Brooklyn Supper

Brian and I are semi-vacationing with old friends in Virginia. I say semi-vacationing because I am printing up a storm in a wonderful print studio in Charlottesville, and Brian is taking care of our toddler all day. Still, the warm weather, good friends, art, and daily thunderstorms have been wonderful. We’ll be back in Brooklyn soon.

I have a pretty serious thing for cheese crackers and cheesy goodness in general. Because most crackers are really not that good for you, I have tried to put some distance between me and my beloved crackers. But when your two year-old shares your love and talks about them all the time, you get to thinking about cheese crackers.

And so yesterday my daughter and I made these crackers together. The recipe is straightforward and forgiving. Just use plenty of flour while rolling out the dough. I put some red pepper flakes and hungarian hot paprika into the dough, and though the crackers are delicious, you might want to add them sparingly for kid friendliness. I made my crackers into stars, but you could roll the dough and cut into strips for cheese straws.

Homemade Cheese Crackers (adapted from the Lee Brothers Southern Cookbook)

3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour
4 oz. shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 stick room temperature butter
2 tablespoons quark, sour cream, or half and half
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)
1/4 teaspoon hungarian hot paprika (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In the bowl of a food processor combine the cheese, flour, spices, and butter. Pulse several times until everything is combined and crumb-like. Add the quark and give a couple of pulses. Check the salt levels, add more if needed, then lightly knead into a ball, divide into two flats, wrap in plastic and set aside for a few minutes.

Roll one of the dough rounds on a well-floured surface. Cut out into your preferred shape (I used 1″ stars and rounds, but strips or larger round would be great too). Place the shapes onto the cookie sheet and bake until set and slightly firm for 10-12 minutes.

Carefully remove from cookie sheet and serve. Store in an air tight container at room temperature for a few days.

People like to look at animals way more than animals like to look at people. It costs $15 to go to the Bronx Zoo if you don’t want to see the tigers, the gorillas, and the butterflies, more if you do. (Word to the wise- skip the tigers. It’s depressing.) Animals, on the other hand, really only look at you if they think you are going to do something to them or you are going to give them some food or you are making a weird noise. Or they are going to eat you. It’s just as well, because it’s unnerving when an animal looks at you.

And the only thing people like more than looking at regular old animals is looking at baby animals. There are lots of websites devoted to pictures of baby animals. I don’t have the sense that our forebears had this need to see cute baby animals. Maybe because middle-class people have babies so much later than they used to, they need a way to get their cuteness fix. I just invented that theory now.

This past weekend, we braved the hardship of waking up early on a Saturday, a thunderstorm, and a bout of car-sickness so we could drive to Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture up in Westchester to look at animals. Totally worth it.

Stone Barns seems like the best place in the world to work. There’s this hair salon on the corner near our apartment where everyone seems to have a good time and on the weekends they throw parties there and all the employees hang out even when they aren’t working and I used to think that was the best place to work. But at Stone Barns every single employee we saw was smiling, even as they went to do physical labor in a muddy field early in the morning on a Saturday. That’s happy.

We were supposed to collect eggs, but the thunderstorm meant we couldn’t go into a field with metal baskets. But after the storm blew over, we fed some pigs eggs, which they seemed to get a kick out of. And then we had a little breakfast at the cafe. Elizabeth and I both had cheddar and ramp scones, which were pretty dang good.

Afterwards, we wandered around the farm for a little while. The highlight was the Berkshire pigs, which were fenced off in little pens in the woods adjoining the farm where they could root around and do piggish things. I think swineherd is pretty low on the animal husbandry prestige list. Shepherds are out in the rolling fields singing songs with their dogs and goatherds go up into the mountains by themselves, which is pretty rugged. But at least swineherds get shade and the pigs seem like they can take care of themselves a little better than sheep. I guess it’s dirtier work, but other than that, it’s got a lot going for it.

The sheep were also pretty cool because they’d just had their lambs and it was cute watching them scampering across the hillside. I’m kind of wondering these days if I’m going to keep eating lamb. With other kinds of ethically raised meat, I feel like the animal got a good deal. Those pigs, for example, got to live in an environment they loved, doing the kinds of things pigs do, while being protected from predators and disease. They really had a chance to achieve their pig potential. That seems fair to me. Lambs, on the other hand, don’t really get the chance to do all their sheepish things and, not to anthropomorphize, but it can’t be to easy on the ewes, either. It sucks because I really like lamb, but I think I’m going to look into mutton from here on out.

We also saw some chickens, but I don’t know what else to say about them except that they were chickens.

At the end of the day, we got a chicken (which was fantastic and which we made into our first chicken mole), some lamb stew meat (our last?), some bitter dandelion greens, stinging nettles, and some green garlic. After months of root vegetables and stews, summer eating finally feels like it’s right around the corner.

A simple grapefruit curd tart with a buttery crust. 

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