Simple, easy, tasty, cheesy

Home made queso blanco cheese.

Keeping to the theme of springtime delights, here is a recipe that brings a creamy and delicious cheese for lunches or snacks, and protein packed left overs (whey) for smoothies that you and your kids will love. Or you can go one step beyond, and use the whey to make ricotta.

Queso blanco is a mild, creamy white cheese great as a base for dips, fantastic with crackers as a snack, and a deeply satisfying addition to many Mexican dishes, including my flat food pt 2!

In its simplest form, it has a mild and wholesome flavour like bocconcini - but spreadable. It doesn’t melt, however - until it reaches your mouth!

What do you need to make this treasure? Milk, salt and vinegar. And a piece of cheese cloth (muslin). However, if you like a little extra, this cheese comes to new life if you add herbs or spices such as cumin, chives, pepper … hmm. Nice.

You can make this with regular supermarket milk, but it really benefits from good quality full cream milk. Riverina brand is good I think. But any full cream milk will work.

BTW, I like the pic below, because the cheese in its wrapper reminds me of the face-hugger pods in Alien.

Recipe: Queso blanco

Yields

• 400–600g cheese
• 2 litres whey

Ingredients

• 4 litres full cream milk
• 1/3 cup white vinegar
• 2 tablespoons salt
• 2 teaspoons crushed cumin seeds
• 1 pinch smokey paprika

Method

Heat milk in a pot (start heat low, then increase to medium if you want to reduce your pot-cleaning at the end) until the milk is just about to boil. You can tell it’s close because tiny bubbles start to rise, there is a shimmering on the surface - and it feels really hot to your pinky!

Then pour in your vinegar and gently stir. Here the magic happens, and the curds start to separate from the whey. The curds (from which we’re making our cheese) are lumpy and stringy, and gently stirring will help the separation process. Remember the separation process? Well, this one ends in cheese! And whey.

Stir gently for a couple of minutes. Turn the heat off, then stir gently for another five.

Line a colander with a piece of muslin about 40 cm square, and place over a large pot or dish to retain the whey.

Gently pour the curds and whey through the strainer Occasionally you’ll need to gather the corners of the muslin and squeeze out the liquid a little.

When all the whey has passed through and all that is left only a little puddle that can be contained inside the muslin line colander, it is time to add the remaining ingredients.

Sprinkle the salt and the cumin, and a little pinch of paprika onto the cheese. Tie the quarters of the muslin using some cooking string and hang over to sink for four hours, or up to 12.

Return the remaining whey to one of the milk bottles and place in the fridge this you can use later for really yummy, protein-packed smoothies.

You can also use the whey to make ricotta.

Now, you will find many recipes on the internet for what is basically my queso blanco, claiming this is ricotta. Wrong! Ricotta (Italian for re-cooked) is not strictly a cheese, but a biproduct of cheese making, by using the whey. They ricotta makes use of a different set of proteins than those that form the curds of the queso blanco.

I have never made ricotta (I generally can’t wait to get the bar mix out for those smoothies!) but here are two recipes for making ricotta from whey.

• How To Make Ricotta Cheese Using Only Whey
• How To Make Great Ricotta Cheese From Whey

Flat food pt 2

Spring is here. Time to start thinking about lighter, sharper, busier flavours. Thank you comfort foods, your job is done. Time for the party plate!

All over Sydney Mexican restaurants are opening like cactus flowers. As a home cook cuisine, Mex is really good fun, and a good combo of plate food and portable food. Diana Kennedy’s “The cuisines of Mexico” is the very best place to start.

In the meantime - here’s my main meal flat food.

Corn enchildas, cumin lime pork, refried beans and white cheese.

I like soft corn tortillas, but they are much harder to find in supermarkets and delis than the wheat variety. Try Senor Nila on the northern beaches, Mexico City in the south, or Fireworks in the west. Otherwise, Woolies stocks the “A taste of Mexico” brand which has white corn tortillas, which I used for this recipe.

The mild white cheese in Tex Mex is Monterey Jack. There are some very funny posts on blogs about how difficult it is to import American cheese into Europe, mostly ending in - what would we need this awful cheese for anyway?

‘Monterey Jack’, or the more Mexi ‘Questo Blanco’, are pretty bland cheeses that can be substituted with bocconcini, or other mild white cheese. OR you could make your own! Easy and so tasty! See our next exciting recipode for home made Queso blanco. I am eating it spread on crackers right now, and it’s yum!

Recipe: Lime pork enchiladas

Ingredients

Yields 8 enchiladas

• .5 kilo pork mince
• 1 can red kidney beans
• 8 soft corn tortillas
• 2 tomatoes
• 1 brown onion
• 1 red onion
• 4 tablespoons canola or other vegetable oil
• .5 cup chicken or vegetable stock
• fresh coriander
• ground cumin
• pepper
• juice 1 lime
• 1 cup grated or crumbled mild white cheese
• .5 cup grated cheddar cheese

Method

Preheat oven at 160 degrees Celsius.

Finely chop tomato, coriander and red onion. Set aside

Pan fry the pork mince in the vegetable oil with pepper, and coarsely ground cumin. Add juice of lime, stir until evaporated and pork is browned. Set aside.

In the same pan, using the oil left over from the pork, sauté diced brown onion.

Add the red beans, including the broth, stir and mash. After a while, they mixture will start to gather into a kind of pancake. Once you can roll it off the pan, it’s ready.

Set aside.

In the same pan, bring stock to a simmer.

Rest each corn tortilla in the stock until they soften (about 30 seconds).

Place on each tortilla a tablespoon of the pork, beans, tomato, and white cheese. Roll each tortilla and place on an oven tray. Sprinkle with yellow cheese. Place in oven until the yellow cheese starts to brown and the inside juices start to bubble from within - about 30 mins.

Flat food p1

Last Sunday was fathers day, and my boys suggested, as a fathers day treat, that I make them pancakes.

Actually, the request was more specific. The word was crepes.

Flat breads of various kinds are incredibly useful bachelor foods for breakfasts, snacks, work and school bags.

And for dinner? How about corn enchiladas with cummin-lime pork? More on that in Flat things pt 2.

Crepe or pancake. Basically the difference is a pancake includes a raising agent and a crepe doesn’t.

Crepes are more likely to be eaten folded or rolled, while pancakes are more likely to be eaten with syrup or salsa.

Smaller pancakes (flapjacks) can be eaten in a stack.

If you add extra caster sugar (and some vanilla essence) as well as a raising agent and make smaller cakes, you get pikelettes, which seem to be an Australian / New Zealand invention.

Wikipedia has a really good discription of pancake styles around the world at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake

Crepe recipe

Ingredients

• 1 cup plain flour
• 1.25 cups milk
• .5 teaspoon caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon butter

Yields 6–8 crepes

Method

The most important thing is not about making the crepes, but keeping them warm. Put the oven onto 60 degrees now, and pop in a dinner plate.

Mix all ingredients except the butter in a mixing bowl using a whisk. The mixture needs to be smooth. When you lift your whisk out of the mixture, it needs to run, rather than fall in blobs (not too thick), but leave ripples where it falls back in the bowl that stay for a moment or two (not too thin).

Heat half the butter in a frying pan. The heat needs to be high enough for the butter to melt and start to bubble, but not so high for the butter to burn.

When the butter is melted and coving the pan evenly, add the batter, just enough to almost fill the pan. I like to leave about a cm of space on the outside to the edge of the pan because I think the slightly smaller size looks better on the plate, and that bit of extra space makes turning the crepe a little easier.

When the edges of the crepe start to turn up, and small air bubbles start to pop in the mixture, it is time to turn them. Add extra butter as required.

Remove them one by one to the warming plate.

Serving

My boys and I like sprinkling with raw sugar and lemon juice and rolling them up. Yum!

A side benefit to crepes is that it is one of the few ways my kids will eat eggs without the slightest hassle.