Much Like A Cheese

This past Saturday was St. Patrick's Day, but by spreading out my pub visits I managed to invent St. Patrick's Day weekend. You're welcome. Here's the story of how some cooking fit in there.

But first, let's back up even farther to a week ago today - Pi Day! That's 3.14 for you non-math-nerds, or Pi Approximation Day for teh ubernerds in the audience (keep your lousy 22/7). For Pi Day I decided to make pies. That's what you do. So the night before I made a crack pie that cooled down overnight just in time for breakfast, and then a chicken pot pie spruced up with rosemary. Deliciousness may have been involved. Why am I telling you this? Originally I had wanted to pick recipes from Shakespeare's Kitchen, and settled on Chicken Plum Pie and Inside-Out Pie. But then I realized that the Chicken Pie required Renaissance Stock, and gave up on the whole idea.

The plan haunted me, however, and come Saturday I decided I would nip down to McGinty's for a pint (or three) and then grab me some ingredients for Inside-Out Pie. I also decided to complement it with Cheesecake “in the Italian Fashion” which sounds insulting because of the quotation marks but is made in a pie dish and therefore close enough for me. I decided to start with the Cheesecake because it was a simpler recipe, and then go from there.

Also, I did math! For reasons that certainly had nothing to do with the fact that I was drinking, I flipped through the entirety of Shakespeare's Kitchen, noted which recipes used Renaissance Stock, and tallied that shit up. As it turns out, if I quintupled the Renaissance Stock recipe, I would have enough to last me the entire cookbook. So now all I need is a stockpot capable of holding roughly 22.5 lbs of chicken parts as well as the other ingredients, a stove large enough to deal with said stockpot, and then a second freezer to put all the frozen stock in. I'm thinking I can take care of all of this with a livingroom hot-tub and some liquid nitrogen. Easy peasy.

But back to my cheesecake.

Sadly, Caliban is not big enough that I can ignore the existence of "packaging," even when the full container is the perfect amount of an ingredient. You can see Ariel's mixing bowl in the back, looking all sad and lonely. Don't worry. Ariel gets used all the time for non-Renaissance recipes. He is not neglected.

When you take the ricotta, cottage cheese and egg out of their packages, it all fits perfectly fine. I don't have a good post-blending picture because it just looks lumpy and white and kind of gross.

Cinnamon, sugar, and mace are hanging out and ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille.

Once the sugar and spice is pulsed in, it's suddenly worth taking a picture.

There's only one remaining ingredient for the filling - 1/4 cup of coarsely chopped pistachios. Sadly, you can't buy pre-shelled pistachios at Safeway, so I had my work cut out for me. Also, you apparently can't buy unsalted pistachios there either, but I don't think it ruined the recipe or anything. I took a guess that a heaping half cup would get me somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/4 cup unshelled.

Close enough! And since I know facts about volume, I knew that chopping up the pistachios would also condense them a bit. Well, except for one minor detail.

Chopping is for losers.

My new cooking maxim is "when in doubt, hit it with a hammer." You should see the souffles. Or the soup.

Pistachio bits get folded into the filling, and then it's time to grate biscotti for the crust. Except grating is for losers. When in doubt, hit it with a hammer.

I kid, I kid! Aside from getting as many crumbs on the counter and floor as I did in the pie dish, this went fairly well.

I thought it was sort of weird that the recipe doesn't use any kind of moistener for the crust. There's no butter mixed in or anything. But them's the breaks. In the end, the filling moistened just enough of the crumbs to stick to the bottom of the cheesecake, but there was a thick layer underneath that just hung out and stayed in the dish. I guess that was the point.

These tracks are side by side. Sand people always walk single file, to hide their numbers.

Not going to lie: when I was sorting through the thumbnails for this entry, I could not for the life of me figure out how I had managed to get a picture of ranch dip. As it turns out, this is the filling in the pie dish on the oven rack outside the oven and I guess I ran out of prepositions there.

It was at this point that I realized I had made a minor mistake. While I had followed all the directions correctly, I had failed to note the cooking time: one and a half hours. I had to leave for my St. Patrick's Day plans in roughly one hour, twenty five minutes. Showing up five or ten minutes late wasn't going to be a killer, but... I'm not really sure how I thought I would be making two desserts that afternoon. I blame the Guinness.

So 90 minutes later, this comes out of the oven and goes immediately into the fridge and then I leave. This is one of the saddest stories ever.

When I stumble back into my apartment, several pubs and over 24 hours later, I finally get to cut myself a slice.

And then, through the miracles of TIME TRAVEL I take this whole cheesecake into work the next day.

Either that, or my last two pictures are out of order and that is what it looked like when it came out of the fridge. People at work seemed impressed by it - a few went back for seconds. I apologize if they are readers here, but I think it was just low standards. I will caveat by saying that when you are sitting in an office all day, any dessert suddenly becomes magical and life-affirming. I say this because it was true, and not to retroactively justify that time I kept going back to see if maybe this jelly-filled Munchkin would actually have any jelly inside.

Verdict: Meh. It was ok, and really simple to put together, but a heck of a time commitment when you factor in cooking plus chilling. And it just wasn't amazing, as far as desserts go. I'm not going to lie, I prefer New York style cheesecake, but I've definitely had better Italians. In the amount of time this takes to prep and cook, I could have made the foole two or three times over. I don't plan on repeating this one.

Pet Peeve: Rih-CAHT-uh. Man-ih-CAHT-ee. Ugh. Please. No. There are a few other pronunciations based on where in Italy your friendly neighborhood Italians are actually from and where in the US their families have previously spent time, and any of them are better than these. I grew up with Rih-GOT and Man-ih-GOT. And pro-ZHUT, for that matter. All of my actor friends are currently wincing because I'm not using IPA for these pronunciations, and they are right to do so, but it is early in the morning and I want to finish this up. The point is, I died a little inside every time I told someone that the cheesecake contained rih-CAHT-uh because I didn't want to bother explaining what I meant. My mom (hi mom!) only recently found out that some people pronounce it this way and was legitimately horrified. As is right and proper.


I had a friend who used hard g and long i sounds in gyro. We're not friends anymore.