I’ve been going through my freezer and trying to use anything that’s getting old. I don’t have a lot of rules when it comes to cooking, but one of them is throw out anything that might be older than the cats. I remember during my freshman year of college, I pulled a jar of mayonnaise out of the fridge and it had completely separated back into egg and oil. Since then, I’ve never let anything lurk in the fridge for too long.

I made lasagna a couple of weeks ago. As usual, I had extra ground beef, ricotta, mozzarella, and sauce left over. I always mix it together and freeze the medley in a ziplock bag. That way, when I don’t really feel like cooking, I can just toss it with some ziti, add some jarred sauce, and I have an instant baked pasta. This time, I decided to use the mixture as filling for my ravioli.

The filling mixture can probably be replicated with one small container of ricotta cheese, a half cup of grated parmesan, a heaping tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley, a cup of shredded mozzarella, a cup of ground beef, a half cup of red sauce, and one egg yolk. As always, season to taste with salt and pepper.

The pasta dough is made with three eggs and between 2-2½ cups flour (instructions here). I rolled it very thin so that the dough wouldn’t be chewy. Next, I snipped off a corner of the ziplock so I could extrude the stuffing like frosting out of a pastry bag.

If I wanted to make large ravioli, I would have rolled out two sheets of dough and placed one on top of the other. But I like small ravioli, so I just folded the dough over like and long empanada and pressed out the air between the stuffing with my fingers. Next, I cut the dough into individual ravioli and sealed the edges with the back of a fork.

The stuffing looks small, but it spreads out inside the cavity during the cooking process. I let them dry on a well-floured baking sheet for a few hours and then boiled them in a large pot of salted water. I layered them in a pan with leftover sauce so they wouldn’t stick together.

These came out good. Next time, I’ll make this with another person. It would go a lot faster with one person rolling dough and the other person stuffing and cutting the ravioli. There are so many stuffing and sauce combinations. I can’t decide what to try next.

First, I prepped the tomatoes and peeled and halved a clove of garlic while my wife picked some fresh basil.

Next, I sliced up some french bread I made on Sunday:

I’m trying to get better at making baguette and ciabatta. I still have a long way to go, but at least the results are edible now. I’ve never been a disciplined recipe follower. I think of cooking as an art form, rather than a science. Baking, however, is more like chemistry than creative design. By following the science, you can make decent bread. To make great bread, you have to sprinkle some art in with the science. That’s where the problem lies. I can’t get the balance right to make bread that’s light and airy and tastes delicious.

I threw the sliced bread in the oven and baked them at 450° for a few minutes, just to toast them a bit. After that, I rubbed the garlic halves all over the surface of the bread. This step makes a big difference. Some people brush the bread with olive oil before toasting it, but I think that makes the bread too hard.

Next, I dropped the tomatoes into a small pot of boiling water. After a minute or two, I immediately shocked the tomatoes in a bowl of ice water:

Not only does this stop the cooking process, but it also makes the skins split. When I remove the stem of the tomato, I also cut a cross in the skin. This makes the skin easier to peel:

I cut the peeled tomatoes in half and used my fingers to pull out all of the seeds. I usually do this over the sink. After that, you squeeze the tomatoes through your fingers. My inner child thinks this step is pretty fun. How finely you crush them is up to you. I like to leave mine pretty chunky, but I make sure to crush the sturdy cores of the tomatoes. Then I put the crushed tomatoes in a bowl and added a little olive oil and a pinch of salt, pepper and crushed red pepper.

Next I layered the sliced, toasted bread with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. Then I threw it all in the oven. I cooked it for a few minutes on 350° until the tomatoes were warmed through, and then I set the oven to broil to melt and brown the cheese. I usually do this with the oven door cracked, and I never walk away. Once they’re done, take them out and enjoy:

We got the basil from our garden, but we had to buy the tomatoes and the cheese. Next summer, when we produce some good heirlooms, I’ll make another batch of fresh mozzarella so that the whole meal is completely homemade. Maybe I’ll be making better bread by then.

We served it with some sopressata. The fresh mozzarella will only get better as it soaks up more of the balsamic vinegar. We’ve made this dish with our homemade mozzarella before, but we just can’t seem to make cheese that tastes as creamy as the expensive stuff. I think it’s because the milk we buy isn’t very sweet. Does anyone have any experience with this?

We had some chicken on hand, so we decided to try to merge Insalata Caprese salad with grilled chicken salad.

Insalata Caprese (which means ‘in the style of Capri’) is a plate with alternating pieces of fresh basil, mozzarella and tomatoes, and it’s often dressed with balsamic vinegar. Our tomatoes just went in the ground last week, but we had everything else on hand.

I marinated the chicken breasts for about 4 hours in balsamic vinegar, sprinkled them with salt, pepper and smoked Spanish paprika, and then stuffed them with our fresh herbs and homemade mozzarella. I tossed them on a charcoal grill with some hickory chips, and watched the cheese start to ooze out:

We had a head of romaine lettuce from the market, and we decided to grill the wedges. We cut them in half and sprinkled salt, pepper and olive oil on the cut sides. I threw them on the grill for about two minutes, or just long enough to sear the face and wilt the leaves a bit. As soon as we I pulled them off, I sprinkled Parmesan cheese on the charred faces:

Here’s how it turned out. I was fun to cut the lettuce and chicken into small pieces and eat it like a salad:

If I prepare this dish again, I’ll make a balsamic reduction to drizzle over the meal, and roast some fresh tomatoes to accompany the chicken.

Another way to do something like this would be to marinate the chicken breasts in Greek salad dressing, stuff them with chopped herbs, green olives and pepperoncini, and then grill the stuffed chicken with romaine wedges and sliced red onion. Then top it all with feta cheese while it’s still hot, and add a little more Greek dressing on top. That would be really good.

Getting your hands dirty is the key to good dough.

The recipe makes a very sticky dough that was hard to manage.  But after a while it came together:

Here she is stretching the dough.  Next time we'll probably cut it to make two crusts:

And here's our pizza with homemade crust, fresh mozzarella, puréed tomato, and dried basil from last season's garden.

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.

You add calcium chloride, citric acid and lipase powder to whole milk. It might sound unhealthy to add a bunch of chemicals, but you’re really just returning the milk to its natural, unprocessed state. Next, you heat the mixture to 88 degrees and add half of a rennet tablet.  This helps develop the curd and separate it from the whey:

You can use the leftover whey to make ricotta cheese, but that's for another day. Here I am pressing the last bits of whey out of the mixture:

This recipe allows you to use the microwave to help melt and consolidate the curd:

Next, you add a little salt and start kneading and stretching the cheese:

Here's the cheese we got from one gallon of milk. It’s about the size of an orange:

It ended up tasting more like string cheese than fresh mozzarella. I wasn't very happy with it, so I spent most of the next day working on this mozzarella recipe from Gourmet Magazine. The first steps are similar to what you saw above, except everything takes much, much longer.

Instead of melting the cheese in the microwave, you hang it in cheesecloth for three hours to let the whey drain off.  After that, you bring a pot of water to around 90 degrees and use it to temper the curds.  After a while, you get this:

These cheese balls were very difficult to pull together, but they came out even softer than the fresh mozzarella from the store. 

We decided the recipe from Gourmet was fantastic, but way too cumbersome.  Next time we'll stick to the Leener's recipe, but keep the kneading and stretching to a minimum.  And if we accidentally overwork it again, we'll just stretch it into a long coil and call it string cheese.

Who doesn't like string cheese?