Clockwork Lemon

Herbed Goat Cheese and Mushroom Tarts

These appetizer tarts might look fancy, but they come together quickly and easily. Puff pastry is spread with a herbed goat's cheese, baked, and then topped with a pile of oyster mushrooms sauteed in butter. 

However, they did take my parents and I ten days to make them... because we grew the mushrooms at home from a kit. 

I received one of these grow your own mushroom kits from Mushrooms Canada while I was attending the Food Bloggers of Canada 2013 Conference (which was ahwe-some by the way) and the kit came with a little tag on it that said 'Blog Me'.

I have to be honest, when I saw the tag I thought to myself "probably not" for a couple of reasons. 

1. I am not a good gardener. Always hopeful and enthusiastic at first, then forgetful, then filled with regret as I toss yet another dead plant into the garbage.

2. I have a baking blog, so blogging about a mushroom kit didn't really seem like a good fit

3. We got a TON of swag at the conference so I wasn't even sure if a mushroom kit would make the cut of stuff I was willing to cram into my suitcase. 

But the kit DID make it home and I brought it over to my parent's house (aka where I bring most of my fancy food projects. See: Cheesepalzooa) to ask if they wanted to grow the mushrooms with me. We decided to give it a try seeing as all you had to do after soaking the mushroom bag was mist the box a couple times a day. 

Turnip Cake {Lo Bok Cake}

One of my all-time favorite things to do is go out for dim sum. Nothing like rounding people up (the more the merrier!) and ordering dish after dish of dumplings, buns, egg tarts, and other dim sum treats. This turnip cake makes a regular appearance at dim sum and I'd never given much thought to how it was made or even what it was made out of. Pan-fried and served up in slices, it's crispy on the outside and smooth on the inside studded with bits of pork belly and chinese sausage. So I knew that turnips were somehow involved, and bits of meat, but beyond that I was usually too busy eating it to really contemplate if this was something I could make at home.

When my friend Vincci invited me over to her house with her sister to make turnip cake for Chinese New Year I jumped at the offer. Free baking lesson!

 

 

If you want try making this at home (which I highly recommend) then you'll need to head to an Asian grocery store for most of the ingredients. First up are these long white turnips that make up the base of the cake.

 

Ham and Swiss Muffins

I'm partial towards savory muffins, and this might be the tastiest savory muffin recipe I've ever made.

I had written down the flavor combo in a notebook months and months ago. It was almost forgotten until one afternoon at the grocery store when I noticed a small smoked ham on sale. I decided to buy it and use it for ham and swiss muffins.

As is sometimes the case with recipe development, the first couple of batches ranged from 'meh' to 'lets throw that right into the garbage'.  The ham was used up, the test recipes tucked away in a binder, and the project was put on hold.

It wasn't until a bit of leftover ham from the holidays jogged my memory and inspired me to work the kinks out of the recipe that this verison came into being.

Homemade Farmhouse Cheddar - Part One

Before I started this cheese making challenge I had never considered what went in to making cheddar. I would casually throw a brick (or two) into my shopping cart without wondering why cheddar tastes so different from mozzarella or brie or Parmesan when they are all made with basically the same ingredients. I was living in a state of cheese ignorance.

But thanks to this month's Cheesepalooza challenge, my mom and I have a better idea of what steps are needed to create those familiar orange blocks. Since we still have the aging process ahead of us I can't really declare that we have successfully made cheddar yet, but we certainly got a few wheels of it started.


It all began with 16L of milk. Creamy, unhomogenized, organic whole milk that nearly broke my fingers off while I was carrying it all to the car. 16 liters is heavier than I thought it would be.

Savory Cheddar Chive Shortbread

'Tis the season of cookies and Christmas baking: gracing the covers of every food magazine, piled high on platters at parties, stashed away in your freezer at home. I love cookies as much as the next person, but this sugar overload has me turning my back on chocolate, eggnog, and gingerbread in favor of  the salty side of the baking spectrum: savory shortbread.

Could this also be an excuse to cram even more cheese into my diet? Probably. But I'm telling myself that I'll give them away with bottles of wine as gifts. (If you receive a bottle of wine with no cookies then you'll know that these never made it out of my kitchen..sorry in advance).

 

Last time I made savory shortbread I couldn't wait to play around with different flavor combinations. I wanted to use this cheddar  because it's texture is so soft that it acts almost like butter in a recipe, and it's extra sharp flavor gives the shortbread a cheddary tang.

 

60 Minute Mozzarella {Cheesepalooza}

There are a lot of recipes for homemade mozzarella floating around out there. From traditional mozza recipes that take literally all day and require constant monitoring of the cheese's pH levels to ensure proper stretching to 30 minute mozza recipes that come together in a flash.

For this month's Cheesepalooza challenge my mom and I wanted to try a recipe that we could succeed at despite being cheese making novices. That ruled out the the all-day mozza marathon or any recipe requiring pH strips.

We decided to use a recipe from A Canadian Foodie's website that not only looked like it made some dreamy mozza, but also came with a ton of tips to help out first time mozza-makers.

 

The recipe starts out with 4L of non-homogenized milk. I bought 4L of 2% milk and 4L of whole milk so that we could make a batch of each and then conduct taste tests to see which cheese was better. Not because I needed an excuse to eat more cheese, it was in the name of science.