Mango Cheesecake

For the longest time, I've had a recipe for mango cheesecake sandwiched between one of my recipe scrapbook pages. I'm not overly crazy about cheesecake (unless my mom makes it; she has a really good non-heavy cheesecake recipe), but the bright yellow color caught my eye. I thus clipped the recipe and added it to my ever-growing pile of to-try-someday-when-the-inspiration-hits recipes.

Pretty though the yellow hue may be, it sat in my recipe pile for a few years for a variety of reasons.
First, the recipe is a Nigella Lawson recipe from the NYT, which typically means that the recipe is very involved. (It was. More on this later.)

Second, her recipes typically call for a lot of butter and sugar (It did.), and not that there's anything wrong with that, but to assuage my guilty conscience, it often means modifying her recipes, which takes a few attempts. I'm not sure I like cheesecake that much to want to try multiple renditions before I declare it edible.

Third, as I mentioned, I'm not overly crazy about cheesecake. Thus, I can't just make this when I'm having people over. I need a party or something to bring it to, so I don't have too many leftovers. (Cheesecake also doesn't freeze well.)

But on this weekend was hot, and I was going to a barbecue birthday celebration in Berkeley, and when I flipped through my recipe pile in search of inspiration, the brilliantly yellow-hued cheesecake jumped out at me. Well, not literally, but still, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try this dessert.

My first mistake was grossly underestimating the amount of cream cheese I needed. I don't really like cream cheese much, so I hardly ever buy it, unless a recipe calls for it. The recipe calls for 1.5 pounds of cream cheese. I thought one package of cream cheese was one pound, so I bought two, thinking I'd have half a container left over. Wrong. I ended up needing another package. That is three packages of cream cheese. More cream cheese than I've bought in the past ten years, mind you. Perhaps this was reason number 4 for not having tried this recipe before.

The graham cracker crust called for a stick of butter. I looked at the 3 packages of cream cheese appallingly and made my first recipe modification. I used a WF whole grain graham cracker recipe, which called for 2 tbsp of butter total and worked perfectly fine as a graham cracker crust.

The recipe calls for a cup of sugar. Second recipe modification: I cut that as well-- but since I was taking it to a barbecue where others were eating it, I didn't cut it as much as I would have were I making this for myself.

The recipe is straightforward enough. (But still very time consuming.) First you make the graham cracker crust, then puree mangoes, mix with the cream cheese (all 3 packages of it), sugar, and 6 eggs. Then it calls for baking it in a water bath for about 2 hours. I was a little skeptical about this, b/c I don't remember my mom ever baking cheesecake in a water bath. Plus, 2 hours of oven time in the heat of summer was just a very long time. Ah well, at this point, I was committed.

2 hours later, the cake came out beautifully. I really wanted to try a sliver to make sure it was fully cooked and also make sure it was edible, but it probably would've looked odd to bring a cheesecake with a gaping hole in it.

The verdict? Well, let me start with a picture of it. It came out looking very impressive and very pretty. Here it is garnished with raspberries. (The raspberries was C's idea.)

Despite the many compliments I received on it, I think I was more impressed with its looks than its taste. I did like it better than a typical cheesecake. It turns out that the water bath steams the cheesecake, which makes it seem deceivingly fluffier/lighter, and also I think helped prevent cracks, which made the above photo op possible.

The mango taste was very subtle-- in fact a little too subtle, for all the time I spent pureeing mangoes.
For the amount of time it took, I wasn't overly wowed by the taste. For this reason, I don't think it is a practical all-purpose or weekday (or even weekend) dessert. However, it does make a good crowd dessert. It has the mango-unusualness factor. It is also very photogenic. It might make a very good alternative to your quotidian pumpkin pie at a thanksgiving gathering.

In the end, I ended up keeping the recipe precisely for that reason.

Foolproof pudding with a few modifications

A few weeks ago, I clipped out a recipe that I saw in the NYT, b/c the title caught my eye: "Foolproof pudding".

Now I am all for foolproof, since I seem to have a knack for mangling the simplest of recipes. But it gets even better. The author promises the dessert will take no more than 20 minutes, and it calls for a vanilla bean. A foolproof dessert that takes 20 minutes to make and calls for only 4 ingredients? Who wouldn't want to try making such a dessert? Plus other than the lack of fresh fruit, it sounded like a very quintessentially summery-sounding dessert.

I bought all of the requisite ingredients (whole milk and a vanilla bean, since I already had the sugar and corn starch and salt) last weekend and set out to make it sometime this week.

Unfortunately, I had a little mishap w/ the milk expiring before I ever got around to making the dessert, but undeterred, I got another container of milk.

The recipe calls for 2.5 cups of whole milk or half-and-half and 2/3 cups of sugar. It wasn't quite the appalling 1 cup of sugar that I often see in recipes, but the sugar content still seemed a tad high, so I cut it to 1/2 cup, which granted, isn't a whole lot less than 2/3 cup.

Well, after mixing the sugar, milk and vanilla bean in a saucepan for a bit and tasting it, I decided that even with this slight reduction, it was still too cloyingly sweet for my tastes. What is it w/ recipes and their annoying penchant to overestimate the amount of sugar one needs to put in a recipe? Anyway, I ended up dumping the entire carton of milk--which btw, is twice the amount of milk that the recipe originally calls for--into the saucepan. The result?

Not counting the cooling time, the dessert did really only take about 20 minutes to make. I was a little skeptical about the corn-starch overpowering the delicate flavors of the vanilla, which it did a little when it was hot, but when cooled, the corn-starchiness disappeared.

The end product lived up to my expectations. It was simple to make, called for minimal ingredients, and tasted yummy. I would still cut the sugar even more, perhaps, if I were making it for myself (especially if I plan to have it as part of breakfast as I did today. . .), but it came out quite well, otherwise, and looked cool, bespeckled with vanilla bean specks.

The recipe calls for either vanilla bean or vanilla extract, but if you are like me and get excited at the sight of real vanilla bean specks, it is well worth the $3 or $4 per vanilla bean pod to splurge for the real thing. I mean, look at how beautiful the specks look amid the pristine white surface:
On the other hand, if you decide to go for option b. and turn it into a chocolate pudding (by adding a few finely chopped up shards of chocolate to your liking), then don't bother with the vanilla bean. Vanilla extract will suffice.

I discovered that it makes a good weekend "almost breakfast" item (hey, the milk has protein!). I think this one is going in my dessert scrap book.

Figs and Tarragon

Where did I get the title of my blog? From this divine combination.

It's such a simple combo, but truly divine. Just figs. And tarragon. That's it. You can grill the figs if you want, for an added bonus, but just plain will do the trick.

My New Favorite Bread

It is not exactly bread-baking season (especially given that I live on a second floor apartment where it gets sweltering in the summer), but I had been fixated on the idea of eating an orange rye bread for a while, so on Saturday evening, when the temperature seemed deceptively cool (outside), I decided to whip out my Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book and give their orange-rye recipe a try.

I've had this wonderful cookbook for years, and as with many cookbooks, I have my stock favorites. I tend to make probably the same 10 recipes over and over again, while there are others that I have yet to make. In fact, I could probably plot a nicely skewed bell curve of the frequency with which I make the various breads in this cookbook.

I made the orange-rye a while back, precisely to break this habit/skewed bell curve pattern and ended up liking the bread and wondering why I hadn't made it all of these years.

Thus, here I was at a too-late-to-start-making-bread hour poring over my Laurel's Bread Book, debating whether to go through with it and bake this bread that I had been fixating over for the past two weeks.
However, while pondering over this and resolving to make the bread after all, another recipe for a honey-spiced rye on the opposite page caught my eye. I compared the ingredients and decided that the latter had more interesting stuff (honey, almonds, lots of interesting spices, orange rind, as opposed to just orange rind and honey for the orange-rye recipe), and made that instead. It calls for a 1/2 cup of almonds, but since I didn't have enough almonds, I also added toasted hazelnuts to the mix.

It called for a mere "pinch" of anise seed, but I added 1 tsp of caraway seed. (The next time I make it, I plan to increase this by another teaspoon.)

The other modification I made to the original recipe was to chop up slightly chunkier bits of orange peel (boil or soak in hot water to slightly soften) than the recipe called for.

Unfortunately, I didn't put it in the oven till 11-ish, so I didn't get to try it till the following morning, but I liked it so much, I think I must've devoured a third of the loaf in just a day.

For the time being, I've dubbed it my new favorite bread. Well, ok, favorite "quick" bread.

The quintessential summer salad I

I have a feeling I will be posting about many quintessential summer salads, and hence the need for the modifier, "I". . ..

About a year ago, a woman brought a wonderfully yummy savory watermelon salad to a potluck. The salad had watermelon chunks, some white thing that tasted like bland feta cheese, but had a good mouth feel and went really well with the other things in this salad, and toasted pine nuts. I found myself coming back for more and more.

I found my friend later that evening and asked her for the recipe. I also asked her what the mysterious white things were. Turns out the recipe is on epicurious, and the white thing is ricotta salata.

Here is the recipe. Note how few items the recipe calls for. Aside from the salad dressing (oil, lime, basil), it calls for just three items.

I have been making this recipe weekly for the past few weeks. I usually cut the watermelon into cubes and let it sit in a colander for a day or two in the fridge to sap out the moisture, as the salad tends to otherwise get soggy. I also add very little salad dressing and prefer to add it as I eat it, rather than pour it all at once. Actually, you could even eat this salad w/o the dressing.

The melange of the different flavors--the toasted nutty taste of the pine nuts, the succulent sweetness of the watermelon, and the firm texture of the cheese--and the slight tartness that the lime vinaigrette imparts complement each other so well. It is also colorful to boot.

Did I mention it also takes 5 minutes to make and requires no oven use (except to toast the pine nuts), and thus is the perfect summer dish? In fact, it is salad, main dish, and dessert in one!

Today, I made this very salad with yellow watermelon instead of the usual red. I enjoyed the colors (and of course, the taste) just as much. Next week, I might get both red and yellow watermelon and mix the colors.

Attempting to Replicate Pizzaiolo's Salad

Although I would never make a great food blogger due to the fact that I often fail to remember to take photos when I go out to eat, I do like coming home and trying to reconstruct recipes of things that I tried elsewhere that I liked. Yes, I am a shameless idea-stealer in that regard.

For example, the other night, I attempted to recreate the yummy salad I had at Pizzaiolo where I interrogated my friend about his engagement status. Theirs was a faro salad; I made mine with hulled barley, but it came pretty close. Or perhaps I am flattering myself, but I liked the nutty taste and the combination of flavors that resulted.

I combined cooked hulled barley with fresh corn kernels, cherry tomatoes (the bigger ones chopped in half so the juices mix), toasted pine nuts, dressed it with olive oil and vinegar, then sprinkled shaved pecorino cheese over this, and put all this on a bed of arugula taken from my garden.

Voila.
The toasted pine nuts were my addition, but I have been putting toasted pine nuts in everything lately, and am convinced that they go well with everything, especially salad-type stuff.

Cherries in a savory dish

Cherries are finally in season! Hurray! Now that apples are about to go out of season, I need other easy, colorful and yummy things to make with seasonal ingredients. This cherry crostini recipe fits the bill.

This cherry crostini takes about 20 minutes to assemble (maybe more--I cheated, b/c I already had the cream cheese made and the watercress washed and chopped up), and 5 minutes to eat, but is fully worth it. It is a winning recipe from one of our iron chef parties.

Need:
spreadable cream cheese (low or fully fatted)
dill
finely chopped walnuts
thinly sliced slightly stale (or toasted) baguette
watercress
chopped cherries

You mix the cream cheese with dill and walnuts (to taste), then spread a thin layer of this over the slightly stale baguette, then put watercress on top, and then top with cherries. I used brooks cherries in this photo, but you can use any kind, really. I also like them with rainiers. Make sure you admire the vibrant colors before you eat. Oh, and if you're a slob like me, make sure you are not wearing white when you eat this.

It probably sounds weird to combine dill with cherries, but I found that the combination of the strongly flavored dill, the nutty walnuts, the bitter watercress and the sweet cherries works really well.

Bon appetit!