Feed 5 for under 10 deliciously from Scratch

Hello again, and welcome.

Tonight I thought I'd share with you an example of our everyday sort of eating around the house. We just had a wonderful meal of baked potatoes, balsamic vinegar sauteed mushrooms, and deviled eggs, and it cost us less than ten dollars to feed our household of five.

Now, this is assuming you have some of these ingredients in your cupboards. If not, it will cost a bit more. Again, this meal feeds five, and it takes about forty-five minutes to prepare.

Ingredients:

11 small to medium sized russet potatoes

6 eggs (free range are tastier)

15 large mushrooms

5 nice leaves of green lettuce, washed and dried

1 cube, or 1/2 cup, sweet cream, unsalted, butter at room temperature

1 shallot, chopped fine

3 tablespoons of parsley chopped fine

2 green onions chopped very thin

1 small handful grated parmesan cheese

1 cup sour cream (remember, some commercial brands are made with gelatin)

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar, and maybe as much as a tablespoon more

1 spoonful mayonnaise

1 tablespoon shao xing wine, or dry sherry

1/2 teaspoon ground hot red pepper

1/2 teaspoon paprika

Salt to taste

Instructions:

Wash well and dry the potatoes and mushrooms.

Take two tablespoons of the butter and rub the potatoes well with it. place these in a hot oven and bake until skins are crisp, and flesh tender. Turn the potatoes after 20 minutes and prick skin with fork. (YES! they really do explode, sometimes.) In 45 minutes, they will be done.

While these are baking, saute mushrooms in a large skillet, over medium high heat in two tablespoons of butter. Sprinkle over mushrooms 1/2 teaspoon salt. If they expel any juice, pour it off and reserve it.

Also, place the six eggs covered in cold water over high heat. Bring to a boil and lower heat to sustain a low boil for twenty, or thirty minutes.

When the mushrooms begin to brown and stick, add the tablespoon balsamic vinegar and stir well, deglazing the pan. Be sure to turn the mushroom buttons frequently to achieve an evenly browned surface. When the vinegar cooks down, the mushrooms will be a lovely color, and the pan also. When the bottom of the pan is coated with a thin layer of sticky, vinegar mushroom sauce, ad the tablespoon of wine, and stirring, deglaze a second time. Remove pan from heat, and with a slotted spoon, the mushrooms from the pan.

By the way, this is the first time I have used balsamic vinegar for the first deglazing. It is so good!

Add 1/2 cup water to the pan, and stir, salting to taste. Pour this sauce into a bowl and set aside.

When the eggs are done, pour off the hot water, and add cold water to cover. In a few minutes, peel egges (typo, but so Chaucerian, I had to leave it in!) and slice in half lengthwise.

Carefully remove the yolks from the whites, arranging the whites on a plate, and putting the cooked yolks in a small bowl. Add a spoonful of mayonnaise, the 1/2 teaspoon hot pepper, salt and vinegar to taste, while stirring to make a thick paste.

Spoon the yolk mixture into the whites, sprinkle with paprika, and place in the refrigerator to chill.

When the potatoes are done, remove them from the oven and slice open, lengthwise.

Reheat the mushrooms and mushroom sauce, unless your timing is excellent.

Slice into the potatoes, opening the flesh. Salt it, pepper it, butter it, sauce it, shallot it, sprinkle with parmesan, green onion, dollop sour cream on it, etc.

Put three lovely mushrooms per person beside the potatoes on their plates.

Arrange the lettuce leaves on the plates, and set two deviled egg halves, per person on the lettuce leaves.

I hope you enjoy this dinner as much as we did.

Best wishes, Scratch

Mushroom Goulash Poblano from Scratch

Hello again, and welcome.

When I was nine years old, my family lived for a short time in Germany where my father, who was a college professor, was involved in some kind of academic research. I can still remember a mid-day meal that he and I shared in the old city of Munich, perched side by side like two comrades on stools at the bar of a dimly lit cellar restaurant.

The server, a bulky red-faced gentleman wearing a stained apron and a huge mustache, set before each of us a large wooden bowl of fragrant stew, a deep velvet brown with spicy red undertones, and between the two bowls, a plate of thick sliced brown bread, and that was my introduction to Hungarian Goulash. Ambrosia.

As a boy growing up in rural Nevada during the great depression, my father sometimes spent entire summers away from his family to earn extra money for the household, living in a Basque sheepherder's caravan and tending the flocks. In such an environment, he learned an appreciation of simple hearty foods, "peasant" foods, of which he used to speak with such deep affection that he infected those around him with his enthusiasm.

Those foods are still by far and away my favorites, and just last week I prepared a vegetarian version of Hungarian Goulash for my family, substituting well browned mushrooms for the beef and organ meats that are traditionally used.

It turned out quite well and everyone was pleased with the meal, but it seemed to us that the dish could have been taken a bit further, that—as is often the case when we remove the meat from a dish that traditionally relies heavily upon it—some small something was still missing.

So after playing with a few ideas, I eventually added to the basic goulash recipe some of the elements of a Mole Poblano, that gorgeously complex chili and chocolate sauce originating in Puebla Mexico, which is commonly ladled over boiled chicken.

The end result is a rich Mushroom Goulash Poblano, which enjoys some of the spicy complexity of traditional Mole Poblano, while supporting, rather than diminishing, the wonderful flavor of Hungarian Goulash. I hope you will agree that this is a treat, very hearty and satisfying, with a warm, spicy finish that lingers on the tongue and in the belly.

Serves 6, Preparation time: between 90 minutes and two hours

Ingredients

3 Roma tomatoes and one Poblano chili pepper, placed under the broiler in an ovenproof dish until the skins are evenly roasted and blackened in patches, then cored and seeded. Discard the skins. The tomatoes can be coarsely chopped, the pepper julienned. (If the skin doesn't all come off the Poblano, don't worry. Its skin is quite delicate.)

3 medium sized potatoes, peeled and diced for soup

2 pounds of mushrooms, washed and thickly sliced

2 yellow onions, chopped fine

1 carrot, peeled and sliced as for soup

1 Bell pepper, with the stem section, seeds, and pith removed, then julienned

Small handful parsley, chopped fine to produce one tablespoon

15 blanched almonds

1 tablespoon sesame seeds

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 teaspoon cocoa

2 teaspoons Hungarian paprika

2 teaspoons hot New Mexican red chili powder (Use mild, if you prefer.)

1 tablespoon salt

1/2 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper

1 dash cinnamon

1 pinch sugar

4 tablespoons unsalted, sweet cream butter

Shao Xing wine, or dry sherry

Parsley for garnish

Sour cream (Be sure to check ingredient listings on sour cream. All too often this is made with gelatin.)

Egg noodles

Instructions

In a large skillet, melt two tablespoons of butter, and sauté the chopped onions over medium high heat. Stir frequently, adding a little water if the onions start to stick, until they are nicely browned. This should take about thirty minutes.

Roast the almonds and sesame seeds in a dry skillet over medium high heat until they are golden brown in color, but not burned. Place them both in a spice grinder, or a coffee grinder used for this purpose, and grind to a paste. Almonds can cause problems here. If they are stubborn, remove what will not grind well, and chop fine.

Put this paste in a small pot over high heat with 2/3 cup water. Bring to a boil and reduce by half. Set aside.

When the onions are nicely browned, add to them the minced garlic, the teaspoon of cocoa, two teaspoons of paprika, two teaspoons of red chili powder, the tablespoon of salt, 1/2 teaspoon course ground black pepper, and enough water to make a wet paste. Continue cooking this over the burner for another five minutes, stirring constantly.

Now, scrape onions and spices into a soup pot. Add the tomatoes, Poblano, Bell pepper, carrot, parsley, and enough water to cover with one inch, or so, to spare. Bring this to a low boil and keep an eye on it to maintain the level of liquid in the pot while you prepare the additional ingredients.

Add the toasted almond and sesame broth to the soup, pouring it through a sieve, and rubbing through the sieve what will pass.

Now, stir into the soup a dash of cinnamon and a pinch of sugar.

In a large, hot skillet, sauté one pound of mushrooms in one tablespoon of butter, over high heat. As soon as the mushrooms are added to the skillet, sprinkle over them one-half teaspoon of salt, and when they expel their juices, add the juice to the soup pot. When they begin to squeak and brown in the skillet, add a splash of sherry, or Shao Xing wine, to deglaze the pan, scraping the bottom of the skillet with a spoon, and continue to cook until the mushrooms are nicely browned. ( You can use water to deglaze instead of sherry, but the flavor and aroma of the added wine is marvelous, and its sugars, when cooked down, cling to the mushrooms and aid in the caramelization).

Add the browned mushrooms to the soup, and repeat this process with the second pound of mushrooms. I do this in two stages, because if the mushrooms are too deeply layered in the pan, the moisture trapped between the layers makes the browning of the mushrooms difficult.

Adjust the level of liquid in the pot after the addition of the mushrooms by adding more water.

Allow the goulash to stew at a high simmer, or low boil, for another thirty minutes, then add the diced potatoes.

When the potatoes are tender (in about fifteen minutes), the soup is done. Serve it in bowls over egg noodles. This soup is very much a meal in itself, but as a protein supplement, you could top the goulash with a poached egg, add a generous dollop of sour cream, and garnish with more chopped parsley.

Goulash Poblano goes wonderfully well with a cabbage vinaigrette, sprinkled with ground roasted caraway or cumin seeds, and a nice heavy red wine. Of course, a slice of buttered bread is great. That, and a few sour pickles with a small glass of ice cold vodka, and it's time to put on some Gypsy violin music. I hope you enjoy this dish as much as we did.

Best Wishes, Scratch

Diamond Pane Pie Crust from Scratch

Hello again, and welcome. No sooner did I finish writing about a favorite soup of mine in the previous post, than I began to think of recipes for other dishes I enjoy in the Fall. So where does this inevitably lead? Why to pie, of course.

This will be a very brief post, and I won't even include a recipe. It is just a method I discovered for the preparation of the top crust of a sweet, or savory pie. I came up with it on my own, but I'm certain it's been done a million times before.

I'm posting it because the end result is such a beautiful thing, like a time consuming lattice, but consuming no time at all.

You prepare the bottom crust as usual, and place the pie tin with the bottom crust laid into it into the freezer. (By the way, I make all butter pie crusts, substituting butter for the shortening in my favorite recipes, and instead of cutting it in with two knives, or a pastry cutter, I use the large grate side of a cheese grater and work the grated butter in very quickly with my fingertips.)

Next, I roll out the top crust between two sheets of waxed paper. Then, carefully removing the top sheet of paper, I take an ordinary table knife and cut a series of straight lines, about an inch apart, all the way across the crust. Then I turn the crust to an angle of about 45 degrees and cut another series of lines, creating a surface of diamond shapes. You need to be careful not to press so hard with the knife that the paper below the crust is damaged, but I've never had this happen.

Now place the upper crust sheet in the freezer for a moment to chill.

Remove the pie tin with the bottom crust and add the pie filling.

Take the sheet of top crust out of the freezer, carefully up-end it and center it onto the pie.

Now, gently peel off the waxed paper and crimp, as you would normally, the overlapping dough onto the bottom crust, blending and repairing as you do, the cuts in the dough at the edges.

Gently apply just enough pressure on the diamond shapes, with your fingertips, to be certain that the cuts you made go all the way through.

Finally, brush with an egg wash, or whatever you generally do, and bake as usual.

The end result is really impressive, and with practically no effort at all.

I hope this works for you.

Best Wishes, Scratch

Ten-thousand Golden Dragons of Happiness Mushroom Soup

Hello again, and Welcome. Today, I'd like to share one of my favorite recipes with you. This is a very festive soup, especially wonderful in the Winter, with accents of flavor and color, like tomato, orange peel, saffron, and wakame, blending together to create a magical cross pollination of a classic bouillabaise with the old Chinese restaurant favorite; hot and sour soup.

Like so many vegetarians who came of age eating meat, I retain happy memories of favorite dishes dating back to my pre-vegetarian days. Bouillabaise is way up on the list of these, and inspired me to create a vegetarian version with a rich, pungent broth, and lots of wonderful mushrooms, instead of fish, swimming beneath a surface that shimmers richly with red-gold oil.

Naming the Soup:

Illustration by Asakiyume (aka Inatangle)

When I lived in San Francisco in the late seventies and early eighties, I always got a kick out of the frequent appearance of the number 10,000 in local Chinese culture, whether it was a philosophical reference to a state of mind enabling one to contemplate ten-thousand mountaintops all at once, or the cozy little used bookstore in the Sunset district, called Ten-Thousand Paperbacks. At a basic level, the term implies a "whole lot" of somethings in one, like the many things that combine to create this tasty melange, and I threw in the golden dragons for good measure, because dragons are after all, auspicious, and because of the wonderful red-gold broth. So this soup could also be called, "A Whole Lot of Golden Auspiciousness in One Pot."

Please try a large bowl alongside a crisp green salad, and with a huge slice of warm, crusty French bread, spread generously with sweet cream butter. A glass of cold white wine wouldn't hurt!


Ingredients:

Half a dozen leeks, white portions sliced very thin and then sliced once across the center to produce concentric half circles

One large yellow onion, chopped fine

Half a head of garlic, minced

Handful of parsley, chopped fine

Grated rind of one orange (orange part)

Generous teaspoonful of saffron

Two fresh bay leaves

Large spoonful tomato paste

Extra virgin olive oil

1/4 cup Shao Xing wine, or dry sherry

Approximately five pounds of mushrooms, washed and relatively thick-sliced*

Half a dozen large, ripe tomatoes. peeled, seeded, and rough chopped

Handful of wakame

(A couple of serrano peppers diced fine if you'd like a little bite)

Salt, and course ground black pepper to taste

One pound firm tofu, rinsed and diced into 1/2 inch cubes

*Note on selection of mushrooms: I read once that Bouillabaise, a fisherman's stew, is traditionally something into which just about anything that found its way into the net was put. In this same spirit, I like to add a wide variety of mushrooms to this soup. Certainly the standard white ones, and the brown crimini mushrooms that have recently become so common in our supermarkets are great, but if you can add some shiitake mushrooms, or some of the little white enoki, a can of straw mushrooms (rinsed and soaked in lightly salted water for half an hour or so to remove the tinned flavor), that would be wonderful. I once added a few wild chantrelle that I found in a specialty shop. Dried mushrooms are also fine if washed well and reconstituted. Be careful of the dry shiitake though. Their broth, after reconstitution, should be used with caution if you choose to add it to the soup as it can be powerfully earthy in both flavor and aroma and can overpower other, more delicate ingredients.


Preparation

Put rinsed and diced tofu in a bowl of water, and set aside.

Place handful of wakame (a variety of dried seaweed availiable at oriental food markets) in a dish of warm water. Set aside.

In a small skillet, dry roast the saffron over medium high heat until it turns a shade darker, being careful not to burn it. Now stir this toasted saffron into a small dish into which you have already poured 1/4 cup hot water. Set aside.

Using the same small skillet again, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium high heat until fragrant. Add the large spoonful of tomato paste to this and stir over heat until tomato paste deepens in color to a darker, reddish brown. Set aside.

Heat 3/4 cup olive oil in a large pot over medium high heat until fragrant. Add garlic, leeks and onion, and stir until mixture turns a pale gold color. (If you are adding serrano peppers, you may add these now and cook mixture for a couple more minutes.)

Stir in tomato paste until fully integrated. Now add your mushrooms, holding back the straw mushrooms and enoki mushrooms if you have chosen to use these, as they are quite delicate and should be added at the end with the tofu.

Next throw in your chopped tomatoes, parsley, orange rind, bay leaves, two teaspoons of salt, and the 1/4 cup shao xing wine.

Raise heat to high. Cook, stirring occasionally, for ten minutes, or so, or until the mushrooms go limp. If mixture begins to stick, add a little more wine to deglaze.

Now add the saffron in its water, and after draining the water from the wakame, add the reconstituted wakame, as well.

Pour in enough water to cover your ingredients. The more water you add, the more soup-like, the less water, the more stew-like.

Bring the soup to a low boil while seasoning to taste with salt and course ground pepper. Once soup has come to a boil, remove from heat.

Finally, drain the diced tofu, stir gently into the soup, along with any of the more delicate mushrooms. Allow flavors to blend for a half an hour, or so, then heat through again, but not to a boil, and serve.

This soup is particularly tasty the next day.

Many thanks to Asakiyume, who drew the great illustration some time ago when she learned about this soup. I really love it, and it would be great if more readers of this blog sent ideas, drawings, poems, etc.

Best Wishes, Scratch

Egg Foo Yung from Scratch

Hello again, and welcome. I want to share with you a recipe for vegetarian Egg Foo Yung. Egg Foo Yung's actual origin is debated by many, but at least we can agree that it is nutritious, tasty, and a well balanced, inexpensive vegetarian entree.

I'm in my early fifties, and one of my fondest eating memories is of the occasional visit to the exotic world of the 1960's era Chinese American Restaurant. The interiors, often dominated by images of dragons, the colors of deep red and gold, and the uncommon tones of Cantonese or Mandarin, drifting out into the dining area from the depths of the kitchen, combined to produce a wonderfully magical experience. As I grew older, and we moved from town to town, and from Chinese restaurant to Chinese Restaurant, many of my favorite dishes changed in the methods of preparation, but the one constant seemed to be Egg Foo Yung. This golden omelet patty, stuffed full of bean sprouts and water chestnuts and topped with a ladle of brown mushroom gravy always arrived at the table the way I remembered it, almost as if the same chef had followed me from town to town, in anticipation of my arrival.

It's no mystery, really. I've been able to reproduce the flavor of this dish, at least to my satisfaction, with four easily obtainable flavoring ingredients: ginger, garlic, shao xing wine(easily substituted with dry sherry,) and toasted sesame oil.

*I have chosen to omit water chestnuts from my recipe, because no matter how carefully I rinse them, they always seem to taste of can. If you don't find this to be true, then by all means, throw some into the mix.

Egg Foo Yung from Scratch

Ingredients:

8 eggs (please buy free range. A happy hen lays a tasty egg.)
4 handfuls of bean sprouts
2 green onions sliced very thinly
approximately 1 square inch peeled fresh ginger root grated or minced fine
2 cloves garlic peeled and minced fine
1 tablespoon flour
salt to taste
toasted sesame oil to taste
Shao xing wine to taste
a pinch of sugar
dash of soy sauce, or more to taste
(if you like a little bite, a finely chopped serrano pepper is nice but not necessary)
oil for frying

For the gravy:

8 tablespoons flour
7 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 cups water salted to taste to which is added a teaspoon of finely minced ginger, a dash of soy sauce and a tablespoon of shao xing wine
handful of standard white or brown mushrooms sliced
a little oil for sauteing the mushrooms

In a large bowl, put one tablespoon flour. Add one of your eggs and with a wire whisk, beat into the flour. Add remaining eggs and beat thoroughly. Add ginger, garlic, sugar, soy sauce, (and serrano pepper,) beating these into egg mixture.

Now add the sliced green onion and the bean sprouts, mixing thoroughly with a spoon.

Finally add salt to taste, beginning with one teaspoon, and proceeding cautiously, a tablespoon of wine, and at the last, mix in one teaspoon, or more, depending on taste, of the toasted sesame oil. As with the salt, be careful with this stuff, it sneaks up on you.

Let this mixture sit while you prepare the gravy:

Heat a little oil in a skillet, til smoke just begins to rise, and stir in the sliced mushrooms. Saute til nicely browned. While sauteing, season with a little salt, and pour off any resulting liquid into the salted water reserved for the gravy. If the mushrooms begin to stick, pour in a little shao xing, or sherry to deglase the pan. Set aside.

In a heavy pot large enough to accomodate four cups of water comfortably, heat your oil over a medium high heat. Add the flour and stir briskly. I use one of those stainless steel whisks with the widening coiled spring bottom, always maintaining contact with the bottom of the pot, stirring very quickly over the entire surface, and in this way I never burn my roux unintentionally.

Continue to stir the roux(flour and oil mixture) quickly, carefully observing the gradual change in color, from pale cream, to golden brown, to peanut butter, and finally to a stage just a little deeper brown in shade than peanut butter. At this point, remove the pan from the heat but continue your stirring for two minutes, or so. This is done for the following reasons: If you pour the reserved liquid directly into your roux without lowering its heat a bit, the possibility of a volcano like eruption is high. And if you don't continue stirring your roux after removing it from the heat, the mixture, which is extremely hot, will continue to cook and possibly burn.

After a couple of minutes, return the pot to the burner, and now with a spoon, rather than the whisk,
quickly stir in approximately 1/2 cup of your salted water. This will almost instantly form a thick paste, to which, while continuing to stir briskly, you will gradually pour in the remaining water. By the way, PLEASE be very careful when first pouring in the water. You must stir the water into the roux, but a great deal of steam will rise up from the pot as you do so. Please remove the spoon quickly from the pot for a moment as this occurs so you don't scald yourself.

Once you have integrated all the water into the roux, leave the pot on the burner and switch back again now to the whisk. Turn the heat up to high, and whisk the gravy up to a low boil. This should eliminate any thick lumps that appeared earlier. Now add the mushrooms, stir them in, and place the gravy on a low back burner. If the gravy is a bit too thick, add a little water, and always adjust your seasonings.

Mix Egg Foo Yung mixture thoroughly with spoon. In a heavy skillet, pour in cooking oil to 1/4 inch depth. Place skillet over medium high heat. When oil is hot, place handfuls of mixture in oil. If bean sprouts mound too high, pat down with spoon. Fry til golden brown on both sides, remove with spatula and drain on paper before serving on platter. Cover with gravy before serving, and bring a boat with remaining gravy to table.

This dish is great on its own, but with any companion Chinese restaurant dishes, and of course with steamed rice, even better. Don't forget the fortune cookies!

Best Wishes, Scratch

P.S. Accuracy note: Most Chinese sauces I've been served, or prepared myself, are closer to glazes than gravies, and usually produced using starches other than wheat. The Chinese American restaurant Egg Foo Yung mushroom gravy was probably, in my time, more often than not produced with a commercial gravy base heavy on beef stock and caramel coloring. Our recipe avoids the beef stock, of course, and comes by its coloring naturally. I read recently that In St. Louis Mo., a local favorite is the St. Paul Sandwich: an egg foo yung patty with gravy, served on a bun with dill pickle. Lettuce and tomato optional.

Ricotta from Scratch

Hi. and welcome. I am pretty excited about beginning this project, and I want to thank anyone who looks in. As you might have already guessed, this blog is mainly about food, vegetarian food that my family and I prepare here at home in our kitchen. We prepare practically everything from scratch, on the lowest budget we can manage, and approach our practice of cooking passionately.

I am writing this primarily because I will enjoy the process, and to establish for myself and members of my family a record of the recipes and techniques we develop, but also, because I want to share my love of food with you. Please feel free to respond to anything that appears here, and if you have any questions at all, feel free. I will do my best to answer them.

This is the first entry in my first blog, so I will be learning as I go along, and eventually, I hope, you will find Scratch Vegetarian a comfortably polished place to visit, especially, if like me, you sometimes take as much pleasure in reading a good cook book, as you do in reading a good novel.


Ricotta from Scratch

Oh yeah, Ricotta. I love it. We'll talk about lasagna down the road. We bake it twenty pounds at a time, but we also use our ricotta in calzone, on pizza, in cheesecakes, and in other ethnic venues; for enchiladas perhaps, or pressed into a firmer cheese, as paneer, for example, to be used in many East Indian dishes. What we don't like about ricotta is the junk they stick into the store-bought varieties, the lack of freshness of the store-bought varieties, and the COST of the store-bought varieties.

At the moment, milk is on sale in almost every store I visit. Be sure to buy the no rBST milk! And now if you follow this simple recipe, you will produce about one quart of very nice ricotta cheese for between twenty and twenty-five percent of what you would need to pay for the commercial variety. By the way, my oldest son and I have been working out this recipe for some time now, so he deserves at least half the credit.

Ingredients:

one gallon whole milk
two, to four lemons or,
1/4 to 1/2 cup white vinegar
whole nutmeg for grating
salt
1/4 to 1/2 cup cream

You noticed my measurements are a little on the vague side? Let's face it. If you want to cook wonderful food, you need to taste it with your tongue, touch it with your fingertips, smell it with your nose and watch it, watch it, watch it with your eyes. We face variations like seasonal temperatures, altitudes, freshness, or quality of ingredients, electric vs gas, to say nothing of differences in personal taste, so I don't even think of following any recipe as if it was some kind of revealed wisdom never to be questioned. I approach the process watchfully, and test constantly.

Put a couple of inches of water in a large soup pot. Bring this to a boil. Place a large, oven-proof bowl on the pot, over the water, one that will comfortably hold your gallon of milk. I sometimes use a pyrex bowl, but I prefer a big stainless steel one that can hold two gallons at a time.

Pour your milk into the bowl and let the milk get hot enough that a skin forms on the surface. At this temperature, when you stick the tip of your finger into the bowl, you really know it's hot!

Now to choose between the lemon juice or the vinegar. Lemon juice imparts a lovely flavor to the cheese, especially nice for use in desserts, and pretty much the rule when taking this process a step further and making paneer for Indian dishes, but for Italian style ricotta cheese, I prefer plain white vinegar.

Pour 1/4 cup vinegar, or the juice of two lemons into the milk and stir briefly with a long-handled spoon. Now watch and wait a few minutes. You want to see the milk curds separating from the whey. In a short time you should see the thick white curds gathering on the surface and the whey should have the appearance of a cloudy yellowish liquid with just a slight cast of green. The clearer the whey, the more substantial the curds. If ,after a few minutes, you have only gotten a few curds and the liquid in your bowl is still very opaque and milky in appearance, add the remainder of your acid, whether lemon juice or vinegar, and stir again. This should definitely do the trick, but always have an extra lemon on hand, just in case.

When the curds and whey are well separated, check that the level of water in your pot is sufficient, and let the curds cook for fifteen or twenty minutes longer. This waiting time lets the acid do its work and results in a little more cheese. Now remove the bowl from the pot and set aside to cool for a while. My son found that doing this lets the cheese set into a more manageable consistency.

When the whey is closer to warm than hot, you can strain the whey off the curds through a sieve. You don't need a super fine sieve, and you don't need cheese cloth. You might lose a tablespoon of cheese by foregoing the cheese cloth, but in my experience, cheese cloth costs more than a tablespoon of curds.

If you strain the whey into a clean container, you can reserve it for use in another recipe, or as a substitute for water in most soup stocks. It is very nutritious, so why not? Use a rubber spatula to scrape any easily removable milk solids from the sides of the bowl, and add this to the curds.

Now press the curds with the back of a spoon, until they are moist, but not to the point that they are practically dry. This is not at all critical, and with practice you will discover what level of moisture is comfortable for you.

Shake the curds out of the sieve back into the bowl and rinse that sieve! Curds dry stickily. Add 1/4 cup cream to the curds. Stir briskly. I use a wire whisk at this point. You want your ricotta fluffy and spreadable, not clumpy, but at the same time, you don't want it so wet that it sheds cream. This goes back to how dry you pressed it earlier. No worries. It's all fixable. If you find it too dry, add a bit more cream. If too wet, return it to the sieve and press out a bit more of the whey. The addition of cream isn't actually necessary, but we have found that in the process of stirring, the cream binds the curds well into a spreadable mass. My son sometimes adds an egg yolk or two as a further binding agent, and to add firmness in a recipe where the ricotta stands more on its own as in, for example, a stuffed pasta recipe.

This is a simple farmer's cheese. In fact in terms of cheese, I don't imagine there is one simpler. Wrapped in cloth and pressed between a couple of plates and under a heavy weight for a few hours it becomes paneer in India, and in Mexico, a fresh queso blanco. Less fluffy, and more clumpy, with more whey (and cream is still very good) it is cottage cheese. It knows no ethnic or cultural boundaries. But for ricotta, I add a little nutmeg.

First salt the cheese. Add two teaspoons to start, stir, taste, then repeat Proceed carefully until pleased with the result. If you really over salted, you could rinse the curds in some of the reserved whey, press again in the sieve, and re add the cream, but why go there?

When you have salted to taste, grate 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg into the mixture for a start, and stir and taste. When seasoning most things, I think the rule should be that it's there, and you'd notice it if it was missing, but you don't really want it jumping out at you. About the only exception to this that I can think of is hush puppies. With hush puppies fresh from the fryer, I want the flavor of pepper to reach out and scratch me, but that's a personal preference.

When you have seasoned your ricotta to taste, it is ready for any recipe that requires it. On a personal note, I just finished watching the entire series of The Sopranos, and keep catching myself pronouncing ricotta, rigott. But however you say it, you have just produced a product for your eating pleasure far superior to what you can find at the supermarket, and saved yourself a few dollars as well.

Best wishes, Scratch

P.S. A mea culpa for any food history monitors out there. Ricotta does, in fact, mean literally "recooked." Traditionally, it is produced from the small, high fat, percentage of curd remaining in the whey left over from the production of mozzarella. I have read that because this requires a second acid separation in this already curd depleted whey, that approximately six tablespoons of ricotta cheese are obtained from one gallon of whole milk. Some commercial producers may still make ricotta this way, and although we have, in my family, begun to experiment with the production of mozzarella using vegetable rennet, we will probably never be making enough mozzarella to justify the production of enough ricotta, of the technically accurate variety, for even a single plate of lasagna. So for now, this is our "once cooked" ricotta, and I hope you enjoy it