Edible Therapy

The Best Homemade Pimiento Cheese

Saturday was cooking bee, which is my monthly cooking group. Five of us good friends get together to cook a big menu of delicious food. We rotate who does the menu planning and we each get a shopping list. The menu this time included pimiento cheese as an appetizer, cold curried pea soup, watermelon and feta salad, flounder with pink-eyed pea succotash, and blackberry cobbler. Several of the recipes came from Frank Stitt's Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill. I have never been to Stitt's restaurant in Birmingham, AL, but I have thoroughly enjoyed this book! I have made the pimiento cheese twice, and am looking forward to trying out the seafood pirlau, the lemon buttermilk chess tart, and the asparagus with crawfish meuniere, among many others. My sister-in-law, Jane, gave me Stitt's book for Christmas, and, although I read it cover to cover on receiving it, it did take me some time to begin cooking from it. Now that I have started, I have not only discovered a wealth of fantastic southern recipes, but I may have also convinced the cooking bee to take a field trip to Birmingham! (Ladies?) The pimiento cheese is made with homemade mayonnaise and red bell peppers that you roast yourself. You could certainly take the shortcut of using roasted red peppers from the grocery and store-bought mayonnaise, but I think doing it yourself makes all the difference. The only thing we did not use in Stitt's recipe was his homemade mayonnaise, as we did our own version. Get your food processor out for this one, people!

Note of caution: we loved this so much that we all gorged ourselves on it and almost could not eat the rest of the meal. Be careful!

Pimiento cheese
adapted from Frank Stitt's Southern Table

1 lb sharp yellow cheddar
1/4 lb cream cheese, softened
1 t freshly ground white pepper*
3 large bell peppers, roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped
1/2 cup homemade mayonnaise
1 t sugar
splash of hot sauce, such as tabasco or cholula
1/8 t cayenne pepper

*I used black pepper, as I despise the flavor of white pepper, and I really don't mind seeing the little flecks of pepper in the cheese.

Make the mayonnaise:
1 clove garlic
1 t dijon mustard
2 T champagne vinegar
1 large egg
1/4 t salt
1/4 t black pepper
olive oil

Into the food processor, put the garlic, mustard, and vinegar. Pulse until the garlic is chopped. Add the egg, salt, and pepper, and whizz away. While the food processor is running, add extra-virgin olive oil in the thinnest stream, just above dripping out of the bottle, until the mixture looks like mayonnaise (about 1/3-2/3 c).

Make the pimiento cheese: Grate the cheddar in the food processor with the grating disk, or grate it by hand on a box grater. Transfer to a bowland add the cream cheese, pepper, bell peppers, mayonnaise, sugar, hot sauce, and cayenne, and blend thoroughly. Refrigerate and serve chilled with saltines and celery sticks.

By the way, I went to Holiday Ham (newly opened on Union Ave. at Florence) yesterday after work to pick up some potato salad for a going away party for a friend last night, and Papa himself asked me if I wasn't going to also get some of his famous pimiento cheese. I didn't have the heart to tell him what I had in my refrigerator!

Deep Chocolate Cake and Diet, Vol. V

I have slowed slightly in my weight loss since my last post, but despite all of my cheating (mostly pinot grigio), I have still lost three more pounds! Amazing. I have a long way to go, though, and that is why I have decided to go back to the gym. I do about thirty minutes on the stationary bike while reading Jane Austen whenever I can. So far, I have completed Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Friends have recommended that Emma be next on my list, so I intend to head to Burke's today to procure it. What is it about Jane Austen? I am absolutely greedy for more. Why has it taken me until now to realize how much I love these books? I digress. Saturday was the worst cheat day of all. I co-hosted a baby shower for a friend, and I ate with abandon. We had ham biscuits with mustard chutney, roasted veggies, quiche, fruit salad, and of course, dessert. I made a deep chocolate cake from my favorite pastry book: Simply Sensational Desserts by Francois Payard. MAKE THIS CAKE! If you like chocolate, you will love this. Payard's recipe calls for a chocolate glaze, but I decided to simply dust the top with powdered sugar, as the cake is already very rich. The edges of the cake are just slightly crunchy and almost like a brownie, while the inside is creamy, dense, chocolatey goodness. So easy, and so not on the nutri-system diet plan. Back on the wagon now, though.
Total weight loss: 12 pounds

Deep Chocolate Cake:
adapted from Francois Payard's Simply Sensational Desserts

17 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped
3/4 lbs plus 1 T unsalted butter, cut into tablespoons
4 large eggs
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 c flour

Preheat the oven to 350. Butter a 9-inch fluted tart pan.* Dust the pan with flour and tap out the excess. In a microwave safe bowl, heat the butter and chocolate together just until melted, about 1.5 - 2 minutes. Stir to combine. Let cool for ten minutes. Whisk eggs and sugar in a large bowl until combined. Whisk in the chocolate mixture and stir until combined. Whisk in the flour just until blended. Scrape the batter into the preared pan.

Bake for 50-55 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean but with a few crumbs. Cool the cake in the pan on a rack for 30 minutes. Unmold the cake and let it continue to cool on a rack until completely cooled. The chill the cake in the fridge for 2-24 hours. Dust with powdered sugar before sevring, or glaze with chocolate ganache. Or just leave it be and eat it alone- it is delicious!

*I used a springform pan.
Please excuse the poor quality picture: I failed to photograph the whole cake, and this is the piece I brought home for Chad. He was urging me to hurry as I attempted to get the picture, and I did as I was asked!

Diet, Vol. IV

Another update: After a few days of resisting the scale (on the advice of my friend Ginger), today I could resist no more.  Three more pounds lost!  I can't believe this is working, even with my inability to stay away from the wine and my regular cheating.  OK, the cheating has not really been that bad.  I have been to Encore a couple of times, where I have ordered the golden gazpacho and the nicoise salad.  I frequently ordered this salad at Encore before I went on the diet, by the way.  It is really delicious- seared tuna, haricots verts, kalamata olives, and roma tomato slices atop a bed of butter lettuce and sliced potatoes.  I just ask for the dressing on the side now and dip my fork a little instead of having the whole salad dripping with vinaigrette.  The gazpacho was the soup of the day both times I have been to Encore in the past two weeks, and it is so delicious!  There is a strong yellow bell pepper taste, and the acidity is exactly right.  If you go to Encore and Chef Jose Gutierrez is serving golden gazpacho, order it.  You will not be disappointed.  I have also cheated as recently as Wednesday night, when my cousin Alison and I cooked dinner for our grandmother, Baba.  We had a relatively healthy meal: grilled salmon with a green salad (full fat papaya poppyseed dressing) and green beans with tomatoes and a light vinaigrette.  Then we had ice cream with raspberries.  Oops.  At least it was Edy's double churn- half the fat and calories of regular ice cream.  When is ice cream not worth the cheat?  Never, if you ask me.  And of course, my worst offense against the nutri-system program: wine.  Fortunately, my drink of choice is white wine, which has fewer calories than just about any other alcoholic beverage one can consume: about 75 per four-ounce glass as opposed to 85 calories for a shot of most liquors (and that's before you add the mixer).  I don't drink too terribly much when I do have wine, so I guess that helps.  What would help even more would be to get off of my keyster and exercise.  Funny, I have trouble getting up in the morning lately because Dolce, the puppy, gets up long before the crack of dawn and needs to go out.  I get up, let her out, and then put her back in her crate.  Then she gets up again about an hour later and cries to get out of the crate.  A sensible person, especially one who is trying to lose weight, would get up the first time and take the dog for a nice, long walk.  Then the dog would be happy, I would get exercise, and Chad would get another hour's sleep.  It's not as if I am able to go back to sleep once I put her back into her crate, anyway.  I guess now that I have put it out there, I will have to do it.  More on that later.  I will also take some pictures of the nutrisystem food over the weekend so you can see exactly what it is I have been eating.  Total weight loss as of today: 9 lbs.

Diet: Vol III

Update time!  I have lost six pounds as of my last weigh-in, which was a few days ago.  The food is tolerable only because of that small success.  I think I will be able to stick to it on my own once I do another month or so, as most of this is portion control and not eating crap all of the time.  And I like healthy food!  I just also happen to love olive oil, butter, cheese, potatoes, cheese, and sausage biscuits.  Oh well.  Change is good.  Hopefully I will have some more interesting blogging for you in the near future, but in the meantime, you can read my restaurant reviews on www.culturegrits.com.  So far there is only one, but another is soon to come.  Next up is Erling Jensen's.  If there are places that you are curious about, let me know and I will review them!