Cooking Out of the Box - Recent Experiments
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Our produce box contained cherries this week, and I decided to make cherry & goat cheese beignets, an idea adapted from Art Culinaire. Their version is "sour cherry and goat cheese beignets", and clearly a dessert item. I made mine savory by modifying the filling somewhat.
The beignet dough in their recipe is analogous to pie dough, but features cream cheese and a bit of butter, not butter and shortening or whatever you put in your pie dough (yes, true lard is the best, but also hard to find). It also has baking powder to give the dough some lift. To assemble, roll the dough into two rectangles. On one, pipe the goat-cheese mixture (goat cheese + ricotta + salt to taste) into little mounds. Top each mound with some cherries, which have been cooked down in a bit of sugar and vanilla. Brush beaten egg onto the other rectangle, lay it on top of the dough/cheese/cherry assembly, and then cut in between the goat cheese piles. Press to seal, and you're ready to deep-fry.
One can not live on beignets alone (though one is occasionally tempted to try), so I also served some monkfish, which I seasoned with salt and lemon, wrapped in cabbage leaves (also from the produce box), and then steamed. I had hoped that the cabbage leaves would cling to the fish, making pseudo sushi rolls when I cut through it, but that didn't happen, so I just laid the leaves on the plate as a bed for the monkfish. I topped the monkfish with a sage beurre blanc sauce, which used the sage from a "mixed-herb" packet in the box.
For dessert, we had vanilla ice cream topped with produce box peaches.
All in all, a satisfactory way to use up some of our produce box shipment. I feel like we're getting more into the swing of things, planning dinners for the few nights after the box so that we use up as much of the ingredients as possible. Some still goes to waste, but that amount is getting smaller.
To accompany dinner, we drank Tablas Creek's 2003 Rosé. The winery only makes a small amount of this Rhone-variety rosé, and it's always well-liked, a perfect wine for the summer. My tasting notes mention the deep color, the aromas of strawberries, flowers, and tomatoes, and the searing acidity which hangs around for much of the long finish.
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