October 15 – October 21, 2023

Sunday:                     Coq au Vin

(this is the Apple-Almond Cake we had last Sunday)

Monday:                   Leftover Coq au Vin, Salad with Red Roquefort Dressing

Tuesday:                   Bacon, Cheddar and Spinach Omelet

Wednesday:            Mixed Grill with Potato-Carrot Puree (the day of the week to grill – no rain)

Thursday:                 Chili Mac

Friday:                       Potato, Corn and Cod Chowder

Saturday:                  Pizza with the Frankencheese

More Jacques and Less Frankencheese and No Recipe

Headnote:  In a 180 degree departure from the tradition of this blog, we’re going to suggest what not to cook this week.  We’ll be back on track with another dynamite recipe next week, but this week, you’re going to get a bit of a rant.

Did you know that they make cheese from cashews?  Neither did I.  Thus it was that while roaming the aisles of Trader Joe’s and working my way through a grocery list, I grabbed a bag of shredded Mozzarella from the hooked rod on which it hung with its fellow Mozzarella bags.  This is wonderful, I thought, now I have only to find the muffins, the coffee and that salsa and those tortilla chips that Beez likes.

The rest of my day went swimmingly, the week was going well, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, or so I thought.  And then Saturday rolled around and, frankly, it was pretty good, too, right up to dinner time.  Saturday night is pizza night at Casa Stuarti, and after making and proofing the dough, mixing a tomato sauce and sautéeing some peppers and sausage and mushrooms, I reached for the bag of shredded mozzarella.*

As I ripped the bag open I saw that I had somehow picked up “Dairy Free Mozzarella Style Shreds Cashew Cheese Alternative.”  I had to sit down.  But, what could I do?  The dough was ready, the oven was hot, we were getting hungry – hell, I thought, I’ll just use this stuff because right on the bag it also said, “Good for Melting: Use on Pizza.”

It was in fact, pretty good for melting.  But you should, PLEASE HEAR ME, never use this stuff on pizza or in any other nutritional capacity.  It’s hard to describe the taste, but imagine you were eating melted cheese that had been mixed with a pretty good quantity of melted plastic.  The damn stuff was tongue-coating and had a weird aftertaste which might have been the cashews objecting to being used to perpetrate such a fraud.  It managed to destroy the beauty of Frankie’s sausage, my home-made pizza sauce and the excellent crust we have developed over decades in one, fell, Frankenfood swoop.

*Mea culpa – I had forgotten to get fresh mozzarella that day at the Giant Eagle.  The fresh stuff, patted dry, is what we usually put on our pizzas.  So, in small part, the disastrous pizza on Saturday, was my fault.  But comparing my guilt to those food engineers who made that, well, whatever it is, is like blaming the straw that broke the camel’s back and not the 2 tons of opium the poor beast was helping to schlep out of Afghanistan.

Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.  We’re continuing to cook through Jacques Pépin’s Quick and Simple, and have been uniformly delighted with the recipes and Jacques’ drawings and paintings and his general approach to life.

Perhaps we’ll share some of that with you next week.