When the wife was recently in New York City, she bought me the Presidential Cookbook at Bonnie Slotnick’s. It’s a collection of recipes enjoyed by the first families up until publication in 1895. That’s the era of Grover Cleveland’s second adminstration, the only time a President served a second nonconsecutive term.
As most people know, I like old things. Not too long ago, the wife’s mother passed down her old electric waffle iron that she got from her grandmother (the wife’s great-grandmother). It’s a Manning-Bowman model from 1941, which means it was manufactured just before all US industry shifted to the war effort following the attack on Pearl Harbor. We recently cleaned it and let it heat outside for about an hour to burn off all the old grease. This past weekend, we finally decided to try it out.
Encouraged by our recent experiments with butter and mozzarella, we decided to make some homemade mayonnaise. I’ve never been a huge fan of mayonnaise, but I’ve been enjoying it a little more than I used to. I’ve mixed all kinds of ingredients with it to balance out various sandwiches and burgers, and I started wondering if I’d like mayonnaise more if I could adjust the flavor, as was suggested in this Bon Appetit column. Well, we rolled up our sleeves and decided to try our hand at making a better mayonnaise than Mr. Hellman and Mrs. Duke. We based our recipe on this one, but dialed down the mustard and vinegar a bit.
Believe it or not, this is everything you need.
This weekend, my wife and I dropped by the local Farmer’s Market to kill some time before the post office opened. I bought some ground beef and pork sausage, as well as the requisite peppers to make chili on Saturday. My wife noticed that they had some raw milk, so we bought a gallon and decided to make some more mozzarella. On Sunday, I used my kit and made a softer, fresher-tasting cheese than last time:
We had some chicken on hand, so we decided to try to merge Insalata Caprese salad with grilled chicken salad.
We figured the best way to use our homemade mozzarella cheese was to make Margherita pizza. My wife decided to make pizza dough to keep with the ‘fresh’ theme. We used this pizza dough recipe. Here she is manually dissolving the yeast:
Getting your hands dirty is the key to good dough.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I tried our hand at making mozzarella cheese. This kit from Leeners.com cost $25 and will make 6 pounds of cheese:
The kit cost over $30 after shipping and handling, and we'll have to buy six gallons of fresh milk. That might sound like a lot of effort and money for so little product, but it would cost us over $90 to buy that much fresh mozzarella from the grocery store. So we think it's a good deal — if the cheese tastes good.
For Valentine's Day this year, my wife and I cooked live lobsters. I wanted them to do battle for the privilege of being cooked last, kind of like my own personal Thunderdome, but the lobsters, sluggish from their fridge-induced coma, just flexed a little.
This weekend my wife and I decided to try our hand at making butter. We heard it was easy, but weren’t sure what to expect. All you need is cream and a stand mixer. We poured in one pint of heavy whipping cream and set the speed on low for a few minutes:
When it gets frothy like the foam on a cappuccino, you can turn it up to medium.
