"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

This entry was brought to you by Fankhauser's Cheese Page, run by a professor of Biology and Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College. I heartily recommend it for any brave souls intent upon their own cheese production.

But first--my own experiments in the past few days. It turns out that it is ridiculously easy to make buttermilk. (Of course, I mean "cultured buttermilk" in this case, not the milk that seeps out of butter churned from the milk recently squeezed out of cow boob.) Basically, you just need to have a tidbit of cultured buttermilk and a lot of whole milk. Then it's simply a question of leaving it alone for a day.

(That's a teensy bit of sour cream hiding behind my buttermilk. It's also a cinch to make and nearly identical to the process of making buttermilk: just substitute heavy cream for the whole milk and you'll have sour cream in a day. And that's my kefir hiding to the side. My roommate assures me it was a success and made brilliant (though I do say it myself) smoothies later.)

Fankhauser says fresh buttermilk is aces for making cheese...but I have never been known for an abundance of patience. So I gave it the old college try with regular milk.


What I lack in adequate equipment, I make up for in enthusiasm. Basically, you need rennet (available at the People's Co-op, fellow Ann Arborians), milk, and buttermilk. Then you need to go to Fankhauser's page because he is much better at explaining these things than I am. And he goes off on tangents about microbes and things. (I can read the words, understand each one individually, and still have to admit that it flew over my head.)


Still lacking in proper equipment. Fankhauser says things like, "hang this cheesecloth in your cheese refrigeration." I'm like, "well, I have neither cheesecloth nor cheese refrigerator nor any convenient place to hang it." I made do with a jelly bag and chopsticks and my grandmother's remarkably large stock pot.


And, voilà! A very soft cheese. Probably a lot softer than Fankhauser would have approved of. Probably a lot softer than most people would be comfortable still calling a cheese. But none of that is the point. The point is that I made cheese. And buttermilk. And sour cream. And kefir. I am obviously the king of the castle and all you non-cheese-making people are not.

Michigan: Great Cherries, Great Pies

Early yesterday morning I ran into five grad students I know at the Kerrytown farmers' market. Now, we all love the farmers' market, but most of us in an 11am-on-Saturday-morning-en-route-to-brunch kind of way. What could possibly bring so many humanities grad students to wake up before 10am on a weekday in July?

Michigan sour cherries, that's what. As often as I complain about Michigan's awful weather, I have to say, the state knows how to grow cherries.

Although I consider myself a seasoned baker, cherry pie is one of those iconic American desserts that I never really thought of baking. It sounds good, but when you think about the reality of the situation, it starts to look more and more like Steinbeck's illusory American Dream. The idea of bright red cherry pie, warm from the oven, with a melty scoop of vanilla ice cream sounds delicious, but fresh cherries have annoying pits in them, and that neon red pie filling in the can just tastes awful.

At first, I was skeptical of the sour cherry--it sounded like a typical Michigan knockoff brand to me. (Want Mexican food? Here's a can of unseasoned diced tomatoes poured over a can of organic black beans.) In other words, like a regular cherry, but not as good.

But boy, was I wrong. The Michigan sour cherry is one of the best fruits with which I have ever had the pleasure to bake. It should be on license plates and the state quarter.

The only drawback to this delicious fruit, is that, like Michigan summers, their season is extremely fleeting. They're only available two weeks out of the year, either in late June or early July, depending on how long winter lasted. So if you want to experience them, don't miss this two-week window! They're hard to find in stores, so your best bet is to hound the farmers' market every day it's open from late June until the cherries show up. There are also farms where you can climb ladders and pick your own cherries.

Sour cherries are SOUR! This means that while they're not very good to eat plain, they are perfect for baking. Most fruit pies require you to add a lot of lemon juice or another souring agent so that the baked fruit does not taste like a sweeter, blander version of the fresh fruit. Sour cherries, however, are so sour that you don't need to add lots of lemon juice--this way, your pie both has character and tastes like pure cherry.

In preparation for the pie my lovely roommate and I were about to bake, I bought a cherry pitter ($12 from Amazon). This reduces the cherry prepping time from about 2 hours to 20 min. It also allows you to make a pie with whole, round cherries rather than with the mangled bits of cherries left over after you've hacked out the pit with a knife. After pitting the cherries, we mixed them with sugar:

Then, of course, we made pie crust:

(And speaking of pie crust, keep your eyes open for an article about how Bessie McAdams makes the best pie crust in the world with vodka and lard. My butter-based pie crust was good and all, but Bessie's pie crust is the best I've ever tasted in my life. More on that to come.)

Cherries go in the pie, dotted with butter:
My roommate constructs a beautiful lattice crust:

And the finished product! Eat with ice cream and enjoy!

"Bear in mind that you should conduct yourself in life as at a feast."

Is there anything lovelier than chilling outside after a bout of unpleasant weather? Whether it's the cold of winter (which, actually, is completely awesome) or the steamy awful horribleness of summer (decidedly not awesome), it's so nice to be released from weather and allowed back in the great outdoors--to a limited degree, obviously, because we don't want to be all up in Nature's face, no one enjoys that. So my co-author and I practiced the ancient art of "voluntary coercion" (when the subject chooses to be coerced) on my esteemed roommate and made our way to the new Ann Arbor food trucks.

Fellas. I'm not gonna lie to you--you know me better than that. I'm going to give you absolute truth right here because that's how I roll and that's what you deserve, being the refined blog readers you are.



This shit is, as the lady says, bananas. It's not a burger (that came later), it's a barbeque tofu sandwich. I'm not the biggest tofu fan--I figure eating vegetables is fine and dandy but tofu is fake meat. I eat meat. I don't want to eat fake meat. But I liked this tofu. It wasn't an imitation of pork or beef or any other kind of meat. It was tofu and it was intentionally tofu.

But I totally coveted Leila's pork bun. I am still coveting it. Man. I want that pork bun.


Later, Roommate Carmen and I went to the new digs in town, The Raven. I had this drink. This drink was a Jack Rose. I've never met this drink before in any other of the gin joints I've been to but I'm thinking this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It may even be the best cocktail that Ann Arbor has to offer.

In other news, this happened:

Yeah, that's a burger. I cheated on the one-burger-a-week rule. It was a new burger. I'm pretty bad at resisting temptation anyway so I definitely can't resist a new temptation. Why would I want to anyway? This burger was a glorious victory of a burger.

And we had dessert. It made Carmen so happy she laughed photogenically.

May I have a box?

Fellow food-lovers, with deepest apologies for my long absence, I take up my pen (well, keyboard) for a slight digression from our normal theme of actual food to explore a new development in the avant garde food art scene. I am sure that our liberal-minded and well-mannered readers will welcome this diversion with the same gusto with which they would sample a new dish.

One night, yours truly was swilling a beer at Old Town when she happened upon a curious object that appeared to be a smallish take-out box with some doodling on the top:


Upon closer observation, I gazed with growing interest upon what appeared to be a sophisticated, yet horrifying, dreamscape of Old Town's ladies' restroom :


Never one to let a good story get away, I immediately sought out the artist. After some confusion with a waiter over the pronunciation of Labatt Blue, I was led to a dim corner table with a single guttering candle. There in the shadows sat the hidden genius behind the momentous work that was soon to rock the food art world. (The artist declines to reveal her identity and will hereafter be referred to as Brown-eyed Athena, according to her preference.) The following is a transcript of our brief interview--the longest to date, that any reporter has ever been able to obtain with the elusive artist:

L: Ms. Athena, I am so interested in your work. I was wondering if you might describe your artistic vision?"

BEA: "What is art?" (followed by a deep, meaningful gaze)

L: "Um, well, perhaps you could tell me what inspired your sketch on this particular takeout box?"

BEA: "Rhianna's album Disturbia."

L: "Oh. I see. Now, some viewers originally thought the girl in the picture was holding a whip with which she meant to attack the approaching monster, but experts then deemed the frail, yet wiry arch to represent the top of a toilet seat. Would you like to comment?"

BEA: "No, I would not."

L: Alright, well let me just ask you a final question, then. Do the contents of the takeout box in any way affect the drawing on its surface? That is, would this work's essence be different if the box contained french fries rather than chicken tenders?"

BEA: "Does this have an essence? But I suppose that since the British patriarchy would require at least some answer from me, I'll concede that the animal-like shape of the chicken tender does resemble the creature in the bathroom stall.

L: "Thank you for your insight, Ms. Athena. Do you have any other comments?"

BEA: "Yes, I do, in fact. I think it's important to consider the reactions of non-human people. If my cat saw this work, she would sniff the corner of the box for two seconds, squeak at it gently, and then go sit by her string and meow until I came to play with her. My cat is really the one who keeps me grounded, so I would like to give her credit for being a collaborator in my work."

Ms. Athena continues to be tight-lipped about the "so-called meaning" of her artwork, but fans are not hesitant to offer their own speculation. A soulful young physicist confessed: "Ms. Athena's work inspires feelings of a destroyed childhood--like when one discovers what a chicken tender actually is."

What do you think? What does the image on this box represent? Is it important to know what food the box encloses before attempting to interpret its meaning? Can art ever have a meaning? Where do you see the take-out box genre heading next? Feel free to post comments below.

Five Guys, Five Thumbs Up

Here is a basic statement about burgers that you should use as a litmus test for whether you and I will ever agree about anything: burgers are best in diners. This statement comes from my heritage--I come from NJ, Land of Diners--but also from a philosophical belief in the true burger experience. If you're at the classiest eatery in all the world and they've ground Kobe beef by hand using diamond knives and unicorn horns, that's not the true burger experience. I wouldn't say no to that experience, but we all must just agree now that it wouldn't be the true burger experience.

Sadly, I'm not in NJ, Land of Diners, anymore. I don't get to have my burgers cooked within hearing as the kitchen doors swing back and forth with every waiter's sally forward. I don't get to have my burgers at the counter or in a red-pleather booth. And I especially don't get to have my burgers in that perfect mix of skeeziness and deliciousness that is chipped dishes and silverware bound in a napkin-zombie. It's not a true burger experience, right, unless you have to ask yourself (at least once) whether you think you're going to be ill later from it.

I'm in Ann Arbor instead. I get black bean burgers on tempeh buns served with organic grass juice or whatever. (Be aware: I would also not say no to that meal. I kind of dig the idea of organic grass juice.) The closest I get to proper diner burgers is Five Guys.

Oh, Five Guys.

Look at that burger. Just look at it. Look how squishy that bun is. Look how all the deliciousness is sliding out the sides--overwhelmed, as this burger is, by its own abundance. This burger says to the world, "I am burger. I am here for you." This burger loves the consumer and wants to make the consumer happy in a phoenix-death of savory goodness. This burger believes in the greater good. This burger loves people. This is the kind of burger that's all about the camaraderie of the diner experience--the 2AM diner jaunt with your teenage friends on Friday night, the post-random-academic-achievement celebratory jaunt with your parents, and everything in between--this burger is about love. That's not even hyperbole; that's fact.

Five Guys keeps going, though. They--like all proper burger providers--know that burgers (though they are the main event) must share the limelight with the fries. A burger without fries is a tragedy. It's actual, King Lear-style tragedy. And let's be serious here: let's just ignore the naysayers who try to substitute a salad for fries. You're only hurting yourself, naysayers.

I had to take this picture after a certain amount of delay. I had a burger in my hands, alright, you don't pause for photography when you have a burger in your hands. And I know none of you fine internet peoples would suggest otherwise, so let's move on. There was a certain dent made in the quantity of fries before I remembered that I needed some photos for this blog or, you know, that I was anything besides a burger-consuming mouth. I was occupied.

I may lose some of you now, readers, when I tell you my feelings on fries. I'm going to preface it by explaining that I ate inner-city school lunches for years. There are some "foodstuffs," right, that my stomach sees as a challenge when it should run and hide in a corner. My stomach has developed odd preferences. That's my preface. But here's the real deal: I think fries are best after they've been sitting in ketchup (I'm talking lakes of ketchup) long enough to get a bit cold. I am perfectly content to eat day-old fries if they've been soaking in ketchup. Fact. And Five Guys has the kind of ketchup dispensers where you have to put some arm into it, you know what I'm talking about, to get a full dollop in your tiny plastic dish. Their fries come in a cup, too; perfectly shaped to allow the bottom tier of fries to laze about in the ketchup. There are so many fries too that the bottom tier is inevitably a bit cold and thoroughly soaked by the time you get to it. In other words, the bottom of the cup = perfection.

I will end with my one piece of criticism of that day's burger experience. I was perplexed and unnerved to read the contradictory claims on the walls of the establishment. On the one hand, it claimed to be "hamburger heaven." I see a sign like that and I say to myself, "Ah, this is where the burgers go after they die. Burgers are such kind-hearted things that they want to be eaten again, even in the afterlife. How noble!" But then I read the the next poster: "Five Guys serves heaven on a bun." This perplexes me. I thought this whole establishment was the ideal place of the burgers. But if Five Guys is serving that heaven in the bun....that means, like scalawags and scoundrels, they're luring the burgers back with the mirage of heaven and then serving them up to be devoured again just when the burgers thought they were finally safe from all that masticating. "I'm finally safe in heaven!" the burger says to itself in the split second before you chew through its heart. Not cool, Five Guys. Not cool.

But I forgive you.

Dessert gala kicks off McAdams-Watkins food blog; cakes critiqued

ANN ARBOR—Saturday evening at Vinology saw the inaugural celebration of a new food blog, touted as a possible rival to “Linwick and Cleary Review Film According to a Rigorous Five-Star Rating.” “McAdams and Watkins Dish” will compete for cohort leisure reading, promising toothsome material about, well, food, with the occasional literary twist.

Co-founder and chief photographer Bessie McAdams said that she was enjoying her dessert but couldn’t secretly help wishing she had paired a burger with her haute dessert wine. After a fracas involving a mismatched glass of Cabernet Sauvignon with a molten lava chocolate cake and mint icecream, overwrought second co-founder Leila Watkins borrowed a pad of sticky notes from McAdams and began pestering gala attendees to dish about their desserts. Attendees were taken aback by such unusual gala behavior but eventually decided to humor Watkins.

Kate Middleton, poet and future queen of the English-Australian empire, described her “Milk and Cereal” dessert as “non-pedagogical”: “It didn’t really teach you how to eat it,” she complained. While she admired the spun sugar art on top of her dessert, Middleton thought her one-dimensionally sweet treat lacked complexity. While she thought it “worked as a metaphor,” the overall picture didn’t pay enough attention to the importance of milk as a crucial collaborative member of breakfast. “But don’t trust me,” said Middleton. “I’m unreliable because of Top Chef. Tom Colicchio made me that way.”

Resident “science person,” Stephen Chuck Norris, opted for Vinology’s celebrated dessert tacos with avocado icecream. “Not desert tacos,” he hastened to add, “that’d be gross.” Citing the presence of pineapple and “some red stuff,” Norris awarded his dessert tacos four stars, using a fool-proof scientific method to arrive at this conclusion. Norris would not discuss the specifics of his methodology as a longer paper on his dessert taco research is forthcoming from Nature in June.

University of Michigan lab tech, Carmen Yu, also ate dessert tacos. “At this point my standard for a good dessert is something that doesn’t make my

face break out in hives and my lips swell up,” said Yu, who is purportedly allergic to green chilies, hops, mice, latex, science, puppies, and sunshine.

Alistair Chetwynd, 67, declined to offer any critical opinion of his food. In a slightly condensed version of his actual press statement, Chetwynd said, “The glory of literature is sacrosanct. I have nothing to say about food. … There is enough bad theorising done about literature without exporting the methodology to discussion of food. Off-record I’m happy to discuss or close read. But never to theorise or criticise. …” Chetwynd went on to offer a very lengthy close reading of his peppermint stick cake, none of which can be printed because it was off-record. One guest, however, later overheard Chetwynd claim that his dessert had “survived the compulsion of the text.” Many pundits tout this as an example of the way Chetwynd often pretends to be against theory while actually reinscribing a humanist resistance to theory (see de Man).

Mathematician and wave expert Rafe Kinsey also ordered the peppermint stick cake but was reticent about his ability to critique it. “It tasted fine. I guess I’m just low brow,” said Kinsey, who subscribes to the New Yorker, audits a Shakespeare class in his free time, and attends Irish drama productions on a regular basis. While he did finally say that the dessert reminded him of Riemann surfaces, some guests were appalled by his support of the hegemonic convention of using utensils to consume one’s dessert.

McAdams, of “McAdams and Watkins Dish,” celebrated with a festive donuts and coffee plate. She reminded her colleagues that it is impossible to understand her dessert without a thorough study of the different genres of donuts. The “child” donut, often considered to be the ur-genre of donuts, can be known by the presence of chocolate, sprinkles, and bright colors. The “diner” donut genre possesses a whimsy that evokes childhood nostalgia while still being an adult food. The “donut hole” genre is prized for the speed at which it can be eaten. McAdams said her dessert played on the conventions of these latter two genres, combining them into a new hybrid genre that evokes breakfast without quite being breakfast. She also said to be sure that everyone noted the mouthfeel of her dessert, which was grainy and soft. “If I could make one tiny suggestion,” McAdams added, “I think Vinology should consider adding a burger to this dessert.”

Gala attendees asked Watkins if she was always going to think of food as a text or if she was ever just going to enjoy her dinner. “OK, first of all, that idea is weirdly eucharistic,” she said. “Second of all, ‘always’ is such a problematic term. One might say that I always already write about food in a predetermined fashion, so this entire question is pointless.”

I'm a Burger Girl in a Burger World

To be clear, I'm not the one who can offer much in the way of recipes and cooking advice. I can't even properly offer reviews or general foodie snobbery--I'm just not capable of it. What I can offer is this: my massive, unadulterated love of burgers. I love this foodstuff more than is wise, more than is necessarily standard operating procedure, and more than is--to be honest--uncreepy. I had to set limits for myself during a stressful school period a couple of years ago. "Self," I said to myself, "this has gotten out of hand. I'm cutting you off." I came up with a new rule then--and it may seem hyperbolic to you now but it is honestly the only version of this rule I could manage to live by at the time--that I couldn't have more than one burger a day. My self-control has grown since then and the rule I try to live by now is no more than one burger a week. I often fail.

So my contribution will be mostly a discussion of the burgers I eat/make/am given. I feel passionately about this subject, I'm not gonna lie. I have Thoughts on preparation of the meat, toasting of the bun, toppings, sides, and so many other things. And because of my peculiar limitations, this kind of post will probably happen only once a week at most.