Zucchini Flowers stuffed with Fresh Goat Cheese

Homemade goat cheese is stuffed into tender zucchini flowers, which are then dipped in a light batter and deep fried until crispy. These Zucchini Flowers stuffed with Fresh Goat Cheese are a beautiful and tasty appetizer.

 

My first farmers’ market of the summer!  We arrived early at the Urban Harvest Market (for those of you in Houston, it is on Eastside just off of Richmond between Buffalo Speedway and Kirby) and I was overwhelmed by the number of vendors and the quality of the fresh produce. 

The primary objectives were fresh vegetables and pastured meat and chickens, along with some pastured eggs.  I found an abundance of all three.  Until recently, I wasn’t familiar with the term “pastured” so perhaps you aren’t as well. Legally, any chicken called “free range” only has to have access to the great outdoors. Many chicken farms interpret this in the narrowest sense and provide a small opening through which a chicken might somehow find its way outside but only by hurdling thousands of other chickens and traversing one hundred yards of shed floor, littered with the bodies of its fallen comrades. 

Pastured chicken is what we think free range should be. The chickens genuinely live and forage outside, with shelter available from weather and predators. My chicken and eggs came from Olde World Farms in Montgomery, Texas.  I’m not sure exactly where the farm is but Montgomery is less than an hour’s drive away so certainly under my 100-mile parameter set by Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.   This morning we enjoyed sausage patties formed from the sausage meat I bought from Olde World Farms and their freshest ever eggs fried over easy, along side my newly baked bread. But I get ahead of myself.

Among my purchases was a bag of zucchini flowers from the Utility Research Garden stall. (They also had mixed bunches of different colored carrots for sale, so I had to buy some. Of course. Who could have watched Jamie Oliver’s At Home and NOT wanted to roast a load of different colored carrots?  Not me.)  It looks like Utility Research Garden is outside the zone but I figure it was still better than the supermarket stuff. 

Well, to show you how these things snowball, once I had zucchini flowers in my Ikea shopping bag, I needed goats’ milk. I managed to buy the last quart from Swede Dairy Farm. The lovely young lady who helped me had a cooler full of two-quart jugs still but they were for pre-orders. Goats’ milk is great for babies who are allergic to cows’ milk so they have a steady list of orders, in fact, she informed me that there is a waiting list. But one quart would do me fine and I was delighted to be there just in time to claim it. The plan was to make goat cheese with which to fill my flowers, in order to dip them in a light batter and deep fry them.

So I made my cheese. Easiest thing ever. 

Simple Soft Goat Cheese

Ingredients

Goats’ milk

Vinegar

Salt

Other seasonings optional: minced garlic, black pepper, green onion tops, etc.

Method

Just bring your milk to a boil in a non-aluminum pot. (If a fridge magnet will stick to your pot, you are good to go.) Turn off the fire and add any seasonings you wish to include (I added about a quarter cup of very finely chopped onion tops and a goodly pinch of Maldon flaky sea salt) then add 1/3 cup of vinegar for every two quarts of milk. Having only one quart, I had to do a few quick calculations and ended up figuring out that 1/3 cup is five tablespoons and one teaspoon. So I put eight teaspoons of vinegar. Actually two tablespoons and then a further two teaspoons. Oh, the math comes in handy now and again. Stay in school, children.

After just a minute or two, the milk separated into cheese and whey. I put my cheesecloth into my strainer, over a clean, empty bowl and poured the whole mess into the lined strainer. You should too. The whey collected in the bowl and suddenly, the snowball effect took place once more. 

I couldn’t possibly throw all that lovely warm liquid down the drain, not after paying five dollars for the quart of goats’ milk, so I had to make bread.  So I poured the whey into a measuring pitcher and I created a cheesecloth contraption out of a wooden spoon, some rubberbands and a pitcher, which I popped into the fridge so the cheese would continue to drip and dry.

I used a Jamie Oliver bread recipe and replaced a quarter of the white flour with whole wheat and used my whey instead of the tepid water. I also ended up adding more whey to make up for the brown flour which seems to need more liquid to get the dough to the right consistency.  Following instructions, I let it rise once, punched the dough down, then formed it into baguette shapes to try out my new baguette baking tray ordered from King Arthur’s Baker’s Catalogue. If you have a weakness at all for kitchen equipment that you are trying to control, do NOT go to this website. Fair warning.

 

And then on to the actual initial recipe as promised in the post title.

Zucchini flowers stuffed with fresh goat cheese

Ingredients

10-12 zucchini flowers

Canola oil for frying

For the stuffing:
4 oz or 113 g soft goat cheese (if you buy plain at the market, add your flavorings when mixing the stuffing)

1 oz or 28g finely, freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1 fresh egg, preferably pastured, of course

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

For the batter:
1 cup or 125g plain flour

3/4 - 1 cup or 180-240ml sparkling water or soda water

Method

Fluff your goat cheese apart with a fork. It should be crumbly. Add the other ingredients and mix until well combined. Taste before adding the salt as the Parmesan can be quite salty and none may be necessary.

Break off the stems and the sepal (those little green leaf-like things that hug the flower) and cut off the stamen if they are still inside. 

Using a teaspoon and your finger, stuff a little of the filling into each flower, squeezing the petals together gently to make sure the stuffing is enclosed at the base.

 

 

Mix your flour and sparkling water with a whisk, adding the water a little at a time until the mixture is the consistency of thick cream. You want it to stick to the flower but you also want the excess to be able to drip off.

 

Heat your oil and drop the first stuffed flower in. It should start to crisp and brown almost immediately. If it doesn’t, let the oil get a little hotter before dropping the rest of the battered stuffed flowers in. You will probably have to do a few at a time to make sure they won’t stick together in the pot.

Turn them as needed to brown both sides.

Drain on paper towel and sprinkle with a little more Maldon salt and perhaps a few minced onion tops before serving. 

Enjoy!

Flounder (or Lemon Sole)

We live in the land of perennial summer, right here in Kuala Lumpur, not far north of the equator, so I am guessing our flounder is lemon sole, so-called summer flounder.  All I know for sure is that it is relatively cheap, with a delicious delicate flavor and succulent white meat.

Today being Sunday, we went to drop of our recyclable goods near Carrefour Wangsa Maju (How on earth can so few people have so many empty bottles?) and popped into one of my favorite stores for fresh baguettes.  The original French managers in Carrefour have taught the bakers well. We came across two lovely flounder(s?) in the fish department and decided they looked an awful lot like lunch.

After rinsing well and making sure that the fish guys had cleaned all the scales off, I placed the two fish on top of a piece of parchment (so the fish doesn’t stick to the foil), on top of a cross of heavy duty foil, on top of a cookie sheet.  I seasoned them simply, with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, 

cutting slashes in their sides and then topping them with the leftover molho from last night.  ( I put a little bit in their tiny cavities as well. Flat fish like flounder don't have very big insides.

I closed up the foil and popped the whole tray into the pre-heated oven (425 °F) for 20 minutes. 

Not the neatest wrap job, but it worked, okay?

At that point I took it out and opened the foil, checking for doneness. The fish was still cool when I stuck a finger in the slash (I am sure that is how the fancy chefs check for doneness.) so I set my timer for another 20 minutes. The molho began to brown and the fish was cooking beautifully.   

When those 20 minutes were up, I turned the oven off and left the pan in for a further 10 minutes.

The flounder were cooked to perfection, very moist. I served them with garlic bread and salad with a simple vinaigrette. And some cold white wine. My recycle bottle box was too empty.

Enjoy!

Brazilian Night

A Brazilian Night feast with all the special dishes that remind me of our home in Macaé.

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you a man.” These words, this motto, attributed to Francis Xavier, the co-founder of the Jesuit Order, implies that our foundation years are our most important. When you live somewhere long enough, especially in your formative years, the culture, food, music and spirit get in your blood and are forever part of who you are.  Our daughters were not quite two and four when we moved to Brazil. We left when they were six-and-a-half and almost nine so Brazil is that way for our family. In our blood, forevermore a part of who we are.

Tonight we enjoyed the quintessential Brazilian meal. We started with caiprinhas, then picanha (top of the rump) well-salted and grilled over an open flame, chicken hearts cooked the same way, farofa, molho, black beans (so now you know we lived in the Carioca region) and rice.

Beans and rice are staples of the Brazilian daily diet but the type of bean depends on the region you live in. Around Rio de Janeiro, where the people are called Cariocas, the bean of choice is black and food is not cooked or served with much pepper. Up north in Bahia, the African influence is more obvious and the bean of choice is light brown, like a pinto bean. There, peppers are used liberally in most dishes. Down south, closer to Argentina, the Brazilians might well have blonde hair and blue eyes because they are descended from Germans and Italians, and they also favor brown beans but not spicy like the Bahians. 

The molho, which means sauce, is by far the simplest dish. Three major ingredients: tomato, bell pepper (green capsicum) and red or purple onion, all finely chopped. It also has a simple dressing of olive oil, freshly squeezed lime juice, sea salt and black pepper. 

The black beans are traditionally made in a pressure cooker, which keeps the beans relatively whole.  They are seasoned with sea salt, pepper, garlic and a variety of smoked pork parts. Tonight I used bacon and sausage.

Chicken hearts should be cleaned of the membrane and most of the fatty top should be cut off. Leave a little fat as it makes the barbecue flames rise up which gives the hearts a lovely crispy exterior. Marinate these in some sea salt, white vinegar (or lime juice) and olive oil. Grilled over the open flame of a barbecue, there is no morsel more succulent. 

Farofa is toasted manioc flour. This is hard to come by in the rest of the world and my last couple of bags (kept fresh in a Ziploc bag in the freezer) come from a little Brazilian specialty store on the west side of Houston, Texas.  Farofa is an acquired taste, a little like bacon flavored sawdust. Although the bag says Farofa Pronta, which means Ready, I fry a little bacon and add garlic to the pan before tossing the farofa around in the mixture. Traditional Brazilians would add butter as well but I could already feel my arteries hardening in anticipation of the meat. Very tasty sawdust indeed!  

The showstopper of the meal is the picanha, top of the rump with a healthy (or probably unhealthy, I suppose) layer of fat.  This should be liberally coated with coarse salt an few hours ahead of time, and then roasted over an open fire until just pink inside. (Knock the salt off as you cook it.) Once again, this is a hard cut to find outside of Brazil, but if you know a good butcher in your town, he or she should be able to provide you with the piece you need.  Some butchers are unwilling to cut the top of the rump off and then you have to buy the whole rump, but make some stew or a curry with the rest of it. It’s all good. 

 When this happens, put the lid on quickly!

 Beautifully done.All thanks to our experienced grill chef!

And last but not least was the first thing we enjoyed. Caiprinhas! Each glass has the juice of one whole lime so you know it’s healthy. Certainly you will not be in danger of scurvy. Cut the lime into quarters and use your same sharp knife to remove all the seeds you can. Put the lime into a short glass, adding two good tablespoons of sugar. 

Smash the limes with a muddler – if you are fortunate you have a lovely parrot one like mine : ) – 

and fill the glass with crushed ice. Now fill up the glass with cachaça and give it a quick stir. Ideally you would have short straws to put in these glasses. Sadly, I did not. 

I know I have not given explicit ingredients or instructions today. Blame the caipirinhas. You really want to know how? I've written it out here for you: Make caipirinhas! 

 The whole meal!

Enjoy!