This Somerdale Red Les tastes like a fairly mature Red Les, with a nice tang. It appears to be a farmhouse version with the telltale cloth marks on the rind. Farmhouse makers will mature it in cloth, the old way, to allow better flavour development says Wikipedia.  And whoever wrote that must know, being British and spelling flavor “flavour”.

This Red Les is a cheese that I think would go very nicely with a beer — not too dark of a beer, you want something to contrast with the light, nutty taste of the cheese. Maybe a pint or two of lager and a packet of crisps with it.

The Somerdale Red Leicester is $19.99/lb at WF. Very lovely, I give it four curds!

Doux De Montagne is mysterious!  It’s a semi-soft cheese with a beautiful dark red, almost mahogany rind.  I like her rind.  That sounds rather dirty, doesn’t it?  :-)  But it’s a good solid rind, not one of those Am-I-supposed-to-eat-it-or-not-rinds.

Doux [You can call her Doux after you've gotten to know her.  But you might want to address her as Ms. De Montagne at first. ] has a very subtle smell, but when it’s in your mouth – it’s like a Charles Ives symphony of tastes.  It’s salty, tart, and very quietly, a subtle and creamy sweetness.  It’s a profound cheese.

The site http://iledefrancecheese.com/ has this to say about Doux De Montagne:

Ripened in the age-old tradition, Doux de Montagne ( Doo deh Mon-than-yeh) originates from the Monts du Velay region of France. Its name, word by word, means “soft” or “smooth (doux)” and mountain (montagne). It is a delightful cheese, and matches well with ales, light sparkling wines, and champagne. Try it sliced on a sandwich, or as part of a cheese platter. It’s also great as a snack before or after dinner.

Doux de Montagne is $18.99/lb. at Whole Foods.  Heartily recommended!

For example, there is a pasta sauce made entirely of onions.  Ok, there is some salt, pepper, white wine and parsley.  And some freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano tossed in at the end.  But it’s indescribably good.  One of her most famous recipes is her roast chicken with lemon.  The ingredients are a whole chicken, salt, pepper and two lemons.  It is so good.  Trust me.

So I decided to try her recipe for boned stuffed chicken.  I have a particular fondness for roast chicken anyway.  So I looked over her directions for boning a chicken and gave it a whirl.  It was a total pain and as I recall, I gave myself a huge cut with the knife I was using.  But it tasted amazing.  And I’ve often thought about it, but didn’t want to go through another boning adventure.

One of the things my wife and I have been enjoying lately is the huge number of original The French Chef episodes that have appeared on Amazon.  If you have an Amazon Prime account (I make no money from Amazon, by the way, I’m just a fan) you can watch them for free.  So The French Chef  has lately been part of our standard rotation for the evening’s entertainment.

The other night, Julia boned a turkey on the show.  She decided to use a turkey because the size would make it easier for the TV audience to see what she was doing, but the techniques are the same for boning a turkey, chicken or duck.  She performed this with such alacrity and ease that I thought I’d have another go.  Whole chicken was on sale at Ralphs’ for 79 cents a pound, so if I totally messed it up, it wouldn’t be a big investment lost.

One of the other reasons I decided to give it a try was the hints that Julia gave. For example, use a very short knife.  This allows you the mobility you need when working in a tight space.  Another was to cut the backbone off at the outset.  I have some poultry shears, and I know how to use them, so this was no problem.  But imagine my surprise when I went back to Marcella’s instructions and found she had given the same hints, I had just glossed over them the first time.

So with short knife and poultry shears in hand, I set out to bone my bird.  That sounds kind of oddly lascivious somehow.  :-)

To my great surprise, the boning took only about 10-15 minutes, and was easy and straightforward.  No surprises or gotchas.  After boning it, you open it up, and put the stuffing in.  Marcella instructs you to sew up the bird.  I thought about it, but decided not to, because we don’t have an extra strong/big sewing needle.  I think ideally you’d want one of those that’s made for doing jeans or some heavy fabric like that.  So I went with Julia’s method, which is trussing the bird.

After trussing it, I roasted it pretty much as normal roast chicken.  I decided to keep the bones in the leg and wings, because it’s just not worth it trying to remove them — not really big enough to make stuffing them worthwhile, in my opinion.  Plus it makes it into kind of  a stealth boneless chicken.

As you can see, it pretty much looks like your garden variety roast chicken.  With some string marks.

One of the things that is so much fun about it being boned is the ease of carving it.  The legs and wings are no longer attached by bone.  They are hanging on by skin and good wishes.  So it’s a quick flick of the knife to get them off.  Then you can just slice your bird like it’s a meatloaf.

This is essentially Marcella’s recipe for the meat stuffing:
2/3 cup bread, cut into 1-inch cubes
1/2 cup milk
1 lb. ground beef
2 tablespoons parsley chopped very fine
1/2 teaspoon garlic chopped very fine
salt
pepper (fresh from the mill, naturally)
2/3 cup freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano

You soak the bread cubes in the milk for 15 or 20 minutes. Mix the other items together and then mix in the bread cubes after squeezing all the milk out of them that you can squeeze.

I think any stuffing recipe that you would normally use would work, doesn’t have to be meat. Though it makes for a really interesting contrast. And the leftovers made us some really good sandwiches for breakfast.

So I decided that it was time to take on a new challenge.  I’m not ending my Russian studies.  I feel like that is a permanent part of my life now, like music, cooking, etc.  I’ve been learning some Korean phrases here and there, and it’s been fun to go into a Korean restaurant and be able to say something in Korean.

But I’ve decided that Japanese might be more useful.  I love the original Japanese Iron Chef, and I’ve collected a lot of episodes in original Japanese without subtitles that were never shown on the Food Network.  For example, there was the ostrich battle.  Maybe they thought that American audiences couldn’t handle that.  The only glimpse of it that we got was the blonde lady in the opening sequence.  She’s an Australian chef named Gillian Hirst.  Hey, you can watch this episode on YouTube now!

Alright, so being able to watch and understand the Ostrich Battle probably isn’t all that urgent of a need, but it does sound like fun.  Plus my wife is willing to learn some Japanese with me, which is a big plus.  My son Jeff has absorbed a surprising amount of Japanese just from watching endless hours of anime.  My step-son Malcolm took Japanese in school.  And I have friends who speak Japanese fluently (Hi Yasmin!) and of course I LOVE Japanese food.   I love to eat it and to make it.  I love going to Japanese markets and it would be extremely helpful to know some Japanese when heading out to my local Nijiya Market.

So we’ll see how it goes.  So far, after 3 days of study , I’m blown away by how EASY the grammar is!  Perhaps that’s a reaction to studying Russian.  Russian grammar is legendary in its difficulty.  I’m not worried about how far I get with Japanese.  Anything counts.  The main thing is to learn and have fun.

-I was just giving you the port salute.
-I didn’t give you the port authority to do it.
-Quick! Submerge it in the port.
-Good. Now it’s a portfolio.
-Th-th-there’s a girl in here!
-We have a girl in every portfolio.

From The Firesign Theatre port gag from the rare live version of The Giant Rat of Sumatra. Listen to the audio sample above for a longer excerpt!

Today’s Cheese of the Week is, predictably, Safr Port Salut from Whole Foods. The Safr, according to Wikipedia, comes from it’s manufacturing history:

The cheese was originally invented by Trappist monks during the 19th century at the abbey of Notre Dame du Port du Salut in Entrammes[1]. The monks, many of whom had left France to escape persecution during the French revolution of 1789, learned cheese-making skills as a means of survival and brought those skills back with them upon their return in 1815. The name of their society, “Société Anonyme des Fermiers Réunis” (S.A.F.R.), later became their registered trademark, and is still printed on wheels of Port Salut cheese distributed today.

The Port Salut found at WF is lovely, everything a Port Salut should be: creamy, mild and subtle. The flavor starts out very slightly sweet and then after a few seconds the taste starts to bloom into a divergence of tastes, and then a slightly bitter after taste that is very pleasant.

It’s $11.99/lb at WF. Recommended.

Purple Sea Urchin

I think one of the things that I’ve always especially loved about Asian food is the abundance of fresh, seasonal vegetables, and the seemingly endless variety of things that Asians will eat.   Some of the stuff in it’s native form doesn’t even remotely look like food.  You have to picture a guy who sees a sea urchin with it’s hard shell and spikes and then  says to himself, “I’m going to crack that sucker open and whatever I find inside, I’m gonna eat”.

My friend and sushi mentor Nogy once said about me:  ”Bruce will eat anything that doesn’t eat him first”.  I considered that high praise indeed.

But I didn’t set out to talk about sushi.  I wanted to talk about Japanese Hot Pots.  Many people aren’t familiar with the term “hot pot”.  Some think it refers to the hot stone used for some Korean dishes like bibimbap, where the food literally cooks on the plate.  Those are delicious indeed, but not a hot pot.  If you’ve ever had the famous Japanese dish Sukiyaki, you’ve had a hot pot.  Basically — it’s a stew.  You put a bunch of stuff in a pot with some liquid, and pretty soon you’ve got dinner.

But it’s totally unlike a Western stew.  In Western cuisine, stews cook for a very long time, usually using a meat that requires slow cooking to properly break it down to make it tender, which imparts it’s flavor to the broth and the other items with which it is cooked.   Boeuf bourguignon is basically a beef stew, using wine and beef stock as liquid.

The broth of Japanese stews is usually very light, and made with any one of or a combination of water, miso, dashi stock, sake, etc.  Dashi is a very light broth made from seaweed and dried bonito (a tuna-like fish which is fresh in Spring) shavings.   Dashi is the “mother stock” of Japan and the base of miso soup,  clear broth, noodle broth, and other things.  Japanese cuisine would not be Japanese cuisine without dashi.

My 1st Donabe

But again, I digress.  I came here to talk about Donabe.

Donabe are clay pots, traditionally used to make hot pots, rice, and other neat stuff.  There has been quite a bit written lately about the use of clay pots.  Some of it I believe, some I don’t, but the proof is in the proverbial pudding, and the pudding is darn good.

There’s a lady in Echo Park, a section of Los Angeles just east of Hollywood who calls herself Mrs. Donabe.  Her name is Naoko Moore and she teaches Japanese cooking and also sells donabe from her home.  I gather she has a pretty healthy mail-order business for them.  She mentioned they are surprisingly popular in unexpected places, like Minnesota.  Unexpected because you don’t usually think of Minnesota being a mecca of Japanese culture — but it does get incredibly cold there, and when it’s cold, hot pots are very welcome indeed.

I decided to take a couple of her classes.  I knew full well that it would be almost impossible to resist purchasing a donabe if I allowed myself to get too close to one, but I decided it was worth the risk.  I took a couple of her classes earlier this month and walked away with some new Japanese recipes, a few new Japanese phrases and two lovely donabe.

In my own hot pots, I’ve been using a great book by Tadashi Ono (what a great name to have for a Japanese cook “Tadashi” — because even his name has dashi in it!! and Harris Salat called, mysteriously enough, Japanese Hot Pots.  Harris is a very cool guy, even answers questions via email and runs a great Japanese food site called “Japanese Food Report“.  One of the hot pots I made was their Salmon Hot Pot(Ishikari Nabe).  I had tried making some hot pots before I had a donabe with a Chinese clay pot I have, but the shape was wrong for what I wanted.  In the pictures of hot pots, the items are neatly arranged into sections, not mixed up like in a Western stew.  In order to make this happen, you need a pot that is more wide and a little more shallow.   You also need to learn some of the techniques that Tadashi and Harris teach you in their book.

My Salmon Hot Pot

For example, you need to “build” the hot pot.  You do this by laying down a foundation of stuff.  In the case of my Salmon Hot Pot, it was a foundation of onion slices, cabbage and potatoes.  Once you’ve laid the foundation, you can pour in your broth, which in this case was a mixture of dashi, shiro miso and mirin.   There are a bunch of types of miso.  Shiro miso is white miso, and the type of miso usually used in sushi bar miso soup.   Mirin is another “must have” ingredient for Japanese cooking.  It is often referred to as “sweet sake” or “sweet cooking sake”, but this is misleading.  Ono and Salat point out that mirin has nothing to do with sake, though it does contain alcohol.  So you can’t just take sake and put sugar in it and call it mirin.  :-)  I can buy mirin in the regular supermarket in LA, though it was harder to find when I first went looking for it in Boston’s Chinatown in the late 90′s.

So after you pour in your broth, you bring it to a boil and then let it simmer for a few minutes.  Then you uncover the pot and add other stuff.  The other stuff really is up to your personal taste.  In their recipe, they add tofu, harusame (dried yam noodles — yummy!), negi (Japanese long onion), enoki and shitake mushrooms.  Add these on top of the other ingredients, but be careful to arrange them so that they each are in a separate, neat bunch.  Cover and simmer for another 5 minutes.  Then you uncover the pot and add salmon slices and cook another 5 minutes or until the salmon is done.  It cooks *really* quickly when sliced thinly as you do for this dish.  Serve this with a bowl of rice, and you’ll have a table of happy people.

My Yakisoba

I did make one of Naoko’s recipes with my other donabe, which is a tagine-style one, which is known as Fukkura-san.  Since she has the recipe online on her site, I’ll quote it here.  This is her recipe for yakisoba.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons  sesame oil

1 clove  garlic, thinly sliced

3-4 leaves  cabbage, cut into strips

1/4 to 1/2 pound  shiitake mushrooms, sliced

3 servings of fresh Yakisoba or noodles for stir-fry (about 1 lb.), loosened by hands

2 tablespoons  sake

1 tablespoon soy sauce + 1.5 tablespoons oyster sauce

Salt and pepper

toppings such as bonito flakes, beni shoga (pickled ginger), chopped chives, karashi (Japanese mustard), optional

*You can make your own variations by adding different ingredients such as bean sprouts, pork, dried shrimp, etc.

Procedure

1.Heat the sesame oil in the skillet of Fukkura-san over medium-high heat.

2.Saute garlic until aromatic.  Add the cabbage and shiitake mushrooms, and stir-fry until for about 1 minute.

3.Add the yakisoba noodles on top of them and drizzle the sake all over the noodles.

4.Close the lid and let the ingredients cook over medium to medium-high heat for about 5 minutes.

5.Add the soy sauce and oyster sauce to the noodles, and toss all the ingredients.

6.Close the lid, turn off the heat, and let it steam for 2-3 minutes.

7.Season with salt and pepper if necessary.  Serve with your choice of toppings.

It is that simple.  And it came out *really* good.  :-)   So good that I couldn’t believe I made it.

I would heartily recommend the books of Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat.  I have their new book, The Japanese Grill, on my iPad.   And you can mail order donabe to your heart’s content from Naoko’s site.   Definitely check them out, they are really beautiful and it is a pleasure to cook with them.

Just like goat or sheep cheese, people’s reaction to blue cheese can be all over the map.  I opened up my package of cheese about 15 minutes ago here at my desk.   Minh, one of my co-workers said, in complete seriousness,  ”Oh, man!  Look at your shoes.  Somebody stepped in dog shit.”    He looked rather amused when I told him it was simply my blue cheese, and said, “Oh, well…I don’t eat cheese, so…”, and walked out of the room.  :-)

Wikipedia says about Bleu d’Auvergne:  ”Bleu d’Auvergne has a strong and pungent taste, but to a lesser extent than other blue cheeses; it is less salted, with a creamier and more buttery taste and a moister texture.”   I dunno, it’s pretty darn salty and pungent to me.  I like blue cheeses, so it’s ok, but to me it’s a little on the edgier side.

Bleu d’Auvergne is $13.99 at Whole Foods.  I don’t know if there is a NSFW (not safe for work) warning for smelly cheese, but if there is, then I guess it would have to apply to this one!

This week’s Cheese of the Week is one that looks as festive as it tastes.

At first I was a little shocked by the thought of adulterating a perfectly wonderful Wensleydale with stuff that in general I only like when it comes out of a can and remains can-shaped, albeit jiggly.

Most Americans so closely associate cranberries with Thanksgiving that many US Beatle fans couldn’t believe that John Lennon said “Cranberry sauce” at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever (and not the often quoted “I buried Paul”).  But of course that’s exactly what he said before it was made less intelligible by the reduction in the tape speed, done by George Martin to more closely match the speed and key of the first section.  But surely everyone knows that story by now.

“What’s wrong with Wensleydale?”, some of you Wallace and Gromit fans might be asking.  Well, I’ll tell you:  I don’t know.  It’s wonderful stuff.   This Wensleydale is a bit creamier than I remember from Wensleydales past, and sweeter.  I suspect that this is done to make it blend more easily with the cranberries.  If so, it’s a success!  It’s hard to step eating it, and tastes almost like cheesecake, it’s so luscious.

Definitely recommended.  It’s not something I would want as often as Long Clawson Cotswold, the cheese with the chives in, but it is a very lovely cheese in taste and appearance.

The Somerdale Wensleydale with Cranberry is $12.99/lb at Whole Foods.

Goat cheese probably isn’t for everyone, but I think everyone should try it at least once. I love goat meat too, though. There are some nice places in Korea-town in LA that specialize in goat. Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly particularly recommends Bulrocho Korean Restaurant.

The Mitica Drunken Goat is $16.99/lb. at Whole Foods.  The sign in the photo was taken at Trader Joe’s (not by me).  You can click on it to see it in it’s original Flickr feed, where credit is given to the artist.

This week’s cheese is Long Clawson Cotswold.  It’s just delightful from the get-go and British to the backbone, where ever a cheese keeps his backbone.   It’s a cow cheese, and is a lovely pale color — I’m sure real food writers have words to describe food colors better than say, “orange” for cheese.  It’s kind of a creamy light orange with beautiful flecks of green chives.  It gets the coloring from annatto, which is also used for coloring in other cheeses, such as  Cheddar, Gloucester cheese, Red Leicester, Gouda and Brie.  It has a wonderful creamy texture, lovely for spreading, except I don’t have any crackers.  Maybe I’ll bump into somebody doing a “Cracker of the Week” blog.

I’m not shilling for Whole Foods, by the way, they don’t need my help.  They just happen to be the nicest purveyor of cheese in my neighborhood.  The Long Clawson Cotswold is $15.99/lb. at WF.   The fruit is mango, strawberries and blueberries.  Some mangos were consumed in the process of producing this post.