Monday 13 February 2017

The Dud Avocado

Confession - I have been intending to read this book for about 39 years! Katherine Whitehorn quotes from it in her book 

"Cooking in A Bedsitter" [utterly brilliant, Bob proposed after he had cooked me one of the recipes therein] When I was helping Steph move, there it was on top of a box of books, so I borrowed it. Half way through so cannot comment yet!
But we had a ripe avocado, lying lost and forlorn in the fruit bowl, so I decided to make something interesting for Saturday's lunch.
Stripes of green avocado and white soft cheese, garnished with chopped sundried tomatoes, strewn with basil leaves, on a slice of seedy brown toast.
All very artistic 
I have been experimenting with the cheese thing lately. After decades of avoiding cheese because it makes me feel nauseous, I am coming to the conclusion it is something to do with the process of 'ripening' the hard cheeses like Cheddar. I can manage smallish quantities of fresh 'farmhouse' type cheeses like cottage cheese, ricotta, paneer etc. So I have been making my own cottage cheese by straining home-made yogurt.
On the internet, I was reading about Skyr, the trendy strained yogurt from Iceland [country,not foodshop]  and this guy said he had a Salter Yogurt Maker like mine which he had modified. He'd bought a second inner bowl and fitted it with a little rubber plug at the bottom. When the yogurt was made, he lifted out the bowl, removed bung, and let the whey drain out. Simples! 
I thought I would try this theory out using a large plastic yogurt pot - I made a row of holes along the bottom with a skewer and put my batch in, to let it drain.
Epic fail!! at first nothing came through the holes, and then when I enlarged them a tiny amount, lots of yogurt as well as whey drained out. I have returned to my original system of coffee filter in a funnel in a large pyrex jug. That works extremely well, and is quite fast too.
And I have a good amount of whey left for scones etc. So I am not going to bother spending £5 on another plastic inner bowl, when I have the kit already.
In case you are wondering, the passage from the Dud Avocado which KW quotes is
“Any moron can cook a steak, I kept saying to myself…. Everybody was terribly kind and co-operative at dinner and it took all four of us ceaselessly moiling and toiling from kitchen to studio and back again to organize and consume a simple meal…” 
Personally I don't mind boiling, but 'moiling and toiling' is not my idea of food preparation. This is the picture currently on my fridge!!



3 comments:

  1. I always make my yogurt by boiling the milk in a pan on the stove and stirring it until it has reduced by at least 1/3. Then, I pour the milk to a dish, let it cool a bit, add the culture and leave it overnight to set. It makes a fairly firm yogurt, with hardly any whey.

    As for avocado - the only way I'll eat it is as a pudding! It's how we used to eat it when I was growing up - very ripe avocado, mashed, mixed with sugar and condensed milk!

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    Replies
    1. Yay, another advocate for Avocados as pudding!!!!! When I lived in Bali, I drank Avocado juices all the time-except they were really like a milkshake- they had avocado, sugar water, crushed ice, condensed milk and chocolate sauce in them! Delicious! And on Christmas day in South Africa we ate Frozen Chocolate Avocado tart!!

      I didn't know you had that reaction to cheese Ang! How horrid! Glad you've found a solution for making your own cheese though!

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  2. I don't think I've heard of a recipe for eating avocado as a sweet dish before. Tins of condensed milk seem to have gone up in price lately round here!

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