Archive for April 2012
Creamy Yogurt Cheese Flavored With Lemony Parsley and Corn Muffins
Once a month, I purchase a log of Vermont Creamery’s [www.vermontcreamery.com/] fresh goat cheese (priced at a reasonable $7.25 for 10.5 ounces at the Honest Weight Food Co-op [www.hwfc.com]). I enjoy spreading this tangy and creamy cheese on homemade bread or a slice of Berskhire Mountain Bakery’s [www.berkshiremountainbakery.com/] German-style grainy whole meal spelt bread with a dollop of raw honey. This month my log of goat cheese disappeared more quickly than usual, and I decided to address my cheese craving by making some yogurt cheese at the suggestion of a friend, who maintained that it is “simple” to make. He was correct.
To begin, I knew that my local food co-op, the Honest Weight Food Co-op in my hometown of Albany, NY, sold Cowbella Yogurt [www.cowbella.com], a wonderful local yogurt, made from a herd of thirty pasture-raised Jersey milk cows in Jefferson (Sullivan County) in the Catskills region of upstate New York. This very reasonably priced yogurt, $3.50 for a 32 ounce container, would be the basis for my creamy yogurt cheese. I used the small dairy’s nonfat plain yogurt with its simple “All Natural Ingredients”: pasteurized skim milk, live active cultures including L. bulgaricus and S. thermophilus.
Preparing yogurt cheese, though simple, requires some ingenuity. Rather than utilizing layers of cheesecloth, I searched the kitchen utensils and dry goods aisles of the Honest Weight Food Co-op, for an alternative way to strain the whey out of the yogurt in order to produce a creamy yogurt cheese. I found “the Natural Scrub Cloth” [www.rrtextilemills.com], a “natural [no dyes] and sustainable kitchen cloth used in restaurants for over 20 years.” Although suggested uses included “capturing food particles and safely scrubbing cooking oils from all surfaces. . . wiping down your flat-top grill to cleaning your stainless steel pot,” the “open-stitch, double-knit design” would work well, instead of cheesecloth, to strain the whey out of yogurt. Since the un-dyed cotton cloths could be laundered, they were reusable, and the $6.59 cost of 2 individual cloths was reasonable. One drawback was the small size (especially after laundering before using in the recipe) of the individual cloths, 12 inches by 12 inches, which required the use of two setups of a funnel, lined with a cloth, draining into an empty yogurt container. Nonetheless, this sparks the idea to prepare one small batch of plain creamy yogurt cheese, and a second small batch of yogurt cheese flavored with lemony parsley, the next time I utilize this recipe. My first time around, I combined the two small batches and made one large batch of creamy yogurt cheese flavored with lemon and parsley.
A versatile and easy herb to grow, parsley has significant nutritional benefits. “The most heavily consumed fresh herb in the United States. . . often it is the only thing left on the plate at the end of the meal, when it may actually have been the most nutritious” according to a fascinating description in Edible, An Illustrated Guide to the World’s Food Plants (National Geographic Society, Washington, DC, 2008). Noting that its exact origins are now obscured in history, “parsley’s genus name Petroselinum comes from two Greek words, Petros meaning rock, from its propensity for rocky cliffs and old stonewalls, and selenium, an ancient name for celery- so one can think of it as ‘rock celery’ [at p. 268].” The entry in Edible also notes: “parsley is high in vitamins A and C, fiber, potassium, magnesium, and iron. Surprisingly, the leaves also contain a significant amount of protein [p.268].” Since it is too early for homegrown parsley, I purchased a large bunch of fresh organic parsley at the Honest Weight for $1.99. I always have lemons in the refrigerator, and the juice of a lemon was added along with chopped parsley to flavor my creamy yogurt cheese.
In addition to utilizing the creamy yogurt cheese flavored with lemony parsley as a spread, I used it as a topping in pasta and grain dishes. An added bonus, I used the whey drained from the yogurt, in lieu of buttermilk, in preparing corn muffins. The whey had too much nutritional value to simply waste this byproduct which resulted from the preparation of the yogurt cheese.
The Joy of Cooking [http://catalog.simonandschuster.com/] by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker (New York, NY: Scribner, 1997), a handy and reliable resource for the kitchen, provided a recipe for Northern Corn Bread (at pg. 777), which I varied by using honey instead of sugar, the whey instead of buttermilk, while also omitting any salt. I also used organic, cold-pressed local sunflower oil ($5.99 per lb.) produced by Stolor Organics in Cazenovia (Madison County) [www.stolororganics.com] instead of melted butter. In lieu of sugar, I used Lloyd Spear’s raw honey from nearby Schenectady County [www.eshpa.org]. This wonderful honey, fairly priced at $25.00 for a 5 pound jar at the food co-op (though my most recent purchase was a 5 pound jar at the Troy Farmers Market [www.troymarket.org/] directly from Mr. Spear at only $21.50) is “produced from cappings and comb honey that are drained and from honey straight from the extractor, complete with all the natural enzymes, pollens, vitamins and complex sugars” according to the label on the jar. For the muffins, I uses “high-extraction wheat” flour produced by Farmer Grown [http://farmergroundflour.squarespace.com/] which grows grains in upstate New York near Ithaca (Tompkins County) and locally mills its flour. The Honest Weight Food Co-op was also the source of (1) organic, yellow corn meal from Champlain Valley Milling (85 cents per lb.), (2) non aluminum, double acting Rumford Baking powder (calcium acid, phosphate, bicarbonate of soda, corn starch from non GM (genetically modified) corn), $3.99 per lb.), and (3) baking soda (100% sodium bicarbonate, 82 cents per lb.).
Creamy Yogurt Cheese Flavored With Lemony Parsley
32 Ounce Container of Nonfat Plain Yogurt
3 or 4 twigs of fresh parsley
Juice of one lemon
Line two funnels individually with a “Natural Scrub Cloth” (or several layers of cheesecloth) and rest them on top of empty 32 ounce yogurt containers. Divide a 32 ounce contained of nonfat plain yogurt between the two setups. Let the yogurt drain for approximately two hours. When the yogurt has drained thoroughly, transfer the creamy yogurt cheese to a bowl.
Finely chop 3 or 4 sprigs of parsley and spread over the creamy yogurt cheese. Squeeze the juice of one lemon over the homemade yogurt cheese. Refrigerate. Enjoy as a spread or as a topping for pasta and grain dishes or cooked vegetable, such as broccoli or sauteed spinach.
Corn Muffins (makes one dozen)
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
Line a muffin pan with paper cups.
1 cup stone-ground cornmeal
1 cup flour (Farmer Ground 50-50 bread flour)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
2 Tablespoon of honey
1 and 1/3 cup of whey, as drained from 32 ounce container of yogurt (in lieu of a mixture of milk and buttermilk)
4 tablespoons of sunflower seed oil (in lieu of melted butter or corn oil)
Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir in.
Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean, 12-13 minutes in a muffin pan.
Serve with a quality jam (Bionaturae’s Organic Sour Cherry Fruit Spread , a delicious option) or with the homemade yogurt cheese spread!
[FW Barrie. 4/16/12]
Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, A Life on the River
FW Barrie, Photographer. River Views from the Rip Van Winkle.
David Montgomery in his history of world agriculture, Dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 2007) details the disappearance of various societies as the consequence of the abuse of the fertility of a civilization’s soil and the resulting inability to provide an adequate food supply. Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow (Counterpoint, Berkeley, California, 2000), a powerful and loving portrait of a fictional barber of a small Kentucky river town, captures the collapse of a small town way of life, close to nature, and its replacement in post-World War II America, with a new society tied to the rush of the interstate and a system of industrial agriculture heedless of the environment and the past.
The novel’s narrator, Jayber (born Jonah) Crow, is a keen observer of the effect of time passing on the life of his small Kentucky river town in his remarkable tale of love. The full title of Mr. Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself, reflects the very personal nature of the tale as the reader follows the narrator from his birth in 1914 to 1986, when he looks back at his life and tells his story. After a page for acknowledgements, a Notice is provided for the reader “BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.” Whether “author” refers to Mr. Berry or to Mr. Crow is unclear. Nonetheless, any book reviewer is warned, in a Mark Twainish fashion:
“Person attempting to find a ‘text’ in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a ‘subtext’ in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise ‘understand’ it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.”
With my apologies to the two, Mr. Berry and his fictional voice, this powerful novel deserves a wide readership, and has a very special appeal for readers, who are searching for a new way to feed themselves, which protects the environment and builds community. The modern movement of CSA farms, farmers markets, and community gardens, which this website promotes, is a sign that hope is not lost, and nature and community may be respected. Jayber Crow, which in good part centers on the sad collapse of a family farm, can serve as a reminder of what has been lost and needs to be remembered.
Athey and Della Keith’s 500 acre Kentucky farm has a richness “both in evidence and in reserve” of “bottomless fecundity,” which is wasted away by their daughter’s husband, Troy Chatham, in the course of a transforming American industrial agriculture, with its “dependence not on land and creatures but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things, and on the sellers of bought things -which made it finally a dependence on credit (p.183).” With 12 working mules, Athey Keith “raised tobacco and corn, followed by wheat or barley, and then by clover and grass. He had cattle and sheep and hogs (p. 178).” Jayber Crow lovingly recalls Athey Keith’s way of farming:
“What I do know is that he used his land conservatively. . . In any year, by far the greater part of his land would be under grass . . . He was always studying his fields, thinking of ways to protect them . . . he was improving his land; he was going to leave it better than he had found it. . . ‘Wherever I look,’ he said, ‘I want to see more than I need, and have more than I use.’ And this is a principle very different from what would be the principle of his son-in-law, often voiced in his heyday: ‘Never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle. Use it or borrow against it.’ (pp 178-179).”
Athey and Della Keith’s “place” included “seventy-five or eighty acres of very good timber” known as the “Nest Egg,” which takes on special importance, in the manner of the great Anton Chehkov and his Cherry Orchard. “The finest stand of trees in our part of the country. . . [Athey] protected it from timber buyers . . . As long as he could make a living farming, that patch of timber would always be worth more to him than to them. . . Whose nest egg it was he never said (pp.179-180).”
By the end of the barber’s story, Troy Chatham has turned the Keith farm into a kind of wasteland and the Nest Egg into dollars. Troy Chatham and Athey Keith were “different, almost opposite, kinds of men.” Troy “asked of the land . . . all that it had” and was unable to see and appreciate the old farm’s “patterns and cycles of work:”
“[I]ts annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing. Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm’s own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment . . . The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish (p. 182).”
This old “order” of farm life stood in the way of Troy’s vision of using the farm “to serve and enlarge him.”
Jayber Crow’s description of Troy’s transformation of the Keith family farm is grave:
“[T]he still unharvested corn crop that I was walking through was poor for the year, and so overgrown with Johnsongrass that you could hardly see the rows . . . I could see that the soil was pale and hard, lifeless, and in places deeply gullied. . . Troy had bulldozed every tree . . . from every foot of ground where you could drive a tractor. The fences were gone from the whole place. Troy was a hog farmer now. Hogs were the only livestock on the farm, and they were all inside pens in the large hog barn that I could smell a long time before I could see it. . . [T]he other farm buildings looked abandoned- paintless and useless, going down. . . Behind the barn lots was what I had heard Troy . . . call his ‘parts department.’ This was a patch of two or three acres completely covered with old or broken or worn-out machines. . . Every scrap of land that a tractor could stand on had been plowed and cropped in corn or soybeans or tobacco. And yet, in spite of this complete and relentless putting to use, the whole place . . . did not look like a place where anybody had ever wanted to be. It and the farming on it looked like an afterthought. It looked like what Troy had thought about last, after thinking about himself, his status, his machinery, and his debts (p. 340).”
But Jayber Crow is much more than the story of the ruin of a family farm, resulting from the ill-conceived dreams of a wannabe agri-businessman. At its heart is a transcendent love story, where a life affirming “Yes” spoken by the narrator’s soul mate on her death bed, gives hope for the human ability to love, rather than hate. Wendell Berry, a proud Kentuckian, has made a small river town the center of a tale of transforming love. Jayber Crow is a book to read and savor, especially now, in light of the great honor recently bestowed on Mr. Berry [knowwhereyourfoodcomesfrom.com/2012/02/09/wendell-berry-honored-as-2012-jefferson-lecturer-in-the-humanities/].
[www.wendellberrybooks.com/]
(FW Barrie, 4/2/12)
