Mixed Berry Three Cheese Blintzes

To download a cookbook-style copy of the recipe for Mixed Berry Three Cheese Blintzes, click HERE.

Blintzes – eastern Europe’s simple and delicious version of a crepe – are perfect for breakfast, a light lunch, or dessert. This week’s recipe, Mixed Berry Three Cheese Blintzes, takes an early Kissing the Cook post for blintzes and reworks it in a new – and, I think, better - way.

Although fruit fillings are often used, the classic blintz is filled with a sweet cheese mixture made with cream cheese and either farmer cheese, cottage cheese or, in more modern versions, ricotta. This recipe combines both fruit and cheese. For the syrup topping and the fruit in the filling, I used a blend of fresh strawberries and fresh blueberries. For the cheese filling, to be consistent with the blintz’ eastern European origins, I combined farmer cheese (which has a consistency similar to ricotta) with the cream cheese and cottage cheese. If you don’t have farmer cheese available, or otherwise prefer not to use it, no need to worry; my grandmother, originally from Kiev, used cream cheese and cottage cheese in her blintzes.

A Cook’s Note before we begin:

• A significant difference between this recipe and typical blintz preparations is that blintzes are normally cooked twice: once to cook the crepe, and once to fry or bake the filled blintz to brown the outside and cook the eggs in the filling. In my version, there are no eggs in the filling; except for the warmed mixed-berry syrup on top, the blintzes are served cold or room temperature instead of fried or baked. It’s an unusual way to serve a blintz, but having grown up eating the ones my grandmother made this way, I can assure you it can work wonderfully. (It’s still possible to fry or bake them if that’s what you prefer.)

The following recipe makes about 10 blintzes. Here’s what you’ll need:

For the crepes: 1 cup AP flour; ¼ tsp salt; 2 Tbsp melted butter substitute; 2 egg-substitute eggs; 1-1/2 cups skim milk; and butter substitute or oil for cooking crepes

For the cheese filling: ½ pound farmer cheese; 1 cup low fat cottage cheese; 8 ounces low fat cream cheese, softened; 3/8 cup sugar; 1/8 tsp cinnamon; 1/4 tsp salt

For the fruit syrup and filling:

1 cup granulated sugar; juice of ½ lemon; ½ teaspoon salt; pinch ground nutmeg; 1 lb. fresh strawberries, hulled and quartered; 1 cup fresh blueberries; confectioner’s sugar for garnish

First, we’ll make the crepe batter:

Combine flour and salt in a bowl, and form a well. Pour the egg-substitute eggs and skim milk into the well. Add the melted butter substitute and mix into the other liquids in the well.

Once the liquid ingredients in the well are combined, gradually mix in the dry ingredients. The result should be a thick batter with the consistency of heavy cream.  Cover with plastic wrap and let rest in the refrigerator for 1-2 hours.

While the crepe batter is resting, prepare the cheese filling and mixed berry syrup and filling as follows. To make the cheese filling:

Put all the filling ingredients into a bowl and mix until well combined and fairly smooth. Refrigerate until needed.

To prepare the syrup topping and fruit filling:

Place a small glass plate in the freezer and put the granulated sugar and the lemon juice into a saucepan. Stir the mixture in the saucepan until the sugar is dissolved.

Add the salt, nutmeg and strawberries and turn the heat on very low. Cook until the strawberries are softened but not mushy, about 10 minutes.

Add the blueberries and cook until softened, about another 10 minutes.

Strain the fruit mixture, retaining the liquid. Set the fruit aside to cool.

Return the liquid to the saucepan. Simmer the liquid until a few drops cooled on the frozen plate have a syrup consistency. Set aside till needed.

While the cooked fruit is cooling, cook the crepes as follows:

Heat a large non-stick pan over medium heat; remove the pan from the heat and melt about 1 tsp of butter substitute. Add about ¼ cup of batter, swirl around to cover the surface of the pan, and put it back on the heat.

When the crepe is lightly browned on the bottom and firm enough to be flipped (usually about one to 1-1/2 minutes, but keep an eye on it), turn or flip the crepe and cook on the opposite side till it has the desired brownness.

Stack the crepes on a plate, covered with a clean towel to keep from drying out. Repeat the above steps for each crepe, rebuttering the pan as needed.

Working one at a time, prepare the blintzes as follows:

Lay a crepe out flat. Put 1/4 cup of cheese filling half-way between the center-line and edge nearest you.

Place a little of the mixed berry mixture on top of the cheese.

Fold the crepe as you would a burrito. First, fold the edge nearest you over the filling.

Fold in the left and right sides.

Roll the crepe away from you to form the blintz.

To serve:

While warming the reserved mixed berry syrup, sprinkle some confectioner’s sugar on a plate as a garnish.

Place one or two blintzes on the plate, and pour a little of the syrup on top.

To download a cookbook-style copy of the recipe for Mixed Berry Three Cheese Blintzes, click HERE.

Hope you enjoy the comfort of this very special dish! And please visit again next week. Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Stuffed Porcupines

Hopefully, no one reading this will be disappointed to find that enjoying stuffed porcupines does not require stalking small game with a shotgun in some deserted wooded area. The stuffed porcupines to which this week’s entry refers are actually tasty cheese-stuffed rice-infused meatballs from the American south.

 

Though this version takes a few liberties with the original, the origin of this recipe is a wonderful treasure with which I was fortunate to be entrusted: a decades-old notebook of recipes kept by my wife’s grandmother back in Meridian, a small town just outside Waco in the sovereign nation of Texas. Written in pencil on the blissfully food-stained pages of a Waco School System tablet notebook, the recipes have authentic warmth that is not taught in any institute of higher culinary learning or on any cable network. These are more than instructions for preparing a certain dish; each is a doorway leading back many years and across hundreds of miles, to the kind of place you know existed in color but that you think of in black-and-white anyway. A place where today’s eager cook gets to mix and measure in joyful earnest alongside people conventional wisdom foolishly says have been gone a long time.

This is the first of what will be several recipes from my wife’s “Grandma Texas.” It is a great pleasure to share them, and an even greater privilege to cook them.

To make about 14 one-and-a-half-inch meatballs, start by preheating the oven to 350 degrees. While it’s preheating, cut about a 2 ounce block of sharp cheddar cheese into ½” cubes, and set the cubes aside. (You’ll need one cube per meatball.) Then, get a large bowl and prepare the meat for the meatballs by combining (by hand) 1 pound of ground turkey (maximum 90% lean), 1/3 cup uncooked rice, 1 egg-substitute egg, 2 tablespoons of diced shallots, ¾ teaspoon dried thyme, a pinch of dried sage, 1 teaspoon of salt, and some fresh ground black pepper. Mix the ingredients thoroughly but don’t overwork the mixture.

Divide the mixture into 1-1/2” diameter meatballs, stuff each with a ½” cube of sharp cheddar cheese, and close. (See the stuffing method below.) Bake the meatballs on a parchment-covered baking sheet for about 50 minutes.

Stuffing method: Flatten each meatball, press a cheese cube into the center, and bring the sides of the flattened meatball up around the cube. Smooth the ball with your fingertips, and roll them gently in your palms to make them round again. Repeat for each meatball.

While the meatballs are baking, heat in a large saucepan 2-quarts of V-8 juice combined with 2 teaspoons of chili powder. (The liquid should be deep enough to cover the meatballs when added.) After baking the meatballs, add them to the liquid, cover, bring back to a boil, and then lower to a simmer for about 10 minutes. After that, set the meatballs aside while you use the liquid to make the sauce as described below.

To make the sauce, separate 1 cup of the hot liquid and add ½ cup of all-purpose flour to it, mixing until combined and there are no clumps of flour. (I know we’re all usually taught to do this with cold liquid. I did it with the hot liquid, and it worked. Go figure.) Add 1 large chopped pepper to the liquid in the pot, bring it back to a boil, stir in the flour mixture, and cook to the desired sauce thickness. (I recommend cooking it down to half.)

Now all you need to do is top the meatballs with the sauce and some grated cheddar cheese, serve it up, and accept the gratitude of a well-fed family or guests! (I’ve found this is especially good served over rice mixed with finely-diced green or red bell pepper and seasoned with Adobo.)

In the photo, you’ll see the porcupines and rice being served with green bean bundles wrapped in turkey bacon. These are from a Paula Deen recipe you’ll find on the Food Network web site.

Enjoy this delicious – and very special – dish. As always, if you’d like a notebook-ready cookbook-style version of this recipe, just let me know and I’ll send it along.

That’s it for this week, y’all. Till next time, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Quiche Me, Baby

Cooking ideas can come from some pretty unexpected places. You just have to be ready. More on that in a moment.

Since recipes must be called something. I decided to name this week's offering, "Trinity Quiche," in honor of its main vegetable component, Louisiana's famed “trinity” of celery, onions and peppers. (It also has mushrooms. I think everyone who cooks has certain ingredients that seem to find their way into almost every recipe. For me it's mushrooms, for their nice taste, peculiar sort-of-soft-and-sort-of-crunchy texture, and their comically off-balance appearance that makes them the culinary world's version of penguins or, if you like, giraffes.) Adding to the "three" concept are its three cheeses which, combined, get along with each other wonderfully.

One oddity you'll find in this recipe is that the milk usually used in making quiche is replaced by a mixture of ingredients you'll probably recognize as a pancake batter. Here's where getting ideas from unexpected places comes in. Some years back I was looking for a way to improve the texture of the quiche filling I was using in those days. While dining at IHOP, I had an “aha!” moment when I read on the menu that they make their scrambled eggs fluffy by mixing in pancake batter. I tried that idea in the quiche filling and the rest, while not history, did give it the texture I'd been looking for.

Of course, if you prefer other combinations of vegetables, or different cheeses, great! One of the real beauties of quiche is that there's a lot of room to improvise and experiment. If there's something in your pantry, refrigerator or freezer you feel like making part of your quiche, go for it!

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees and blind bake a 9” pie crust. (If you’ve never baked a pie or quiche and aren’t sure how to blind bake a crust, just let me know and I’ll describe what to do. It’s basically getting the unfilled crust to a partially baked state (or, for a refrigerator pie, a fully baked state), then adding the filling and finishing the pie or quiche.) Prepare the other ingredients below during the blind baking, looking in on the crust now and then to prevent overcooking. When it is firm and starting to get “crusty,” take it out of the oven, use a brush to apply an egg wash made from one egg and one tablespoon of water, and set it aside.

While the crust is blind baking, sauté about 1-1/2 cups of mixed chopped celery, chopped pepper, julienned onion, and mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper to taste, but if you're using the mushrooms hold off adding the salt till you're almost done; mushrooms have a high water content and adding the salt early draws some of that water out and affects the final texture of the mushrooms. When the vegetables are cooked (but still have a firm texture), place them in a colander and rinse them well with cold water. This stops the cooking, and cools the vegetables so they won't prematurely cook the eggs in the filling when you mix everything together later. Set them aside.

Prepare the “pancake batter” by combining 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, 1-1/4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1-1/2 tablespoons sugar, 1 egg-substitute egg,  5 ounces skim milk, and 1-1/2 tablespoons of melted butter substitute. Whisk until they form a batter.

In a large bowl, combine ¼ cup grated Swiss cheese, ¼ cup grated sharp cheddar cheese, 1/8 cup crumbled goat cheese, 3 egg substitute eggs, ½ cup skim milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and a pinch of fresh ground black pepper.  Add the cooked vegetables and the batter, whisk until combined, and fill the blind-baked crust.

Bake the quiche at 425 for 15 minutes. During this time, partially cook 2 slices of turkey bacon. (For example, if the 2 slices should be microwaved for two minutes to be fully cooked, microwave them for about one minute. They'll cook more later when you finish baking the quiche.) When the bacon slices are done, cut them into small pieces.

Reduce the oven temperature to 300.  Remove the quiche from the oven, and sprinkle the bacon pieces over the surface. By now the surface of the quiche filling should be firm enough so that the bacon pieces will stay on top without sinking.  Return the quiche to the 300 degree oven and cook for 30-35 minutes, until a knife inserted half-way between center and the edge comes out clean.  Let the quiche stand 10 minutes before serving. A salad or cup of tomato soup on the side goes very well with this.

As an added bonus, if you find you have some filling mix left over after making the quiche, I recommend saving it to make one of the best omelettes you'll ever have. And one of the easiest, since everything's already mixed in.

If you would like a notebook-ready, cookbook-style version of Trinity Quiche or any other recipe on this site, just let me know and I’ll get it right out to you. Ditto for any questions you may have about anything I’ve written that you'd like more information about.

See you next week! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

The Raviolo and I

Raviolo: a word so obscure, even Microsoft Word's spell-checking software doesn’t recognize it. Its better know plural, of course, is ravioli. By either name, though, this wonderful cheesy-stuffed pasta pillow is not only delicious to eat; it’s also easy and fun to make. If you’ve never made it (or any other fresh pasta) before, I invite you to try now; you’re in for a real treat, not to mention a real sense of accomplishment once you’ve seen and tasted what you made. And you won’t need a pasta machine. (I didn’t even own one until earlier this week, but that story’s a future post.)

My introduction to home-made ravioli was a pasta class I took several years ago at the culinary arts school of a local community college.  The pasta chef teaching the course excitedly brought out the school’s brand new restaurant-grade pasta machine, an impressive multi-gadgeted electric device only about the size of a household toaster but costing a couple of thousand dollars. Or at least it was impressive until the machine started shutting down from the motor overheating every time someone tried to use it. A few in the class decided to stay with it, enduring a continuous cycle of press, overheat, wait for it to cool down and then try turning it on again. I opted for the other type of pasta maker, the round wooden kind that never overheats or breaks down, also known as a rolling pin. That’s one of the most encouraging things about making pasta; people did it centuries before any of the fancy kitchen equipment we have today was invented.

Both the pasta dough and the filling are easy to make. The dough described follows a traditional recipe. The filling features Fontina cheese. I wasn’t familiar with it until recently, when I heard Bobby Flay make an off-handed remark on a Throwdown rerun about Fontina being one of the best cheeses there is. Once I heard that, I had to get some and find out what he was talking about. My first taste of its wonderful Italian aura immediately screamed ravioli.

The dough for about two dozen ravioli (more or less, depending on how big you make them) begins in a large bowl into which you put 2 cups of all-purpose flour and ½ teaspoon of salt. Mix them until they’re combined and then form a well in the middle of the flour-pile. Into the well, put three egg-substitute eggs (or, if you like, three real eggs), and a teaspoon of olive oil. Mix them together using your hand, first combining the wet ingredients with the inner-most part of the flour pile, and gradually working your way outward until all the flour is incorporated to form a dough.

[Before we go further, I must add the following remark. There’s a good chance you’ve seen someone make pasta dough as described above, except without the bowl; in other words, with the flour piled directly on the kitchen counter. That’s the most authentic way, but it’s hard to do with only two cups of flour without making a mess once you start mixing in the wet ingredients. If you really want to try it, I suggest waiting until you’re making at least a double-batch of dough.]

Knead the dough for four to five minutes until it’s smooth and elastic, flouring your work surface as necessary during the kneading. After kneading, cut the dough ball into quarters. Wrap each quarter in plastic wrap and let them rest for 20 minutes while you mix the filling.

The filling, though delicious, couldn't be simpler to make.

Just put the following ingredients into a bowl and mix well until they’re combined: 1 cup of Ricotta cheese, 3/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese, 3/4 cup of fresh grated Fontina cheese, 1 egg-substitute egg, 2 tablespoons of fresh chopped parsley, ½ teaspoon of garlic powder, and salt and pepper to taste.

So now you’ve got your dough, and you’ve got your filling. Next stop: home-made ravioli!

Beginning with the first quarter-portion of dough (and keeping the remaining portions covered to keep them from drying out), roll the dough out on a well-floured surface into something as close as you can to a square about 12” on each side and 1/16” thick. Using a cooking cutter, cut out as many pieces as you can. (Remember, each raviolo will require two of the pieces.) Place a generous teaspoon of filling on the centers of half of the pieces; using your finger, coat around the edges of those pieces with egg-substitute (or a real egg, beaten) and place an identical dough shape on top. Press the edges down onto the egg with your finger, then with a fork to seal. Done right, the egg will keep the ravioli from opening up later in the cooking water.

And that's it! As you finish the ravioli, either put them aside (if you’re going to cook them right away), or place them on a baking sheet covered with parchment for freezing later. In either case, cover them to prevent drying out while you repeat the above with each of the remaining pasta quarters.

Remember that fresh pasta generally cooks faster than the packaged kind. The ravioli will generally cook in about 7 minutes, but check them often for doneness. If you choose instead to freeze them, put the ravioli in the freezer on the baking sheet first; once they’re frozen, put them together in a plastic bag for storage. (If you put the ravioli together in the bag before they’re frozen, they’ll likely stick together.)

Once the ravioli are cooked, all that remains is to top them off with your favorite sauce and some parmesan, and to enjoy the taste of fresh-made ravioli – and the fantastic feeling of having made them yourself!

For a cookbook style, notebook-ready copy of this or any other recipe from this site, just drop me a line and I’ll get it right off to you. (I also hope to get a video of this recipe finished and available on You-Tube soon...stay tuned!)

Thanks for visiting! Till next week, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)