got at the market from Donna of Floral and Hardy Farms. Her arrangements make me giddy.


Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to have a second bowl of soup and wait for my little pescetarians.

Namasté, y'all!

* If you have a few minutes, I highly recommend clicking on the Happy Cow Creamery link above and reading more about the farm. It's a great story!

** Cheerwine, by the way, is made in North Carolina, pretty close to local. And it is so much better than the inferior Dr. Pepper. Blenheim's Ginger Ale, of course, is from right here in South Carolina and is arguably the best soda in the world. Try it with dark rum some time.