Kofta

One of our favourite summer meals is lamb kofta – a very flavourful lamb meatball with lots of toppings, wrapped in a pita.

The lamb is from Kim’s farm in Golden Lake.   I think this is the 4th lamb I’ve bought from her and it never disappoints. (Alder Creek Farm if you’re in the Ottawa Valley)

I added garlic and cumin and mint and fried the meatballs on the stove top.  For toppings I mixed some of David’s tomatoes  with Joanne’s cilantro, mixed my home made goat yogurt with cucumber, garlic, and mint. And I chopped up some of Chris’s red romaine and some of Joanne’s pea shoots. 

Local.

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Fried Chicken and a Cottage Renovation

This picture from Fine Cooking magazine has been calling to me  (and my sister) for almost a year now. Last weekend I decided to make it and it turned out amazingly well.

To start I ‘dry brined’ the chicken pieces in a mixture of salt and dried herbs for a few hours then dipped them in buttermilk, rolled them in a mixture of flours and herbs and let it all sit to make sure the coating stuck.

I cut up a whole chicken and used a pack of drumsticks as well figuring that left over fried chicken would probably be a pretty nice treat (standing in front of the fridge at 10 pm).

One key is getting the oil to 340F and keeping it there during the cooking. Hotter oil burns the coating before the chicken is cooked on the inside and cooler oil leads to soggy bird. To maintain the right temp I cooked the chicken in 3 batches for 12 minutes each.

A 3 litre jug of oil filled my 6 litre iron/enamel pot half way and that was just the right amount.  

It turned out brilliantly!  The coating was perfectly crisp and crunchy and the chicken was moist and flavoured all the way through.

We ate it with the first potato salad of the year and asparagus stir fried with a ginger-garlic sauce.

Lots if happy diners and more deep frying to come.

And, after almost 50 years of waiting, we now have insulated ceilings in the hallway, bathroom and bedrooms!  Yay Mike!

Mozzarella and ricotta…. and a pizza

After a long break I finally have a milk angel again and a supply of beautiful local cow milk. I decided to celebrate by making some cheese.

Mozzarella is pretty straight forward. Milk  + citric acid + rennet. My first job was to locate rennet but because this is Killaloe and things just magically appear when you need them it wasn’t much of a problem. A woman I know in near Cormac just happened to have some and was happy to have her husband deliver it.  (I love this place!) I heated 4 litres of milk to 90F then added some citric acid and the rennet and let it sit to coagulate.
Then I cut it into squares and scooped it into a colander to drain off some of they whey.

I put the solid mass back into the heated whey to soften it up and then stretched it and formed it into a ball.

It was a great learning experience and not a bad ball of cheese at all. Next time I’ll drain it less and make a softer cheese.  
I reheated the whey to 170F a.d then strained to through muslin to collect the left over curds. 

After adding a little salt I called it ricotta and spread some on a cracker.   So good.  I collected the remaining whey and I’ll likely end up adding to my compost. It’s bright yellow from the colostrum and a little too acidic to water the plants.

My treat was a puff pastry pizza with pesto from the freezer, some roasted cherry tomatoes from the market, some home made tapanade and the 2 cheeses.  Even better than it looks 🙂