Food, Family, Friday: Remember the Alamo & Save Your Cheese Rinds

I printed out this recipe from The Kitchn for pasta fagioli (that’s pasta and beans for all of us who only WANT to be Italian).  We eat a lot of pasta around here and I like pasta fagioli because it’s a little different.  No meatballs in this dish.

I liked this one in particular because it was different still.  Classic pasta fagioli is quite soupy (NOT that there’s anything wrong with that).  It’s peasant food and peasants focus on fresh stuff that creates high flavor and then they stretch a single dish into as many meals as possible.  So leaving it soupy was a way to get a few dinners out of it.  By contrast, the whole motive force behind this Kitchn recipe was to reduce the liquid content and put the pasta and beans at center stage.

That, plus the bacon.  As I wrote recently, everything is better with bacon.  It was another excuse to use Applegate Farms turkey bacon.  If pigs could fly, they would taste this good.

The recipe sat on the island while I started gathering pots and such.  As you likely know, I do not follow any recipe to the letter.  BMW (that's the wife for new readers) looked at the printed paper and noticed my one chicken scratch across the top.

“Remember the cheese rinds,” she read out loud.  “That like remember the Alamo.”

Well, yes, but completely different.  It’s sometimes a losing battle, but I doubt that John Wayne will play me in the movie.

Those of you who regularly grate hard cheeses like Parmigiano-Reggiano probably have a few scraped knuckles from trying to pry the last shreds of real cheese off the rind.  There’s a principle to defend in doing so, of course.  You paid for all that cheese, including the part that’s up against the rind.  It’s simply American to feel a little irked about paying for something you are structurally unable to use.

Insert your own joke here about: taxes, toothpaste tubes, and that last sliver of soap that keeps slipping through your fingers and washing down the drain.

Save your cheese rinds, my friends.  When you can’t scrape any more cheese off the rind and figure you’ve donated enough skin to the grating gods, take the rind and put it into a bag in the freezer.  It will keep for months.  Just like a chicken carcass is the start of a pot of soup or a freezer full of stock, cheese rinds can be tossed into soups or sauces so that you can milk all the final flavor out of them. 

It’s not so much a cheese flavor they add as a depth of flavor in general.  If you ever had a thin soup that tasted like warm water with stuff floating in it (NOT that there’s anything wrong with that), that was a soup that needed cheese rinds.  Or, if you ever wondered how the Italian grandmother down the street turned a simple tomato sauce into a religious experience, check her freezer for cheese rinds.

In this case, I threw two Parmigiano-Reggiano rinds and a Manchego into the pot right when it started simmering.

My challenge is always remembering to use the cheese rinds, especially when I’m working with a recipe.  Recipes generally don’t include using your saved cheese rinds because most people don’t have them hiding in the freezer.  It’s something you pick up from another cook.  Thus, I scrawled the words “remember cheese rinds” across the recipe while it was hot off the printer.

And this was the result.

Food, Family, Friday: BACON -- 'Nuf said

On a recent night, I added bacon to a simple pasta sauce.  Regular readers know it won’t end up that simple, but it’s a good place to start.

It’s actually a pretty standard recipe that I borrowed from Mark Bittman.  It’s essentially one 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes crushed up with your hands, a small handful of basil leaves added to a bunch of good olive oil and enough garlic to wipe the Twilight series from the memories of an entire generation of teen girls.  Usually, I make this dish with Spanish chorizo, but I’ve lost my source of good Spanish chorizo and hunted for a decent substitute.

I used Applegate Farms turkey bacon.  Here, the word “bacon” makes turkey thigh meat better.  In fact, it is some of the best bacon I’ve ever had and it cuts out lots of calories and saturated fat.

Bacon is undergoing a renaissance after many years with a bad reputation that, I submit, was due largely to bad bacon.  Pick up the average name brand package of bacon at the store, look in the little window on the back of the package and you’ll see a mass of fat whispering to you about a place where meat might once have been.  But, don’t worry.  That fat has been salted to within an inch of its life so it can stay on the shelf until some father who knows no better picks it up as a treat for the kids.

New sources of bacon such as Pederson's Farms, Applegate Farms and others are leading this renaissance.  These bacons are largely uncured which means they actually taste like something other than salt and the animals themselves are allowed to move from time to time so they develop meat along with the fat on their bellies.  Things get better.  At Whole Foods Markets, you can also buy pork belly and they will just give you the recipe for turning it into bacon.

Is this a great country, or what?

The bacon renaissance is leading to a certain symbolic quality being attached to bacon.  Bacon makes everything better.

You might have seen commercials calling for a “bacon latte.”  Bacon shows up in the new generation of designer burger restaurants.  And it’s difficult to find chefs who don’t use bacon to make traditional dishes better.  In fact, this idea that bacon makes anything better animates a video from Youtube sensations Rhett and Link.

And if you’re a parent who does not know who Rhett and Link are, then you need cooler children.  Or perhaps you could just rub some bacon on them.