Category Archives: cheese

Devilicious – food truck review, a little luxury at lunch.

Posted in cheese, lunch, reviews - food truck by

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So there is some upcoming construction at work and they have called in the food trucks to give us more lunch options as moving our cars on our lunch break will become very difficult; nice gesture I think.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of getting my lunch from the Devilicious Food Truck http://deviliciousfoodtruck.com/.  Devilicious was part of the show The Great Food Truck Race on the Food Network.  The masterminds behind this comfort food kitchen on wheels are: Dyann Huffman, Kristina Repp and Mark Manning according to the information I found in their Food Network bio.  My apologies if there have been changes since that bio was posted.

The pleasure was all mine as I  wolfed down savored the duck confit grilled cheese with caramelized red onions, gruyere and mozzarella with a honey port reduction on freshly baked sourdough bread.  To my surprise it was served with some mixed baby greens in a balsamic vinegar dressing; more on that in a minute. “Confit is an old French technique for preserving duck legs in fat. Although most people no longer have to keep duck through the winter without refrigeration, the technique is still used a lot because it makes for delicious eating. The only difficult part is coming across enough luscious duck fat—you can order it for yourself from www.hudsonvalleyfoiegras.com orwww.dartagnan.com. You can render duck fat yourself, or you can substitute lard. Once you make confit, you can keep it in the fridge for months.” (Davis, 2006)

The grilled cheese was of a generous but not over the top size and was proportionate to its $9.00 price tag.  There was plenty of delicious duck and plenty of gooey cheese.  The bread was of a good quality; chewy with a great crust and was toasted perfectly. I am a big bread fan and this was good bread; I forgot to ask which bakery was supplying them…next time.

I thought the sandwich was soft and chewy, but don’t be fooled, this was not a soggy sandwich, something I really appreciated.  Duck is greasy on its own and luckily I had those mixed baby greens with the dressing as the vinegar helped to cut through some of the richness and duck fat. Great addition and a nice surprise.  I would most definitely order this again and again.  I’m actually craving one right now.
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Davis, M. (2006). Duck confit. Retrieved from http://www.jamesbeard.org/recipes/duck-confit

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Cheese Straws – Southern or not, mostly delicious

Posted in cheese, Food, snack by

Although my friend Mo and her mom Cat might deny that Cheese Straws are indeed a Southern Classic; I made them and they are wonderful…but what do you eat them with?  The boys “liked them” but the oldest said they dried his mouth out a little and maybe some ham on them would be better.

Below is the recipe I used.  I am not sure I will make them again anytime soon.  Maybe I am not Southern enough or maybe I just wasn’t the biggest fan.  I have read other recipes and they say to bake until crisp.  Maybe I just need to play around with these some more.

I think more salt, and maybe some dry mustard would be an improvement or even some bacon grease, but then again there are very few things that bacon grease doesn’t improve in the kitchen.  Even our cat Thai would likely agree to this idea!

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Our family cat: Thai

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Sifting the dry ingredients together.

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Creaming the butter and cheese together.  Total nightmare. Next time I am using the stand Mixer. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Cool it buddy!

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All finished

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Ingredients:
A little less than 2 cups all purpose flour

1/2 t cayenne pepper

1/2 t kosher salt

2 sticks butter, at room temperature ( apparently softer than 2 hours in a 73 degree house)
2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese although I hear parmesan works great too.

The How To:

Preheat the oven to 310 degrees F.

Use a mixer to cream together the butter and the cheese then set this aside.  At this point I was ready to throw in the towel because cheese and not quite soft enough butter were flinging  all over the kitchen.  Sift the flour, cayenne pepper and salt together  into a bowl.  Add the dry mixture 1/2 cup at a time into the creamed butter and cheese.  I was told to pipe them onto a cookie sheet using a large star tip.  That wasn’t going to happen in a million years.   I did not get a soft batter but more like a soft pie dough consistency.  Luckily my husband had a cookie spritzer and I used that, which was the perfect tool in my opinion.

Bake for about 15 minutes until set and lightly toasted.  Cool on cookie racks.