Intentional Slow Food

I had today off, so if you're wondering, that's why I had to the moxie to make homemade mayonnaise at lunchtime. Otherwise, I scarf down my lunch and run outside like a little kid to check on my garden when I get home for lunch. None of this lounging about business.

Chris and I often laugh at the people who think they'd be so bored without work. I RELISH the days I have at home. Even when I'm bored.

Thoughtfully wasting time is an art.

But I digress.

For dessert I made a Ricotta Cheesecake from Grow Organic Cook Organic (review here). We also made Chicken and Asparagus Risotto from the same book. They were both pretty good, but perhaps folks in the UK tend to not like as much seasoning as much as us folks in the US - we had to adjust accordingly (no offense my UK friends!).

Ricotta Cheesecake
I had a little bit of a sweet tooth today, and this sounded like it would fit the bill. Not overly sweet, but instead a bit savory.

2 cups ricotta cheese
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
6 tbls. sugar
Finely grated rind of one lemon, one blood orange (farmer's market substitution!)

Pastry crust:
1 1/2 cups flour
3 tbls. sugar
1/2 cup chilled butter, cut into small chunks
1 egg yolk

Oven to 375^o

We freeze our flour to keep it fresh, and this recipe called for the pastry dough to be cold. I sifted the flour and sugar onto the clean counter, made a well, and added the egg yolk. I mixed that in, then added the butter and worked it in. This took a while. Meditative almost.


Then I reserved about 1/4 of the dough to make the top crust, and squished the rest into a 9" tart pan with removable bottom, covered it with foil, and weighed it all down using beans. This baked for 15 minutes, and after I took it out, I took off the foil with the beans, and let it cool on a wire rack.

Then I mixed all the wet ingredients in my mixer. All in one shot!


Add the wet mixture to the cooled shell (it will be nearly full!), and then roll out the reserved 1/4 crust and make designs if you're good at that sort of thing. Cookie cutters work best for me (hence the Christmas stars on top of ours).


The book said this bakes for 30-35 minutes, but ours took about 42 minutes. And it was perfectly done!


We both agreed that this recipe would be divine with a splash of orange extract in the mixture, or with marmalade as a topping...

I won't bore you with the risotto recipe. It was just Ok - nothing great...



Chris mentioned to me today that he'd like to buy a nice pepper grinder in which you can adjust the grind size of the peppercorns. When I checked the mail today, the newest Penzey's Spices catalog just arrived - and included their new and improved peppermills! It was fate. We stocked up on some of the spices we were getting low on, and splurged for the new peppermill set with 3 different kinds of peppercorns ($47 total - a total bargain).