It was good. In fact, it was great. But it wasn’t ricotta.
It was “rrrrree-go-the.”
It wasn’t until I heard every other person in the cheese class pronounce it “ree-cott-ah” as they sampled their little plate of cheese that I decided to take my stand, or else my Fury Language was bound to erupt.
“Keith,” I called out in a crisp, clear voice. “How would you use this rrrrree-go-the to make rrrrree-go-the salada? My mother would flip out if I brought it to our Christmas Eve antipasto. It would be better than bringing her a surprise grandbaby.”
He didn’t look at me with a puzzled expression, and he understood exactly what I was saying. “You’d need to let it drain a little bit longer, then put a layer of cheese salt down in a form or bowl, add the ree-cott-ah, then more salt, another layer, more salt, another layer, more salt. Coat the outside of the cheese with salt as well, wrap it in butter cloth, and put it in the refrigerator for two weeks.”
Come on, dude, I thought to myself. I’m giving you an opening here.
Say it. Say it.
“Hmmmm,” I said. “That’s all there is to making rrrrree-go-the salada?”
“That’s it,” he said, nodding.
“For rrrrree-go-the salada?” I repeated. “I could start out with this recipe for rrrrree-go-the?”
“Sure,” he said.
I nodded. I thought about following it up with another Italian word, but really, the only ones I know for sure have a subtext of raunch to them—unless you count the cured meats I know—so in case he had really been to Italy, I kept quiet. I had already been late to class, so I didn’t want to be kicked out for throwing some shade on his mom’s anatomy.
We moved on to making mascarpone, which was fine—the class, as a whole, only butchered one vowel, so I really couldn’t take issue with that. But when we were done with the sample and Keith announced that we were now moving on to mozzarella (motts-a-rell-ah), it was time for an extra blood pressure pill.
“Mootz-a-dell-eh [mozzarella] has always been a mystery to me,” I piped up, trying to seem eager and get a good look as Keith poured whole milk into a stainless steel pot. “If I could put mootz-a-dell-eh on everything I ate, the world would be a glorious place.”
I saw the hippie next to me take a glance sideways and notice that the girl who wanted to eat cheese on everything could only manage to get half of her ass on the chair seat. Then she spilled her disgusting kombucha drink all over the counter, and if I wasn’t so humble, I’d swear I did that with my mind. After all, if these cheese tricks were true and I could go home at that very moment and make mootz-a-dell-eh, I was a superhero. And I finally discovered a use for kombucha, other than inciting nausea; it cannot be beat for cleaning up runny cheese and strawberries. Ate it up like it was acid.
For the rest of the class, Keith avoided eye contact with me, and I got the distinct impression that having a native in his class was dulling his shine. Still, even though he couldn’t properly say the very names for the magic he was creating, I don’t think I could have found anything better to wake me up on a Saturday morning.
After the class was done, some of the students milled about the kitchen supply store where the class was held and bought the equivalent of magic wands and fairy dust: citric acid and a cheese thermometer. The hippie was lost; no surprise there, but when she saw the cheese thermometer in my hand, she asked me where I found it. I led her over to the display, where she gasped and said, with a wrinkled brow, “I’m not going to pay thirty dollars for a thermometer just to make a fancy name for cottage cheese.”
I could have killed her. There was a full set of Henckels knives two feet away or twine I could have piano-wired her neck with, but I didn’t think spending the rest of my life in the big house was worth taking the life of a woman who couldn’t tell the difference between a lipstick tube and a Playtex tampon. Instead, I simply turned and said, “Rrrrree-go-the is not fancy cottage cheese; it is the food of my people—”
“So I heard,” she said.
“—just like kale is the food of your people,” I continued, adding another cheese thermometer to my basket out of spite. “And if you happen to have noticed that the Kale Wall at Safeway is now gone, you are welcome. An aggressive letter campaign to corporate repeatedly emphasizing the words ‘filthy salmonella hands,’ ‘fondling,’ and ‘dreadlocks’ got that thing down within a week.”
She sneered at me and walked away.
“Kombucha is next!” I called after her. “I already have a first draft!”
I wasted no time, and on my way home from the store, I bought a gallon of whole milk and I was all set to begin my life in wizardry.
I smiled as I watched the thermometer climb to 160 degrees, then 170, then 180. I took it off the burner, stirred in the vinegar, and watched the magic happen. I was breathless.
“Oooh, whatcha makin’?” my husband said as he came up behind me and peered into the pot. “Something from cheese class?”
I nodded and smiled, bringing up the slotted spoon that revealed the beginnings of the curds forming.
“Oh, my favorite!” he exclaimed. “Cottage cheese!”
I turned and looked at him, about to burst into a soliloquy of Fury Language when he smiled.
“Just kidding,” he said. “I meant rrrrree-go-the!”
Ricotta
* * *
1 gallon fresh whole milk (do not use organic; it is ultra-pasteurized)
1 tablespoon cheese salt (specifically cheese salt, because it is not iodized; available at kitchen stores, Amazon, etc.)
⅓ cup distilled white vinegar, plus 1 teaspoon
1. Rinse the inside of a nonreactive (stainless steel) pot.
2. Add the milk and salt and stir several times. Cook over medium heat. When the milk rises to 180 degrees (buy the thermometer; it’s worth it), take the pot off the burner, add the vinegar, and stir for 1 minute. Curds will form immediately.
3. Then cover the bowl with a dry dishtowel and walk away for 2 to 3 hours. Do not look at it. Do not lift the towel to peek underneath. Do not stir to make sure the magic you are pretty certain you just made is still there. It is still there.
4. Now get a colander, and line it with butter muslin (again, kitchen stores, Amazon, about six dollars). Butter muslin is not called cheesecloth; cheesecloth is much too open with the weave and you’ll lose way too many curds by using it. Butter muslin is more tightly woven, but will permit excellent drainage.
5. With a slotted spoon, ladle out the ricotta into the colander, and let it rest for about 2 hours; less time will provide a creamier ricotta, and longer will make it drier.
6. Add salt to taste after draining. The ricotta lasts up to 7 days in the fridge in a sealed container.
Queso Fresco
* * *
1. Exact same recipe as ricotta, except use 2 tablespoons of cheese salt and ⅔ cup distilled white vinegar to produce larger curds.
2. After draining, wrap the queso fresco in butter muslin and weight it down with a can of vegetables or something substantial. Let it drain for 2 hours. The drained cheese will be more compact and denser than ricotta.
Incredibly Easy Goat Cheese
* * *
This requires no cooking whatsoever. You only need to locate a large tub of goat yogurt (think Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods) and pour it into a colander lined with butter muslin. Drain the goat yogurt for 18 to 24 hours. (You can drain it on the counter if the kitchen isn’t very warm, or you can do it in the refrigerator, which will take about 6 hours longer.) And then that’s it. Add salt, herbs, honey, whatever you feel like adding. I made a fantastic log with marjoram, garlic, and chervil, and another with Italian herbs that was equally awesome.
Incredibly Easy Cream Cheese
* * *
Same method as the goat cheese, except use regular dairy yogurt with the highest fat content you can find. Line the colander with butter muslin, add the yogurt, and drain for 18 to 24 hours. Add salt to taste.
I added caramelized onions, truffle salt, and parsley to mine. Take this to parties, tell them you made it, and you’ll have cheese cred for life, my friend.
The moment I pulled into my driveway, there was no ignoring the smell.
This was truly awful, permeating and sharp, and decidedly not the aroma of spoiled, rotten cabbage that was produced by the paper mill and hung over our little stinky town.
Great, I thought to myself, sighing deeply, attributing the stench to the newly opened barbecue place behind my house that had set up an enormous smoker in the parking lot that piped the same amount of smoke into my backyard as the Polar Express.
“This will not do,” I mumbled to myself as I grabbed my purse and wished again that one of my sisters had married a lawyer. I headed toward the front door, where the stink only got stronger.
“I will not live under a rotten meat cloud, BBQ King!” I yelled loudly as I pulled out my keys. “I will see you in court as soon as I make friends with George Clooney’s wife!”
But when I opened the front door I was enveloped by a thickly hanging bank of fog that was accompanied by a burning, acrid stench. It hovered in front of me, so thick it was difficult to see through.
The house was on fire.
Oh my god, I realized, my husband always said this would happen! He always insisted that the two prior years of mail that had piled up in my office would combust before I got the shredder fixed.
The first thing I did was grab Maeby, my dog, and push her outside to safety. After that, I froze. Should I grab the shoes I just got on eBay or the portrait of my grandfather as a little boy? What about the green vintage coat I just found in my size? IN MY SIZE? My sewing machine! Get the sewing machine! TiVo! TiVo! There’s a Tom Hiddleston movie on there that I haven’t watched yet! How hard would it be to drag my 1948 O’Keefe & Merritt stove outside? I just got awesome Kate Spade tights at T.J.Maxx for $3.99! Those must be saved! What about my computer? I’m in the middle of writing this book!
I almost hit myself in the face.
Who cares about the frigging book? I have made what I consider wise investments. I don’t have a 401(k). Instead I have a comprehensive, world-class collection of Spanx, which was now in danger of melting into a giant, unusable puddle! At a hundred bucks a pop and enough pairs to rotate before I am forced to do laundry, I have a Toyota’s worth of flesh-colored spandex in my middle drawer.
The panic was paralyzing. I didn’t know what to grab first. I finally pushed myself to run to the stairs and save my body shapers, keeping my eyes out for flames and falling timbers. While I agree it may be foolish to sacrifice one’s life to rescue rubber lingerie, the importance of a well-fitting girdle cannot be overstated. There are those that roll up and create something akin to a Speedo, like two hot-dog-sized tubes on either side of your hinterlands, as they simultaneously cut off circulation to lower extremities and create a pins-and-needles sensation where no one wants a pins-and-needles sensation except E. L. James. There are those that roll downward until they are cradling your fat roll like a hammock rocking a one-eyed, limbless baby. There are those that are too efficiently clingy, enough to cause Spanx Thumb, a repetitive-motion injury incurred by struggling to pull them down in the event of a middle-aged lady coughing, sneezing, getting out of bed, or being told a joke far too saucy for her easy-release bladder. And then there are those that aren’t up to the job and blow themselves out on the tenth outing, creating a back access panel where there shouldn’t be. Unless, of course, you are E. L. James and need to find another fifty shades of shame.
The closer I got to the kitchen, the thicker the haze was, and as I passed my prize stove, which was now black with char, I saw smoke billowing out of it like there were a thousand tiny little vapers sitting inside, but without the accompanying aroma of candy corn or drag queen.
And because I have watched numerous movies in which people open doors to rooms and cause back drafts that char them worse than anything served at Sizzler, I pulled the door to the oven down and was smacked with a pyroclastic flow of choking smoke and ash. Inside was a giant, broiling ashtray, but thankfully no flames. Just two cookie pans full of what looked like hardened lava, chicken that had changed form from a solid to liquid and became a bubbling mass of charcoal.
This is impossible, I thought to myself. I turned the stove off before I left. I know I turned it off. I had started making my sweet little dog her chicken jerky treats after China was caught, essentially, melting Tupperware into the shape of dog bones and then shipping them to Costco. So I do it myself now, and had just finished the last tray, and had turned the oven off but left the trays of chicken in the oven to let them finish jerky-ing.
I looked at the dial on the stove, still puzzled as to what had happened.
Apparently, it’s easy for anyone to think that they are turning the oven off by turning the knob to the right, but they have actually turned it to broil—before leaving to get their roots done.
For a little over three hours.
Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, right? Right?
Isn’t that the law?
Right is OFF.
Left is ON.
Except the law is broken on my stove, and as I just checked, also on my kitchen faucet, bathtub, outdoor spigot, and essentially every other place in my house that defies the law of a well-established and culturally essential nursery rhyme.
So anyway.
I aired the house out as best as I could, employing every fan I had pointed at open doorways and windows. The smoke, eventually, sort of, cleared out.
What remained was the aroma of a chicken that I had not only broiled but also cremated in my oven. In fact, I did more than cremate the chicken, I Pompeii’d the chicken to the point that if I had the wherewithal to pour plaster over the cookie sheets, I would have had a tourist attraction on my hands.
It did not smell like a campfire. It did not smell like barbecue. It did not smell like jerky. The stink that permeated every inch of my house—every surface, including rugs, furniture, linen, and clothes—was a concentrated, boiled-down, aromatic stew of hot metal and charred meat, accented by notes of burned hair, which all added up to one gigantic death fart.
I quickly Googled products that eliminated “smoke” smell and ran to Home Depot and Auto Express to secure them, hoping to erase the stench before my husband came home. I even ordered dry chem sponges that are used by professional crews for fire cleanup. Despite the effort of spraying two cans of smoke and odor eliminator, and sprinkling baking soda on everything, I heard the “stink” laugh at me as my husband walked through the door at six o’clock, gasped, and then covered his mouth.
“What the hell happened?” he said in between coughs.
“Oh, that smell?” I said, trying to be casual. “I think BBQ King got slammed at lunch today.”
“Oh really?” my husband said. “Are they cremating corpses now? Because that is not pulled pork.”
“There was an incident,” I relented.
“What’s all of this white stuff? Please tell me it’s house dandruff and that you weren’t trying to make crystal meth.”
“There was a situation with the oven,” I tried to explain. “That oven is NOT righty-tighty!”
My husband’s face was beginning to form a grimace. “It smells like a new car in here,” he said. “With a Molotov cocktail burning inside of it.”
“Did you know that every single on and off knob we have in this house is defective?” I stuttered.
“It’s all of that junk mail from Discover Card and American Express, isn’t it?” he said, untucking his shirt and trying to use the hem as a mask. “I can’t believe you finally set the house on fire.”
“I did not set the house on fire,” I protested. “I only cooked a chicken until it became an element.”
“For how long?” my husband said. “Are you still cooking it?”
“No!” I said adamantly. “I got it out before the pan turned liquid.”
“Didn’t you sme
ll it? Didn’t you see it? I can barely see my hand. It looks like China in here!”
What he didn’t know was that I had already cleared out ninety percent of the smoke due to my plan of action and that, in my eyes, it looked pretty damn good now. In fact my eyes hardly stung anymore.
“I can’t even smell it now,” I lied, since the stench had burned itself into my nostrils to such an extent that I knew I would die smelling it.
“Fix it, Laurie,” he said.
“I will, I will,” I said, terrified to hear what he would have to say once he smelled our dog, who had been marinating in the smoke with her head under a chair until I came home.
He wrinkled his nose as soon as he let her in. “Oh my god!” he snapped at her, as he foolishly attempted to fan the remaining smoke outside with the palm of his hand. “She smells like my grandma’s perm!”
“I’m sorry,” I pleaded.
“Just fix it,” he demanded, to which I simply nodded.
In the days to come, I found out just how evil smoke from a cinder chicken can be. It got into everything—everything. And once the smoke settled, a thin layer of black ash covered everything, making the effort of my last dusting, three months prior, entirely worthless.
The washing machine ran for a week straight. I rented a steam cleaner to get the soot out of the rugs. Then things took another turn for the worse when I washed every wall down with water and vinegar to neutralize the smell, and then had to try to figure out how to stop my house from smelling like a torched side salad.
Everyone who came near my house was invited in for a test smell. Neighbors, friends, mailmen, the UPS guy, my plumber, the landscaper, and anyone else I could get my hands on.