Eggs Tarentaise in Butternut Squash

I'm crazy about soft-boiled eggs. I eat one just about every morning, which is how I got the idea to bake an egg inside the cavity of a butternut squash with a little bit of Tarentaise. Tarentaise is a sweet, nutty cheese from Spring Brook Hill Farm in Vermont, made by the same folks who produce Redding Raclette. 

Today on the Di Bruno Bros. blog, I write about this cheese and offer a recipe for Eggs Tarentaise. It involves a few steps, but it's a fairly easy and very eye-catching dish. Here are a few photos of the process. To see the recipe, click here.

Soup Cheese

I never grew up eating Pecorino, but this winter it’s become my go-to cheese to serve with winter soups. The nutty flavor of this quintessential Italian specialty comes from sheep’s milk, and because it’s a rich, fatty cheese, a few curls shaved onto a broth adds beautiful dimension.

This week on the Di Bruno Bros. blog, I touch on several different Pecs and offer a recipe for Swiss Chard Soup. Full disclosure: Twice a month, I freelance for Di Bruno Bros., one of my fave cheese shops in Philadelphia. I pick out a cheese to feature on their blog, and I run a wee teaser here. The money I earn from this venture supports my dairy habit.

Can the Cheese Ball Be Rebranded?

In the dairy world, a cheese ball has about as much class as a Mr. Softee cone rolled in colored jimmies. And yet, who doesn’t salivate at thought? If the cupcake can make a comeback, why shouldn’t the cheese ball rise again?

Over at Cheese and Champagne, my digital compatriots have thrown down a tauntlet. It’s called the Cheese Ball Invitational, and anyone with a blog can dip this challenge in peanuts and set the globe spinning.

Let’s do it. Let’s make cheese balls. But let’s do it with intention. Let’s make cheese balls of integrity!

This demands forethought. Before you resurrect a cheese ball, consider your audience – pick a worthy recipient, someone who has an appreciation for clashing boundaries. Then, embark on your mission. Make a serious face in the mirror and start inventing. Why not a cheese trapezoid? A fromage rhombus?

For my minor opus, I present…the Point Reyes Pine Cone.

Oh, yes, this is a cheese ball, but as you can see by its teardrop shape, this "gobbet of gunk" has arisen. Note how crushed gingersnaps in this recipe replace the salted-nut dermis. There’s room for interpretation here, too – as with all high art. Is it a pine cone, you might ask, or is it a forest creation by Andy Goldsworthy?

To raise the cheese ball out of its puddle, I felt I needed to lob it at a person of quality. My friend the Blue Cheese Brit seemed like an ideal recipient for my re-branding campaign. As you can see, he’s wearing an ascot. This is not your average cheese ball consumer.

Serve your guests some gin’n tonics, and the Point Reyes Pine Cone turns a stale party into beautiful havoc. Watch as guests bypass your beautiful cheese board to grab a crumb, a twig. 

The Point Reyes Pine Cone is the next generation cheese ball, friends. If we can’t save the planet, we can at least save the whipped dairy appetizer. Join me. Do it now.

The Point Reyes Pine Cone

16 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

¼ cup purple onion, minced

1 cup crumbled Point Reyes Blue Cheese

2 tablespoons fig jam

½ cup toasted walnuts, loosely broken

Freshly ground pepper

1 box Anna’s Ginger Thins

1. Mix cream cheese, onion, blue cheese, fig, jam, toasted walnuts, and ground pepper in a medium-sized bowl. Stir until well-mixed.

2. Pour the cheese mixture onto a large square of plastic wrap and form the glob into a ball. Refrigerate this little asteroid for an hour or more.

3. Use half of the ginger thins to make crumbs. You can use a food processor, or go old school: drop the cookies into a large Zip-loc and then use a wine bottle like a rolling pin.

4. When the naked cheese ball is cold, unwrap it and roll it in the gingernsnap crumbs. Use your hands to delicately mold the ball into a pinecone shap. Use the scalloped edges of the ginger thins to create bract scales.

Serve with crackers and thinly sliced pumpernickel bread.

Note: If you can't find Point Reyes, pick up a wedge of Maytag. It's a raw-milk cheese from Iowa, in the style of Roquefort. Point Reyes, from California, is ideal because of its sharp, salty kick, thanks to the seaside air that imbues the milk with a pleasant salinity.

The Strange Beauty of Scamorza

On appearance, Scamorza (ska-MORT-sa) is one of the ugliest cheeses. It looks like the belly button of a giant baby – dried out, pale, and slightly waxy. For years, I avoided it. No one I knew ate it, and the only person I ever saw order it in the cheese line was an old man with very large ears.

Turns out, that old man knew something I didn’t know. Scamorza is good company for the end of summer. When all that your garden offers is a few lonely herbs, you might as well pluck them and make Scamorza toasts with olive oil, herbs, and black pepper. To continue reading, please click here.

Full disclosure: This is part of a paid series I write for Di Bruno Bros. Twice a month, I select a cheese and develop a post for their blog. This is how I cover the cost of my dairy habit.

Blue Cheese Cherry Burgers

Recently I took on the challenge to create a “hometown burger” for Labor Weekend, a request from Wisconsin Cheese Talk. Since I still think of Wisconsin as home – Madison, specifically – I thought back on two of my favorite summer flavors from that state: Door County Cherries and Black River Blue from North Hendron Dairy Co-op. If you’ve ever paired Stilton with port, you know that these two flavors make beautiful music in the key of sweet-salty.

Black River Blue is a great burger topper – it melts well, and the flavor is sharp without being too aggressive. If you have any left over, sprinkle it in a spinach salad or tuck it into a BLT. The cherry-onion relish can be made in advance, and it keeps well. The tartness of the cherries alongside the caramelized onions balance out the saltiness of the blue, making for a truly stunning burger.

Back when I lived in Wisconsin, I used to bike down to North Hendron Dairy from my favorite little writing cabin at a place called The Christine Center, which was run by nuns. Props to Sister Margaret and Sister Johanna who turned me onto this cheese. When I see it on the East Coast, it makes me think of rural Wisconsin and kind Franciscans.

Blue Cheese Cherry Burgers

For the cherry-onion relish

¼ cup dried cherries

½ cup warm water or dark beer

1 medium-sized white or yellow onion, thinly sliced

1 Tablespoon butter

1 Tablespoon brown sugar

2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar (or red wine vinegar)

Ground black pepper

Sea salt

For the burgers

4 ground beef patties

4 whole wheat hamburger buns

Baby spinach

Black River Blue Cheese (or Gorgonzola)

1. Soak cherries in warm water or beer and set aside to soak for half an hour or more.

2. Melt butter in skillet and add thinly sliced onions. Cook on low to medium heat, about 20 minutes. If they brown, they’ll get tough, so be sure to let them cook down slowly. Once onions are transluscent, add balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, and turn off heat. Add a pinch of salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Drain cherries, and add to onion mixture.

3. Salt and pepper ground beef patties, and grill. If you cook them on a stove, get the pan hot and cook them in a little butter, 5-7 minutes per side if you want them to be rare – closer to 9 or 12 minutes per side for well-done.

4. Top burgers with cherry-onion relish and a hunk of blue. For additional condiments, try some baby spinach, a shmear of mayo, and a little whole-grain mustard. Serve with a dark, smoky beer and sweet-potato chips.

Note: You can use dried cranberries in place of cherries in this recipe. If you like a smoother relish, put it in a food processor.

Peach Bruschetta with Mascarpone

My go-to summer appetizer has become a singular obsession. It’s simple: Mascarpone, speck, and sliced peaches. Put this on toasted baguette rounds, and you’ve created the last rays of summer.

Each time I make these for a party, I tweak them a little. I add a few cranks of  pepper or some tiny nodes of flowering basil. The minute I set them on a table, they vanish and itty bitty taste-gasms ensue.

The key is good Mascarpone. I’ve experimented with different brands and I have to say that, although it’s cheeky expensive (as much as $8.99 for a wee tub), the BelGioiosi brand boots the Whole Foods brand ($2.99). The latter is silken but virtually tasteless, whereas BelGioioso is sweetly milky.

If you’ve never tried Mascarpone, prepare to wallow. It’s like Nutella’s blonde cousin – you’ll want to slather it on bread and then fall, panting, onto the couch. It’s great with jam, and it’s got half the calories of butter – as if you care.

If you’ve never met speck (pronounced shpeck), you’re really in for a breathless moment. Imagine Prosciutto’s suave brother – a slightly smoky character from the Alto Adige region of northern Italy. It’s less salty and more nuanced than Prosciutto.

Enough naughty talk. Go to the store. If you have leftover Mascarpone, you might want to make anchovy toasts. They're my favorite thing to make on New Years Eve with Champagne.

Peach Bruschetta with Mascarpone and Speck

Mascarpone

Speck (about ¼ lb)

2 peaches

1 baguette

Olive oil for drizzling

White or black pepper

Fresh basil

1.    Preheat oven to 375.

2.    Thinly slice baguette into rounds and drizzle with olive oil. Bake on a cookie sheet until brown, flipping once.

3.   While baguette rounds cool, slice peaches and toss with a little olive oil and a few cranks of pepper – this will keep them from drying out.

4.   Shmear baguette rounds with Mascarpone. Add a layer of speck, a peach slice, and top with chopped fresh basil.

Lady C's Salmon Melts

This summer, I have taken boarders. The Inn at Maison Fromage is now occupied by an additional pair of cheese lovers, Lady Cheddarly and Lady Spreadable -- good friends who are relocating to the area for jobs. The best part of this new arrangement? Shared dinners.

Let me give you an account of a recent supper prepared by Lady Cheddarly. She took on our burgeoning cheese drawer and created this twist on a Fishtown favorite, the tuna melt. In place of tuna, she used canned wild Alaskan salmon from Trader Joe’s. I had to remove my mental frown when she described it to me – it sounded heavy and potentially too fishy in flavor. On the contrary. This meal won Favorite New Recipe of the Week at our house.

The key? Lemon zest. And good companions.

Lady C’s Salmon Melts

Serves 4, with leftovers

• 2 cans (14.75 oz. each) Wild Alaskan salmon, Trader Joe’s Brand
• Juice and zest of 1 lemon
• 1/2 cup mayo
• ¼ cup minced purple onion
• ¼ cup chopped parsley
• 8 slices multigrain bread
• 8 slices cheddar

1. Drain salmon.

2. Combine salmon, lemon juice and zest, mayo, onions and parsley in a bowl. Stir with a fork until well-combined.

3. Toast bread.

4. Spread salmon mixture onto toasted bread and top with cheese. Bake for 15 minutes in the oven at 300 degrees, or until cheese is melted.

Trout-Apple Salad with Horseradish Cheddar

I’m a horseradish junkie. In my last life, my boss grew it in his backyard and every summer he would bring me a jar of his own homegrown horsey – a highlight during each of my five years in the newsroom. It was so fresh and pungent, I spread it on crackers at my desk and fueled myself through whole afternoons of fluorescent listlessness.

LeRaysville Cheese makes a horseradish cheddar that I sometimes dream about when I’m stuck doing some pooh-blah thing at work. Yesterday, I was typing up some minutes, and I had a horseradish brainstorm: trout…apples…fennel…yes….and horseradish cheddar. I think I actually released endorphins just thinking about it, because I breezed through those minutes and was on a train home in no time, reaching for the cheese knife before I had even set down my bag.

The beauty of this salad is that it takes deux minutes to throw together, and it looks fancy. It’s also a miraculous balance of salty, sweet, zesty-sour and crispy, which means, well, that it’s jazz. I put on a little Lionel Hampton, in fact. Horseradish cheddar and vibes, man. It does not get any better than that.

In Philadelphia, you can find LeRaysville Horseradish Cheddar at the Greensgrow Market in Fishtown and at the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal. It’s a pasteurized whole milk cheese made by the Amish in LeRaysville, outside of Scranton, and would you believe these folks also make Limburger? (Must investigate.)

Elsewhere, you should be able to find horseradish cheddar at the grocery. If not, just choose a medium-sharp white cheddar and add a little extra jarred horseradish.

Trout-Apple Salad with Horseradish Cheddar

(serves 2)

½ apple, chopped

1 filet smoked trout

½ cup fresh fennel

¼ cup horseradish cheddar cheese, cubed

greens

Dressing

3 Tablespoons ranch dressing

1 teaspoon apple-cider vinegar

1 Tablespoon prepared horseradish

Ground pepper

Whip up the dressing, then chop your salad ingredients and arrange them in two bowls. This is the sort of salad where you can be haphazard about measuring – just put in as much of each ingredient as you want, and feel free to add some purple onion. The key is to use plenty of apple so that the saltiness of the fish doesn’t take over. I cheat by using ranch dressing, but you could easily make a homemade horsey dressing using 2 parts mayo to 1 part sour cream. Serve with a glass of rosé.

Note: fresh horseradish is pretty strong -- it looses its sharpness the longer you keep it around, so taste it before you add boat-loads, eh?