Tag Archives: mozzarella

Food and Death on the Small Screen (or TV with a Side of Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto)

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sopranosAlright, I admit it: I like watching television while I eat dinner. I KNOW, okay? I am single-handedly destroying the time-honored tradition of family suppers, and Jason and I will probably forget how to have actual conversations, and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. And yes, I, too, hate the zombie-like stare-at-the-screen epidemic of the modern era. But, but, but…I like coming home from a frenzied New York City day and cooking dinner and letting myself be hypnotized for a little while.

Jason and I excuse this guilty pleasure by telling ourselves that at least we watch good TV. And it really is a grand age for television dramas, isn’t it? We don’t have cable, so most of our viewing takes the form of gobbling up the latest DVD releases of shows like Game of Thrones or Homeland or Mad Men or (R.I.P.) Breaking Bad. But I like the “classics,” too. I’ve sat through two viewings of Deadwood and I’m not above a third. And when I heard that Jason had never seen all of The Sopranos, the show that ushered in this golden television epoch, we went back to the pilot and started from there.

It’s funny; after my first viewing of The Sopranos, six or seven years ago, most of what stuck with me was the violence, but this time it’s the food that really stands out. Everyone, even the skinny teenaged daughter, is constantly packing away the ziti and manicotti and cannoli and other Italian foodstuffs ending in “I” that I can’t hope to spell correctly. It’s like they’re defying death with the stuff of life. In the last episode we watched, the recent-immigrant cousin Furio expertly formed a massive ball of mozzarella cheese (baby-soft, lily-white, the closest cheese approximation of mother’s milk), while pulling on a cigarette and almost ashing into the bowl. Then he went and beat some people up. Life and death, man, life and death.

Anyway, you shouldn’t try to take on The Sopranos without the proper sustenance. Here’s a recipe for a sun-dried tomato and walnut pesto that’s hearty and delicious and will leave you yearning for the next episode.

Sun-Dried Tomato and Walnut Pesto Continue reading →

The Most Important Things I Learned in Cheese-Making Class

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fresh mozz

My very first braided mozzarella knot! Not bad for a novice, eh?

Oh, Groupon—how did we ever find cheap and marginally educational weekend recreation without you? The ubiquitous discount site was where I happened upon the mozzarella cheese-making class at BrickNYC, a brick oven pizza joint in downtown Manhattan. And since I have long harbored a secret fantasy in which I own a nanny goat named Moo Goo Gai Pan and make my own fresh chevre, I decided that it was worth a try. Here are my key takeaways:

Cheese details are not for the faint of heart.
People really do not like talking about food and poop in the same sentence, especially if the connection goes beyond the most basic one. My classmates looked a little dismal at the revelation that cheese is basically bacteria poo, except for two lively young women who clearly had had the good sense to pre-party before the class began. When the question of the holes in Swiss cheese was posed to one of them, she gasped and exclaimed, “Oh! Like little farts!”

Pity the piglet.
Apparently, you can make cheese from the milk of any mammal (yes, including humans), but the only one that tastes really vile is pig cheese. I was really curious about this fact, and asked our instructor Patrick to elaborate, but he said I was just supposed to trust him. Boo. Sounds like a cop out to me. Doing a little internet research today, the most prevalent theory is that pig cheese tastes bad because they are omnivores rather than ruminants like cows and sheep. Continue reading →