Lex Culinaria

Mini Lemon and Cream Tarts

More so than any other occasion during the year, Valentines day is an essentially discriminatory holiday....against people who don't LOVE chocolate that is. It's also the only occasion, aside from birthdays or anniversaries that a couple is likely to splash out on a nice meal and a special restaurant. And so they should. Despite my misgivings bout the commercial roots of Valentines day, there's something really nice about celebrating your love and commitment to your partner with a beautiful meal and a nice bottle of wine. Who cares if everyone else is doing it too!

Unfortunately, for those of us who prefer to give chocolate a miss at the end of a meal, at this time of year every restaurant seems to haul out the triple chocolate mousse cakes and molten chocolate cakes and bitter chocolate tarts for dessert. What if you or your partner (like mine) are more of a fruit dessert kind of person? It'd be nice to have something special and decadent all your own don't you think? besides, after a rich meal and some gorgeous wine, chocolate might be a bit heavy, especially if you've got activities planned for later, if you know what I mean...

Why not save the desert for your return home? These gorgeous little lemon tarts are sweet and tangy and not cloying or heavy the way chocolate deserts can be. You can make them ahead of time and pull them out of the fridge when needed. The little mound of puffy cream on top and the brilliant red berries dress it up for the occasion very nicely. All the better if you've got a little bit of food grade glitter!

No need for a professional pastry chef either. If you're not keen on making the pastry yourself, buy some of those tiny pre-made tartlet shells, or pop pre-made pastry into a mini muffin tin. If you are keen to make your own pastry any shortcrust or patee sucree will do, bearing in mind that a patee sucree will result in a sweeter finished product. I used plain shortcrust (premade from the freezer section, gasp!).

This recipe makes about a dozen small tarts, or you could save the extra lemon curd to serve over angel food cake, fill a layer cake, plop on a Pavlova or dip fruit slices in. Or, if you live in my house, you might just keep it in a jar in the fridge and slowly (or quickly) eat it spoonful by spoonful over the course of a few days. This curd recipe is also more forgiving, easier and less rich than traditional curd recipes as it replaces some of the yolks with whole egg and cooks in less steps, but turns out beautifully creamy nonetheless. Also, because I have a very fine grater, sometimes I don't strain the zest out of the curd, but if your grater produces coarser zest, you may want to, just make sure you do it while your curd is quite hot.

Mini lemon and cream tartlets

• 12 blind-baked mini tart shells in a pan (you could blind bake these ahead of time and premake the filling and topping and then all you have to do is spend a few minutes assembling on the night!)
• 375 ml fresh lemon juice (or part lemon ad part lime)
• 4 teaspoons finely grated fresh lemon zest
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3 egg yolks plus 3 whole large eggs
• 1/4 cup butter, soft
• 3/4 cup whipping cream
• 1.5 tablespoons vanilla sugar
• small punnet ripe raspberries
• food-grade glitter (available at cake decorating shops) or icing sugar for dusting.

Beat lemon juice, zest, sugar, and eggs together very well using an immersion blender, or standard blender on the highest setting.

Heat over medium heat in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, whisking occasionally. When mixture starts to get hot, whisk in the butter. Continue whisking until mixture thickens significantly to the consistency of warm custard. Remove from heat and strain through a fine mesh sieve to remove the larger bits of zest. Chill slightly by pressing cling wrap to the surface to prevent a skin from forming.

While curd is still warm, pour into tartlet shells. Save any extra in a jar in the fridge.

Refrigerate filled shells until curd is firm.

Whip the cream and vanilla sugar together.

Top each filled tart with a dollop of whipped cream and a few berries. Immediately before serving, dust with food grade glitter or icing sugar.

Enjoy the love!

Xmas Baking #1: Cheddar and Cranberry Cookies

Don't ask me why, but I've been contemplating a sort of cheesy, savoury shortbread cookie for going on 2 or 3 weeks now, so I decided it was time to get off my butt and do something about it. The combination of salty, aged cheddar and sweet tangy cranberry has quickly made this a buttery, crispy snack favourite in our house. In fact, I made a second batch of dough expressly for freezing, so that I can cut a few slices off and quickly pop them into the oven when company pops by. If that sounds a little too Martha Stewart for you, bear in mind the real reason I do that is so we don't eat them all before company shows up!

• 115 grams (1/2 cup) butter
• 150 grams (1 1/2 cups) extra old (at least 3 years old) cheddar, finely grated
• 180 grams (1 1/2 cups) white flour
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 cup toasted chopped pecans
• 1/3 cup finely chopped dried cranberries

Cream the butter ans cheese together at high speed in your stand mixer. Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together. Combine flour mixture, nuts and cranberries with the butter mixture on high.

Turn dough out onto a large piece of waxed paper. Roll the dough into a log shape, rol the paper around it and twist the ends shut. Refrigerate for at least 45 minutes. You can freeze the dough at this stage as well.

Preheat oven to 375F.

Unwrap the dough log and, using a very sharp knife, slice the log into rounds 1/2 cm thick. Place rounds on cookie sheets and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until the bottoms of the cookies are golden brown. Remove to a cooling rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container.

Makes 30.

Parmesan mousse with poppyseed and asiago crackers

These crackers weren't in the original plan. I'm glad I made them though. You see, The Parmesan mousse was something I'd made for first course of the disaster dinner. On the night of the disaster, I served it on top of a layer of chargrilled asparagus. I just don't think it stood up to the asparagus the way I'd intended though. It was too mild. Never one to want to walk away from something that I know could be good if given the proper opportunity, I decided to try a different partner for the mousse, and was I ever glad I did. I must give credit where credit is due though, and point out that it was Cakes' idea for me to make crackers.

I made some cookies a fair while back that included cornmeal in the batter. It gave them a really nice, slightly meatier, texture, so that's where I started out with my crackers. I really just chucked a bunch of stuff in a bowl, based on what I had in the cupboard, and what came out was fantastic. These little crackers are crispy and flavourful and a tiny bit cheesy without being too heavy on the cheese or the fat - one of the problems with a number of the cracker recipes I perused for inspiration. All of them seemed so heavily buttery and cheesy that I couldn't in good conscience pair them with what is already a fairly rich partner.

Try this combo for an appetizer for your next party. I guarantee they'll disappear. The crackers stay pretty crispy as long as you keep them well sealed, so make some extra for snacks.

Parmesan Mousse

• 250ml cream
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed with the back of a flat knife
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 packet (8 grams) of gelatin dissolved in 2 tablespoons cold water
• 1 cup grated good quality Parmesan
• salt
• pepper
• 1/2 cup grated other cheese such as Gruyere, cheddar or provolone (I used Gruyere)
• 2 Tablespoons finely chopped herbs - I used chives and parsley - I reckon basil would also be nice.
• 250ml cream

Simmer the garlic in the first quantity of cream at medium-low heat in a small saucepan for 10 minutes. Place yolks in a small bowl. Whisk 1/3 cup of the warm cream into the yolks. Return the egg mixture to the saucepan of cream, whisking continuously. Continue to heat the cream over medium heat, whisking, until thickened. Stir in the softened gelatin and continue stirring until dissolved. Add cheese and salt and pepper. Stir until cheese is fully incorporated. Remove pan from heat and set in a cool, not cold, water bath while you whip the second portion of cream to stiff peaks. Check that the custard is cool, but not started to set up.  Fold the whipped cream and custard together. Adjust salt and pepper if necessary. Add the chopped herbs. Divide into individual serving dished, or one big dish if you are planning on spooning servings out later. Chill for a minimum of 3 hours, preferably overnight. You could also do this in dariole molds and turn them out onto individual serving plates.

Poppy seed and Asiago Crackers

• 1/4 cup corn flour
• 1/2 cup cake and pastry flour
• 1/4 cup white cornmeal or quick grits
• 2 Tablespoons poppy seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1/2 cup finely grated asiago cheese
• 4 Tablespoons yogurt

Mix together all the dry ingredients. Rub the butter through the way you would for making biscuits. Stir in the cheese and then mix the yogurt through with a wooden spoon or using a stand mixer until you have a cohesive but slightly sticky ball of heavy medium-soft dough.

Spread some flour on a clean surface and use your hands to pat the ball down into a flat disk. Flour the top of the disc and roll the dough into a sheet roughly 1.5 millimetres thick. Use a metal ruler and a sharp knife to slice the dough into rectangles approximately 2 by 4 centimetres. The dough should make roughly 75 of these little rectangles. Transfer them to a non-stick baking sheet, leaving 1 centimetre between their edges. Bake at 400F for around 12 minutes, or until you see them start to brown lightly around the edges. Transfer them to a wire rack to cook completely.

An unusual panacotta

I love confounding expectations in the kitchen: mushroom bread pudding, yogurt drained and used like cream cheese, salted caramels.... are all a little different, and they work so very well.

As does this great appetizer panacotta. It's gralicky and very parmesan-y. It's super quick to make and goes very well with all sorts of heavy crusty bread. I bet it would even do well with a nice salad and some grainy bread for a light and unusual lunch. I adore it, and we have made this to the raves of our dinner guests quite a few times. It's also one of my most popular recipes with readers. If you haven't already, give it a go.

The original post and recipe is here.

Right about now, I'm shopping at the Prahran Market!

First the Pa-tay

There are two types of eaters in this world: those who leave their favourite thing until last so that they can savour it slowly after they's got the broad beans out of the way, and those who eat the best thing first because they have absolutely no self-control. This latter type is the sort who may or may not have had an extra coke float (coke spider, for those Aussies out there) last night because the first one was gone so fast. Oink.

So I suppose the latter type would also be the sort of person who, when faced with a list of food-related things to write about in a given period of time would invariably write about the pate first.

Which...holy cow. I had no idea that making pate could be so damn easy. Sure it's a kind of a mawkish brown colour. Sure it smells kind of gross. But it tastes divine, and I somehow always assumed it involved unpronounceable ingredients and Hogwarts-style incantations while stirring slowly clockwise and adding an anticlockwise stir every seventh time. Only I bet they would say "widdershins" instead of "anticlockwise".

I am so pleased to say I was w-r-o-n-g.

I made this pate last Sunday. (Some people go to church. I go to the kitchen.) and most of it is gone already!

I went to 4 different shops to find chicken liver - given the frequency with which I had to avoid this stuff in my childhood, I would have presumed great quantities of it would have been lurking next to the Kraft Dinner and Ichiban noodles at every local 7-eleven! Not so. I finally found a nice big package at Happy-Lucky-97-Good-Luck-Long-Life-Double-Happiness-Fortune-Wealth-Market.

Here's what I did - this makes kind of a lot - about 4 250ml serves - so share it with your friends.

• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 1/2 teaspoon ground sage (or a tablepoon fresh)
• 600 grams fresh chicken livers
• 1/3 cup grand marnier
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh cracked pepper
• 1 teaspoon sea salt (use less if your broth was salty)
• 2/3 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 cup butter, melted and clarified

Put the onions, broth, sage and liver together in a small pot. Heat until bubbling and cook, covered, stirring occasionally until the livers are cooked through.

Pour off the stock and transfer the liver and onions, grand marnier, butter, salt and pepper into a food processor or the bowl of your Kitchenaid (using the mixing paddle, not the whisk or the dough hook thingie) and process, slowly at first and then increasing speed gradually until smooth. The Kitchenaid will leave some small chunks of onion as compared to the food processor which should get everything quite velvetty.

Spread the mixture in a shallow container and pop it into the freezer to cool rapidly.

Meanwhile, whip the chilled cream into stiff peaks. Gently fold the chilled pate into the whipped cream. Spoon the pate into containers (I used 4 - 250ml jam canning jars, but wish I'd bought the smaller ones as they are easier to give to people and if you eat a whole one yourself you don't feel like such a pig). Rap the jars gently on the counter to release trapped air and top with enough melted butter to cover the pater by at least one millimetre. Place filled jars, wihtout lids, into the refrigerator to set for 4 hours. After that time, pop the lids on.

Stock up on nice crusty, grainy bread.

Anyone know where to get a kilo of duck or goose livers in Edmonton?

And because you darlings have all been so patient with me ( I promise I'll update my food blogging contest links soon!) here is a bonus photo of my darling fat little kitten, Fitzroy Possum Stanley-Maddocks, asleep on the printer as I'm typing. Awwwwww.

IMBB 16: Upside down caviar

Thanks to Viv at Seattle Bon Vivant for naming eggs as the guest of honour for the June edition of IMBB.

I was so pleased to finally have a chance to flip through the copy of Georgeanne Brennan's Holiday Eggs which I bought second-hand for $12 a couple years ago. At the time my husband said, "A whole book about eggs? Who needs a whole book about eggs?" I bought it entirely for the photos (it is a gorgeous book) and have paged through it from time to time, but have never specifically made anything out of it before.

My husband, Doubting Thomas that he was at the time of purchase, was cheering for the oeufs a la niege - poached sweet meringues floating, well, float-ily, on top of a pool of pale yellow creme anglaise and topped with fresh berries. He still might get that sometime soon, just not in time for IMBB.

Alas, the oeufs a la niege were not to be...as I was instantly smitten when I saw the recipe for quails eggs and caviar.

I love caviar (which are eggs too, now that I think about it) but the traditional sour cream/onion/toast/caviar combination topped with minced hard-cooked eggs seems so trite and boring. But if you turn it upside down, by using the caviar as a topping for the eggs...well now we're talking!

Also, I especially love that quail eggs look so cute. I have always had a soft spot for miniature anythings. A childhood trait I must have forgotten to outgrow. I came to love quail eggs when I was living in Melbourne and ever since then, one of my favourite party snacks has been hard cooked quails' eggs rolled in a mixture of sea salt and toasted ground cumin. Simple, but amazingly good.

These little caviar-topped beauties are just as simple and ever more cute than the cumin rolled ones. It's a shame that they disappear so quickly.

The secret to this, and any other hard cooked egg recipe, is to cook the eggs exactly long enough to avoid both the uncooked squishy yolk (blech) and the overcooked and highly unappealing grey yolk (double blech). Fortunately, there is a foolproof method for hard cooking both chicken and quail eggs. The method for quails eggs is contained in the recipe below. For perfect hard cooked chicken eggs, place the eggs in a pot of cool salted water, bring it to a boil over high heat, immediately remove the boiling pot from the heat and cover it. After 10 minutes, pour off the hot water and immerse the eggs in cold water. Does everybody already know this? I only learnt this last year (when I was in a hard cooked egg phase) and was shocked to find that I had been suffering through years of grey yolks for no good reason at all. I strongly suspect that I am the last person on the planet to have discovered this method.

When choosing your quails eggs remember that, at the best of times they are difficult to peel as they are quite delicate. Older eggs will peel better than fresh ones, so check the best before date on the cartons at the store and choose less fresh ones, or buy the eggs at least a week ahead and le t them sit in the refrigerator to age.

Quails eggs and caviar

• 12 quails eggs
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1/4 cup finely minced yellow onion
• 1 small jar black lump fish caviar

Place eggs in pot of cool salted water and bring the pot to a boil over high heat. Allow the eggs to boil for exactly one minute, before removing the pot from the heat, pouring out the hot water and immersing the eggs in cold water. Leave the eggs in the cold water until you are ready to peel them. You can boil the eggs up to a day ahead.

Peel the quail eggs carefully, making sure not to tear the egg white from the yolk as you do.  rinse and dry the peeled eggs to ensure that there are no microscopic pieces of shell on the eggs. Slice each egg in half lengthwise and place on a plate. top each egg with a tiny dollop of sour cream, a few pieces of minced onion and a dollop of caviar. you'll have quite a lot of each topping left over when you are done as each egg half uses only a microscopic amount.

Tomato & Onion Jam

For a vegetable that was once thought to be poisonous, tomatoes have sure come a long way.

Thought at various points in history to be the sole domain of the poor, the Italians or the Central Americans, tomatoes are now used in a staggering array of dishes across all cultures. This is hardly surprising to a die-hard tomato fan like me.

Tomatoes are so many good things at once: tart, sweet, tangy, juicy, smooth and vibrantly coloured. They smell and taste like summer all juicy, and warm with sunshine.

Every summer my mother's garden would change slightly from the last year, instead of last year's beans there would be peas, or baby carrots instead of last season's beets (which,as a child, was totally okay with me...I hated beets). Whatever other vegetables my mother planted and grew, tomatoes were always the highlight of the garden. My mother's red tomaotes, beefsteaks mainly, found their way into most of our summer suppers, and we never tired of them. Truth be told, my sister and I probably prized them more for their satisfying squish when we threw them at the dog.

My childhood was full of salads of tomatoes still warm from the garden. Mum would send me out the back door, mixing bowl in hand, to pick tomatoes and maybe an onion and a few leaves of lettuce for a fresh summer salad.  I'd bring the vegetables back in to the kitchen, along with a bonus layer of mud up to my knees or a gross bug or something. I'd watch mum slice the tomatoes, juice oozing out, and arrange the slices on our plates in a very 1970's cookbook kind of way.  Which, well, it was the 70's and my mum belonged to every one of those recipe card clubs, so, there you go.

We'd carry the plates outside and eat at the white metal patio table with the sauve seventies brown-striped umbrella. Mum would have a glass of wine with her supper and my sister and I would misbehave by kicking each other under the table and sticking our tongues out and pinching each other as hard as we could.  The evening air would be  perfect and warm and full of our laughter and cries of "STOP IT. Mum, She's touching me again.", and "OOOOWWWWWWW!"  The backyard had a particular summer smell: dirt heated by the daytime sun, moist green grass and the fruit trees in our yard.

Mum fed not only our tummies on those evenings, but our little kid souls as well. Who knew that being teased and kicked by my older sister would be part of my fondest memories of childhood? If you'd told me at the time (or any time before I was out of my teens really) I would have thought you were nuts. I hope when I have my own kids, they beat the crap out of each other the way we did. Or rather the way my sister did to me. Because I would never do that sort of thing. Really. Plus, she was bigger.

I must have inherited my mother's tomato-planting gene. All those years I lived in apartments I always had a cherry tomato plant on the balcony. My ferns would perish horribly and my marigolds would wilt, neglected, but my tomatoes would be showered with love and would produce enormous quantities of those juicy buggers that explode satisfyingly in your mouth. My own garden (the first proper one I've ever had) now contains no less than 5 varieties and well over half its total of 800 square feet is taken up by tomatoes! In our family, the tomato-growing genes run deep. Too bad they are linked to the too much shopping gene.

Until my own tomatoes are ready, I have been indulging myself every Saturday morning at the Strathcona farmers market by purchasing 3 or four pounds of dense, heavy, plump tomatoes in red, yellow and orange. I must admit I purchase them as much for their perfect round brightness as I do for their taste! They do double duty in my house, sitting perched in a white ceramic bowl for a few days before being devoured. This week, they lasted so beautifully and work was so busy that I didn't get a chance to do anything with them until Friday night. By 8pm on the last day of the work week, I was feeling quite a lot like a nice glass or wine, some crusty french bread and cheese. I gambled that the perfect tomato dish to accompany my feet-curled-up-under-me-on-the-sofa- reading-a-good-book kind of feeling was a sweet tomato and onion jam, spread thickly on freshly toasted French baguette and topped with slivers of Applewood smoked cheddar.

I was right.

Coincidentally, it also made for an excellent breakfast in bed (with these little guys) the next day.

If you want to be a real purist, you can peel and seed the tomatoes. These tomatoes are so beautiful and fresh and their skin so tender, that I didn't bother. Besides, I really like the farmhouse appeal of using the whole, unpeeled, unseeded tomatoes.

Tomato and Onion Jam

• 1 tbsp good olive oil
• 300 grams sliced sweet onion
• 4  large garlic cloves, crushed and chopped
• 1/2 tablespoon grated fresh ginger root
• 1 - 1/2 teaspoons sea salt
• 1 - 1/2 teaspoons fresh ground pepper
• 2 tablespoons good quality balsamic vinegar
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 7 large ripe tomatoes, chopped roughly (about 4 cups)
• 1 cup water

Add olive oil and onions to a non-stick pan over low to medium heat, cook and stir until softened and well browned, about 10 minutes. Add garlic and cook and stir 5 minutes more. Add all the rest of the ingredients, except tomatoes and water. Cook and stir until bubbly, about 5 minutes. Add tomatoes and water, heat until bubbly, reduce heat to low, and cook, covered, stirring occasionally for 30 minutes. Remove cover, increase heat to medium high and cook, stirring until liquid reduces and mixture becomes jammy in consistency, about 15 minutes. Pour into a clean 1L jar or plastic container to cool. Refrigerated, this jam will keep for about a week. Spread thinly on crusty bread and top with cheese. It would also make a fantastic accompaniment to an omelet or any other dish where you might use a vegetable chutney.

Roasted Garlic and Reggiano Panacotta

I was inspired by a sub-par restaurant experience I recently had to make this third (and I think, best) instalment in my 3 chapter IMBB series. I ordered a divine-sounding Roast Garlic Custard, and this dish is exactly what I was hoping I'd get, but didn't.

I love, love, love the way this turned out! This is definitely one of those little discoveries that makes up for all the failed attempts in the kitchen! make this as the starter for your next dinner party. Your guests will propose marriage! It is a perfect blend of cool and creamy, cheesy and garlicky. And. It spreads on warm bread like a dream!

Ingredients:

1 whole head garlic, anointed with 1 tsp good olive oil, wrapped in foil, roasted and then left to cool
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
1 crushed clove fresh garlic
1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
1/2 tsp good sea salt
1 pkg gelatin
100 grams good reggiano, grated fine

Whiz cream, milk and roasted garlic in a blender. Don't worry if there are some chunks of garlic left, they add character to the dish.  Heat cream in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium-low heat with gelatin,  crushed clove, salt and pepper. When it is sufficiently warm, and the gelatin has dissolved, stir in the finely grated cheese. 

When cheese is thoroughly melted, use a fork to fish out the crushed clove. If you miss some small bits, don't worry. Pour warm mixture into little individual glasses ( I use Ikea candle holders that cost $0.50 each!) and chill until set.

Serve with warm (or toasted) crusty rye or multigrain bread. Try not to eat it all at one sitting.

Randy's Sinful Barbequed Shrimp

Randy was right. These are damn good. Make sure you use the French bread to properly mop up all the sauce or Randy will inspect your plate in the kitchen after and pronounce you unworthy. Whatever you do, avoid the unworthy pronouncement. You might never get to eat this divine dish again.

This dish isn't, strictly speaking, barbequed. What it is is buttery and saucy and yummy. There's no point in counting calories here as you'd burn out your calculator battery. Serve this with a crusty warm french loaf to dip in the remaining sauce. Also, plan on going through some serious napkin usage and these little suckers are messy. messy but goooooood.

ingredients:

• 2-3 lbs unpeeled, shrimp, heads removed
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 2 Tbsp worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 lb butter, melted
• splash olive oil
• 1 pkt River Road barbequed shrimp seasoning

Combine all ingredients in a shallow casserole and mix to coat thoroughly.

Bake in a 350 farenheit oven for 20 minutes until shrimp are pink.

You could probably alter the amount of butter if necessary or add lemon juice or other seasonings if you like.

Serve with lots of crusty bread for mopping.

yum.

Luscious Labanya

From the post: A Perfect Winter's Eve Supper

Make this beautiful spicy, soft mediterannean cheese ahead and keep it in the fridge for company or just for a delicious snack of an evening.

I suppose you can do this with store bought yogurt, although I prefer to make my own. It’s always creamier and milder than the sometimes gelatinous and too-tart stuff from the dairy case. If you must use store-bought yogurt, please buy full-fat and organic if you can find it.

Ingredients

1 litre creamy, mild yogurt

3 garlic cloves, peeled and partly crushed

1 small hot red pepper

a few peppercorns

a few good-sized pieces of lemon or lime rind

sea salt

olive oil

Line a sterilized colander with fresh and impeccably clean cheesecloth or butter muslin and dump in the yogurt. Let it drain, over a bowl for 6-12 hours, scraping the yogurt from the cheesecloth and stirring it up every two or so hours so that it drains properly. The yogurt on the outside will become firmer and less liquidy as it drains and it is important to allow the softer yogurt on the inside to drain as well. When the consistency is quite creamy, rather like room-temperature mascarpone, bring up the sides of the cloth and tie into a bundle. Suspend the cheese-filled cloth (I tie mine to a cabinet handle) over the colander and bowl and allow to it drain for a further 12 hours, taking it down occasionally, untying it and redistributing the yogurt as before. It should achieve a solid, creamy consistency similar to that of a thick butter icing. The firmer your yogurt was to start with, the less time it will take to drain to the right consistency.

Scrape out the yogurt into a clean, sterile bowl and mix up with a bit of sea salt and, if you like a few dashes of fresh ground cumin.

Pour olive oil into a sterilized jar until it is 3 or 4 inches deep. Add in the garlic, peppers, and rind. Drop spoonfuls of the yogurt into the oil in the same way (and same size) you would for drop cookies. When the dollops start poking through the oil at the top, add more oil so they remain covered. Continue until all the yogurt has been dolloped into the jar and the whole lot is covered with enough oil that it is a centimeter or so above the yogurt balls.

You can keep this in the fridge for a few weeks. If your fridge is pretty cold the olive oil will go all opaque and sludgy, so take the whole jar out and sit it on the benchtop for an hour or so before you want to use it. Then, use a fork to carefully scoop out some cheese blobs and put them in a little dish and spread the yummy oily cheese over nice bread or biscuits.