This is a Bruschetta recipe that is a little expensive, but sure to wow your taste buds.

Baguette, sliced
Olive Oil
Garlic, minced
Chevre
Kalamata Olives, sliced
Basil, julienned
Tomatoes, diced

Drizzle Baguette slices with olive oil and top with garlic.  Arrange on baking sheet and toast in oven.  Combine remaining ingredients in bowl. Spread onto toasted bread.  Keep warm in turned off oven until serving.

There is nothing better than cooling down on a hot summer's day with a cold treat.  Today, I'm going to talk about three: Chessecake, Panna Cotta, and Banana Ice Cream.  As the Twin Cities seem to be undergoing an oppressively hot summer broken up by a day or so of heavy storms, I can't help but enjoy one of these cold treats every so often.

As I was saying in my last post, Cheesecake isn't as much a cake as it is a custard due to its ingredient composition.  As with many things that rise, cracking and/or uneven surfaces are common with this dessert.  In order to keep your cheesecake's surface nice and smooth, make sure not to over whip it. Cracking happens because air in the batter is trapped and expands during cooking.  When the custard cools it collapses onto itself breaking that sleek, creamy surface.  There are thee easy ways to help keep your custard from becoming cracked:

1)  Only stir the batter enough to completely combine all the ingredients and that will help keep out any excess air.  
2)  Bring your oven up to temperature gradually by placing a tray of water on the bottom rack.  A slow heating oven will help the bubbles disperse gradually instead of being baked into the cake.
3)  Make sure the cheesecake cools gradually as well.  

Those tips should help get your cheesecake sleek every time.  If it doesn't and you still end up with a fault down your beautiful creation, you can always put fruit on it as well.  You can see that my cheesecake actually cracked because we cooled it down in the freezer (my friend had to leave the next day)  To cover this up, I topped my cheesecake with a triple berry coulis.  Both recipes are as follows.

Cheesecake

Crust
15 graham crackers, crushed
2 tablespoons butter, melted
 
Filling
4 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese
1 1/2 cups white sugar
3/4 cup milk
4 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 cup all-purpose flour

Directions
1.Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 9 inch springform pan.
2.In a medium bowl, mix graham cracker crumbs with melted butter. Press onto bottom of springform pan. Bake for 10 min.  Turn off oven when done.
3.In a large bowl, mix cream cheese with sugar until smooth. Blend in milk, and then mix in the eggs one at a time, mixing just enough to incorporate. Mix in sour cream, vanilla, lemon juice and flour until smooth. Pour filling into prepared crust.
4.Turn oven back to 350 degrees F and place cheesecake on middle rack. Place tray of water on the bottom rack and bake cakes for 1 hour. When it's done, the cheesecake should look a little underdone. If it looks done, you've baked it too long and take it out of the oven. If not, turn the oven off, and let cake cool in oven with the door closed for 5 to 6 hours; this prevents cracking. Chill in refrigerator until serving.


(If you are in a time crunch like I was, you can stick it in the fridge, or (gasp) the freezer after a couple minutes to let it set.  Be advised that your cheesecake will crack if you do it this way.  My friend was going back to France the next day so we needed cheesecake now.)

Triple Berry Coulis

Ingredients
2 cups raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries (cut into large chunks)
3/4 cup Simple Syrup (1/2 cup sugar dissolved into 1/2 cup boiling water)
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/2 tablespoon cornstarch dissolved in water (optional)

Directions
Bring the raspberries, syrup, and lemon juice to a simmer in a heavy medium saucepan over low heat. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the berries are very soft, about 8 minutes.  Thicken with cornstarch if necessary.

Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl; discard the seeds. Cool completely, then cover and refrigerate until ready to use.

Panna Cotta is Italian for "cooked cream." Benvenuti in Italia! I served this after Italian sausage, spinach stuffed shells which despite taking longer than I would have liked, were delicious.  This dessert is basically an egg-less custard that is often served with a fruit, or chocolate topping.  Served alone, this is a blank canvas that complements any flavor.  As my brother described it at the Tuesday Night Dinner where it was served, it's like "sweet, creamy tofu."  Almost anything will go well.  I served mine with the left over triple berry coulis from the cheesecake.

Panna Cotta

Ingredients
1/3 cup skim milk
1 (.25 ounce) envelope unflavored gelatin
2 1/2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions
1.Pour milk into a small bowl, and stir in the gelatin powder. Set aside.
2.In a saucepan, stir together the heavy cream and sugar, and set over medium heat. Bring to a full boil, watching carefully, as the cream will quickly rise to the top of the pan. Pour the gelatin and milk into the cream, stirring until completely dissolved. Cook for one minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat, stir in the vanilla and pour into six individual ramekin dishes.
3.Cool the ramekins uncovered at room temperature. When cool, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, but preferably overnight before serving.

Lastly, a quick, cheap way to beat the heat is banana ice cream.  At the local grocery store, bananas are about $0.49/pound.  They are pretty much the least expensive fruits you can buy.  After the bananas are ripe, peel them and chop them into medallions about 1/4 inch thick.  Freeze them.  After they are frozen, put them on a cutting board and just keep cutting until you get a smooth texture, like ice cream.  Once you do it a couple times, you can refine your technique.  After the pieces are small enough, it becomes more of a spreading motion with knife.  This quick dessert has kept me comfortable throughout this sweltering summer.

Happy National Cheesecake Day!  That's right, July 30th is the unofficial celebration of America's favorite cake, er I mean custard.  Despite its name, cheesecake isn't really much of a cake at all.   Cakes require flour; cheesecakes don't have that.  Instead they're more of a custard as they are composed of mainly eggs, cream, and sugar. 


Last week, I had a friend from France come and say with me.  One night when we went out to dinner, she was excited to see Cheesecake on the dessert menu.  Apparently, in France (or at least the southern part) they don't have cream cheese!  Who would have thought that the country known for their over 360 different kinds of cheese, cream cheese is not among them.  We of course had to make a cheesecake at home before she left.


After gently folding through the pages on the internet, we finally found a quick recipe for cheesecake.  For you hardcore foodies (who aren't reading this because I know all two of my readers), I would not recommend using the recipe that we did.  That being said, we did successfully satisfy our cheesecake craving.


I'll write more on this post in about a week.  Hopefully I'll get internet in my apartment then.  Hopefully This tiny bite of what's to come will wet your appetite for more on cheesecake.

It has been said, "if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life."  When I was a sophomore in high school, my mother wanted to make sure that both I and my older brother knew how to "fish" before we left for college.  This meant learning how to cook (which I never got to do while I lived in the dorms).  When I look back at my and my brother's childhoods, we've always been somewhat involved in the kitchen.  We knew how to cut up onions, peel shrimp, and perform other menial tasks (we actually got quite good at that kind of stuff, I suspect it's because my mom didn't want to do those tasks herself so she made us do them).   However we never had to take a meal from grocery shopping to prep work to execution to eating.  In order to teach us, she made us make a full meal about 2-3 times/month and always on a Friday night.  Over the 3 years I did this, it grew to be a popular social event among my friends and laziness in creating the Facebook invitations branded the event as FND for Friday Night Dinner.  As it turns out, good food often leads to good friends.  I learned how to organize and plan a meal and my time spent in grocery stores looking for ingredients gradually declined.  I learned how to prepare many of my mother's family recipes and try to avoid chaos and her yelling at me in the kitchen.  Although the meals were often tasty, I still haven't mastered the whole avoiding chaos and yelling bit when I go home and cook.


My favorite part of FND happened each time just before the food was set on the table.  At this time, I would look around and see myself surrounded by friends and family all sitting down together for a meal that I toiled over for the past hour or two to prepare.  Funny stories and good conversation were about to be passed along with a side of gai-lan or mashed potatoes.  Although sometimes days would start out rather unpleasant or stressful, at the end of the night, after being with good food and good company, I don't remember ending a single one in a bad mood.  


While in high school, my parents footed the bill for each of these dinners (which sometimes fed about 20 people), needless to say, these did not continue after I graduated from high school.  However, this summer FND has been resurrected and re-adapted as TND, Tuesday Night Dinner.  Last Tuesday, July 6, was the first one.  My brother and I cooked Char Koay Teow for a few friends.  We created a running tab where we can track how much each meal costs and how much everyone owes.  With different friends and different food, I personally am excited to see this tradition carry on.  Next week we will be having German food prepared by my brother's roommate's girlfriend.  There is nothing quite like making friends over a good meal.  

This cut of meat is a the most inexpensive making it ideal for a poor college kid like me.  Although is called a "spare rib," this is not the rib that Adam gave up to create Eve (Sorry, that's a lame joke).  There are two predominant explanations for spareribs' name.  The first is derived from the German "Rippenspeer" which means "spear ribs," or ribs you roast on a spear/spit.  When translated to English, it became "rib speer" which eventually evolved into "spare ribs" or "spareribs," both spellings are generally accepted.  The other explanation is that this cut of meat is literally the spare ribs.  After the butcher cuts up the pig the last part is generally the ribs.  Baby back ribs are taken out first and whatever meat is left becomes spare ribs.

Pizza is a favorite of Americans of all ages.  Here in the states, we eat approximately 11,000,000,000 slices of pizza per year.  Although the style of pizzas to which we are all are accustomed are uniquely American, it may not surprise you that the concept of pizza is not an American creation.  No, it's not Italian either.  The origins of this savory pie can be traced back to Ancient Greece.  Here, the first pizzas were flat bread with olive oil, herbs, and dates.  It was cheap food for the masses.  As it spread throughout the Mediterranean it adapted to each new region but remained relatively inexpensive.  However, as soon as a few notable nobles acquired a taste for this treat, pizza became somewhat of a delicacy.

Legend has it that during the reign of Spanish King Umberto (1878-1900), his wife, Queen Margherita went on an inspection tour of her kingdom.  After seeing many of her subjects eating this large flat bread, she ordered a guard to bring her what the peasants were having.  Some could say this was the pizza delivery.  The Queen loved it so much she asked for it to be served in the court.  She commissioned Raffaele Esposito, a pizzaioli in Naples, to make her custom pizza.  To please the Queen, he created a pizza with Mozzarella, Basil, and Tomatoes (the colors of the Italian flag) and called it a Pizza Margherita.  She loved With the stamp of the Queen's approval, the Pizza Margherita became the standard pizza around the world and Naples became the pizza capital.  

Pizza did not come to America until the early 1900s.  The first pizzas in the United States were called "Tomato Pies."  They are traditionally built with the dough, then the cheese, then the sauce and whatever else met your fancy.  Once they hit the shores and moved inward, pizza changed from the traditional thin crust to the popular Chicago style deep dish.  

Today, Pizza has once again become a food for the masses.  As a poor, college student, I appreciate its simplicity and deliciousness.  It is one surefire way to attract crowds to any meeting.  College students and the rest of America consume about 350 slices of pizza per second.  The most popular topping is not one that was found in Italy, but rather something that came about here, Pepperoni.  In India, pickled ginger, minced mutton, and paneer cheese are favorites.  The two most popular topping combinations in Japan are Mayo Jaga (mayonnaise, potato, and bacon) and eel and squid.  Brazilians enjoy green peas on their pies and Russians love a red herring pizza.  

One of the beautiful things about pizza is you can throw just about anything on it.  When I made these pizzas, I emptied my refrigerator and used up anything that was on the verge of going bad: tomatoes, peppers, ham, mushrooms, onions...basically anything and everything.  The pizza dough recipe I used is down below.  It was a solid base for the toppings and sauce but I would have preferred a puffier crust.  

Pizza Dough

1/2 – 3/4 c. warm water
1 T. dry active yeast
1 t. sugar
2 c. flour
1 T. vegetable or Olive oil
1/2 t. salt

1. Combine 1/4 c. water with yeast and sugar. Stir to dissolve the yeast, set aside until bubbly about 5 minutes.

2. Mix flour and salt, then add the oil.

3. Stir the yeast mixture into the flour mixture, adding water until it forms a ball you can work with.  Knead for a few minutes.  Cover with plastic wrap and let stand for 10 minutes
5. Put all the toppings on and bake at 350 or 375 or 425˚.  Don't preheat the oven.  Bake for 10-15 min or until the bottom is brown and the cheese isn't burnt.