"chevre" news and stories

Have you noticed how hard and dry goat's milk cheeses become after spending a couple of weeks in the fridge? They may seem as though they are ready to be thrown away. Although they will not taste as good on their own, there are several ways you could use these dried out morsels of cheese to add flavor to a dish.

When I was at the farmers market on Saturday with Sarah, I picked up a couple pounds of gorgeous-looking beets, without much of a plan other than they called out to me. Yesterday afternoon around 3 pm, they started to talk to me from the vegetable drawer and so I put a pot of water on the stove to boil them up. I had picked up a package of chevre at Trader Joe's and I started to imagine a beet and goat cheese salad with red onion, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

While I was in the middle of making some relatives showed up and my cooked beets spent about an hour gently cooling in their skins on the kitchen counter. When I finally got back to them, they slipped out of their skins easily. I cut them into half moons, tossed them with some great olive oil that somehow wandered into my parents' kitchen, the crumbled chevre, some slivered and soaked (in attempt to make them a little less pungent) red onion, a little balsamic, a bit of cracked black pepper and some salt.

I had intended to top it with some toasted walnuts, but people came in and started eating it before I got to that step. Instead I just cut off a hunk of sourdough from a loaf I bought at New Seasons earlier in the day and scooped up a plate of beet salad for myself. They were some of the best beets I'd ever had, sweet and earthy and so tender. If you have some beets laying around, this is a great way to make them appeal to a large swath of people, as no one who has passed through the house yet has been able to say no to it.

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Jamie, the cheese lover behind the blog Curdnerds.com, posted an interesting food question today: "What is your favorite cheese to cook with?"

I've been pondering that thought for the better part of the last hour and I think I have to say that when it comes to cooking, I'm a big fan of the goat and sheep cheeses. Feta, Chevre, Basque Shepherd cheese or Pecorino Romano are all good ones in my book.

In New York, more restaurants are staying open, or opening up, to cater to the late-late crowd that come out to eat in what some consider to be the wee hours of the morning. Some do it because they like to stay up late. Others do it because you have a "built in clientele" of people who are up and have few options of where to go.

The first, the biggest, and perhaps the best, artisan goat cheese maker in the US has recently been sold to a French company. The company specializes in developing and continuing small artisan lines, and plans to continue Laurel Chenel's work. She plans to continue to raise goats and, even once in a while, take some time off.

There are so many conflicting studies about the health benefits and/or risks or eating fish, it's hard to know what to eat. Most still agree that some fish will have health benefits, as long as you avoid kinds known to be high in mercury.

Want to make some really good Finnish meatballs?

Julia Moskin eats at the Morgan Dining Room and gives it 2 stars.

Mark Bittman, the minimalist, cooks a few quail dishes.

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