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French Liasons: Rustic Tart with Beltane Farm Cheese
Our new blogger friend, Marie-Claude, otherwise known as Banette, writes mainly about breads and baked goods on her blog: http://www.bombance.net. Although she is French, she has worked in New York for almost 20 years, and currently divides her time between New York state and Connecticut. One of her recent blogs was about Beltane Farm, where she bought fresh chevre and made a Rustic Tart with Chevre, Rosemary and Lemon. We were not lucky enough to try it ourselves, but it looks delicious! Her blog is in French, so if you would like to brush up on your language skills, it is a great opportunity. If you don't speak French, just enjoy the photos, they are pretty self explanatory!
I love Turkish Food
I love Turkish breakfasts. Well, I love all Turkish food, but breakfast most of all. A typical Turkish breakfast consists of breads, olives, cheeses, jams, honeys, tomatoes and cucumbers. When I say jam, I mean rose petal and quince, and when I say honey, there are usually a variety of different floral honeys to choose from. Cheeses range from soft feta to hard Kasar. Turkish breakfasts are healthy and abundant with flavors. I remember being surprised the first time I traveled to Turkey, and saw vegetables (For all intents and purposes I am referring to tomato as a vegetable. Yes, I know it is a fruit!) at the breakfast buffet. I quickly adapted because I realized that eating savory foods was much healthier than the sugar-laden and subsequently sugary "sugar-free" junk food that is marketed to us as breakfast in the US. Also, it was not hard to conform to a new way of eating with such abundant beauty.
I will also never forget when I fell in love with Simit, a hollow, circular bread covered in sesame seeds, which is sold all over the country. I have never been a big bagel fan, which is probably the closest comparison to this type of bread. However, unlike bagels, simit is less chewy and dense, and is more "bread-y". Simits tend to be big, so most people will cut it into quarters and include parts in the bread basket. I ate my first simit with my friend Harika. She taught me to pair it with a soft cheese and drink Ayran (a yogurt drink) along with it. I will never forget that breakfast on the Bagdat Caddesi on the Asian side of Istanbul.
Turkish food is all about combining contrasting textures and flavors. Cheese is oven served with tomatoes and watermelon, as their salty and soft vs slightly sweet and crisp textures contrast in a way that combines beautifully. Another breakfast treat that we feature on the show this week is Tahin Pekmez, which is tahini (tahin in Turkish) with pekmez (a molasses made from grapes or carob). The nutty flavor of the tahin contrasts with the sweetness of the pekmez. This summer I traveled to Turkey again, and enjoyed this combination for the first time. Even though it was my third time in Turkey, I was discovering new things every day. Instead of pekmez, I would drizzle honey over the tahin on top of my bread. Side note: At dinner one night we had fried eggplant with tahin pekmez on top. The flavor combination does not have to be limited to just breakfast!
Another favorite breakfast food was poca, which I learned to make from my friend's housekeeper, Nur. Poca (pronounced poh-ja), are buttery breads filled with feta and herbs. When I caught her in the kitchen one morning throwing all of the ingredients together, using coffee cups and her hand to measure, I went in and estimated everything she was doing. One Turkish coffee cup I estimated to be 1/4 cup. When I returned to New York, poca was one of the first things I made.
My friend Ria and I have discussed breakfast in great detail. She lived in Turkey for some time and loves the food there as well. It is her theory that our obesity problem would be greatly reduced by making savory breakfasts mandatory. I have to agree with her. Imagine if we ate the Turkish way, and had tomatoes and cucumbers for breakfast, with a little bit of salty cheese and some freshly baked bread. How does that compare to yogurts with 18 grams of sugar per container and packaged cereals with ingredients we can't even pronounce? Or fried donuts covered in glaze?
Just some Turkish food for thought.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
By Sophia Brittan
Last week I invited some friends over for a local cheese tasting to be accompanied by Eve’s Cidery Bittersweet Cider. I selected six cheeses from different farms around the Northeast. We tried Lively Run Goat Dairy’s Cayuga Blue, Bobolink’s Aged Cheddar, Patches of Star’s Lightly Salted Fresh Chèvre, Twig Farm’s Goat Tomme, and 3 Corner Field Farm’s Frère Fumant and Shushan Snow. The point of the cheese tasting was to delve more in depth into the flavors of the artesian cheeses of our region, exploring their textures and variations according to where they are from. My friends are fromage fanatics, so it was great to have their seasoned palates tasting along with me. The end result was that we got to know 6 cheeses that we might not have tried before. And the cheeses that we had tried, we explored their flavors more closely. To accompany the cheeses I served Bread Alone’s Multigrain Baguette (a new favorite), along with fresh slices of Golden Russet apples, Concord grapes, husk cherries, quince compote, and almonds mixed with honey. I have to say that I might have a thing or two to learn about putting together a cheese plate, as it could have been a bit more diverse- so I look forward to learning even more about that part of it.
We set it up so that everyone wrote notes on the same sheet for each cheese. We tried each cheese with the different accompaniments and the cider. We were open about sharing notes and talking about why or why not we liked the different cheeses. The chèvre was well liked- it was mild and creamy, almost as if it were a cream cheese/chèvre. The next mildest was definitely the Goat Tomme. It went well with all of the accompaniments, and seemed like a nice cheese that would incorporate well with fall recipes. The Cayuga Blue was one of the favorites. The “blue” flavor does not dominate the palate, and has a medium sharpness that gives it great flavor without being too strong. Even those among us who don’t like blue cheese easily fell in love. The Bobolink Aged Cheddar was an interesting one. Everyone agreed that it was “really sharp”, and had a strong aftertaste, but loved the way it paired with the fruit and the cider. The last two were the Fumant and the Shushan Snow. The Frère Fumant was applauded all around. It has a great smoked flavor, similar to the type of Spanish Basque cheese it takes after. However, the Shushan Snow was the all around winner. People said it was one of the best cheeses they had ever tasted. They loved its “incredible creaminess” and subtle taste. It did not go well with the grapes at all, but was a great match for the cider.
The cheese tasting was a great way to spend the afternoon together. We are not professional cheese-tasters or conosseurs of any high degree, but we love cheese. It was great to introduce my friends to more regional cheeses and to learn what they liked and disliked. I encourage you all to buy a bunch of cheeses and some cider and do your own tasting as well.
Here are short descriptions of the cheeses and the farms where they come from:
Lively Run Goat Dairy is a family farm located in Interlaken, NY, in the heart of the Finger Lakes. Their Cayuga Blue is a great blue cheese for beginners to try, as the texture is perfectly creamy, and the blue does not dominate the flavor.
Twig Farm is a goat dairy farm located in West Cornwall, VT. They specialize in raw aged goats milk cheeses using traditional methods and equipment. Their Tomme is aged for 80 days, and is semi-hard in texture.
Bobolink Dairy produces 100% grass-fed, raw cow’s milk cheeses in New Jersey. Their cheeses are strong and robust. The cheddar was considered “really sharp”, and paired very well with all of the accompaniments.
Patches of Star is another goat dairy located in Nazareth, PA. They have fresh chevres, fetas, and halloumi cheese, as well as yogurts.
3 Corner Field Farm is a Sheep Dairy located in Northeastern New York, near the Vermont Border in the Green Mountains. They practice organic farming methods, and the sheep feed on grass, clover, and alfalfa exclusively.
A Local Cheese Tasting with Eve's Cidery
The other day I had a few girlfriends over for some local cheeses that I picked up from Murray's Cheese and the Greenmarket. I was going to only have five cheeses, but then I got to the 3 Corner Field Farm booth at Union Square's Saturday market. Emma had told me about their smoked cheese, which was a must in the cheese plate. Then the woman convinced me to try the Shushan Snow. That was the beginning of the end. I fell head over heels, crazy in love with this creamy dreamy cheese. It has the form and consistency similar to a brie, but the flavor is so light and creamy that it would never be confused with anything but itself. I could not have possibly returned home without the Shushan Snow, so the cheese tasting became six instead of the perfect number of five. I served all of the cheeses with a quince compote and Conchord grapes. This is just a preview of the whole event; I will be putting up more information about the tasting tomorrow!
Sophia made us dinner...
Sophia and I are in upstate NY. Yesterday we were filming at Eve's Cidery in Ithaca-- we will be posting the video we made with Ezra, Autumn and James of Eve's Cidery the last week in September so stay tuned! Now we're in Cooperstown, we're going to spend the weekend canning and preserving foods, next week we are participating in The Last Supper, a multimedia arts show in Brooklyn on September 20th. We are doing a food installation- a recreation of a food pantry so we are busy bees this weekend getting prepared for the show.
Since we've been filming for the past few days I had a lot of editing to catch up on so that was most of the evening. As I was editing away in the kitchen, Sophia was cooking us a tasty dinner-- she was testing a recipe we will be posting next week, a low-sodium soup for Senator Harkin.
This is how we like to work, cozily traveling, good company, good food- cooking and creating as we go.
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