Ricotta cheese is used in Mexican cooking in various ways—to fill squash blossoms, empanadas, tacos, quesadillas, fried pockets made with corn tortilla dough, and to make faux “scrambled egg” dishes, like the two recipes, shown below, I made from The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy: Ricotta Scrambled in Tomato Sauce and Ricotta Scrambled Like Mexican Eggs. Like Crumbled Indian Cheese with Peas from Entice with Spice, the first DCCC pick, (more…)

(Adapted from Diana Kennedy’s recipe in The Art of Mexican Cooking)

This soft, crumbly white cheese, whose name means literally “fresh cheese,” is used in a variety of ways in Mexican cooking. According to Diana Kennedy, author of the current DCCC pick, it may be eaten uncooked as a snack with drinks, crumbled on top of various cooked foods, such as enchiladas and soups, or cut into strips for chiles rellanos and other dishes.

As queso fresco is used in a number of egg dishes and red pozole, a famous Mexican soup, that I’d planned to make, I looked for it at the specialty foods market in my town. Unfortunately, it was not available, even as a special order. (more…)

Any fool can grow Swiss chard, I like to say. My gardening strategy is a process of elimination. I’ll give something one or two tries, and after that it’s off the list; I’ll let someone else, with greener thumbs than me, grow it. My goal is a garden of foolproof foods, and chief among them, come rain or shine, is Swiss chard. (Other foolproof greens are collards, kale, and mustard greens; but not spinach or watercress.)

Long before I started growing greens, (more…)

A lot of good cooking is derived from using up what’s at hand. In this case the recipe for Dried Beef Hash, or Aporreada de Huetamo, from The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy allowed me make use of some dried beef I had in the freezer (it’s always a good day when I actually remove something from our over-packed freezer instead of just adding to it) and, since this hash include eggs, some of the eggs that are being produced (more…)