Blue Swoon

I recently switched over to using blue cheese salad dressing exclusively. For years I’ve been pretty much anti blue cheese in every form. It was too strong for me, and the idea that it was mold that gave it its character just ooked me out.

That I actually came to like it was a somewhat convoluted process. I had a tomato recipe from Bon Appetit that I made for our Christmas Eve dinner last year. Plum tomatoes get cut in half, seeded, and drained for 15 minutes. Then you toss them with chopped rosemary, minced garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and let them sit for another 15 minutes. They get roasted at 375 for about 65 minutes. Once they come out of the oven, the cheese (which was supposed to be Stilton—this was, after all, a Christmas recipe) gets crumbled and scattered over them, where it melts a little.

The question of why I was willing to make a recipe that called for Stilton cheese when I wasn’t a fan of blue cheese in the first place is a hard one to answer. Food photography can be very seductive, and they were being served with a Rosemary-and-Pepper Standing Rib Roast with Two-Mushroom Pan Sauce we were making, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and make the tomatoes. The worst thing that could happen, I determined, was that I’d hate the blue cheese and scrape it off.

The first time I made the tomatoes, I used Stilton, and they were exceptional, even for a non-blue cheese lover. The next time I made them (because I figured they were the perfect winter vegetable—something a little different, a nice take on tomatoes in which if they weren’t first class summer ones they were still acceptable) I guess we were out of Stilton, but we had this St. Agur that we’d bought at our local grocery store (Central Market, if you’re wondering—a fabulous place with an outstanding selection of cheeses). I used it and was devoted from that minute. I ate the tomatoes for breakfast, much to the disgust of my boss, who didn’t like the smell of the blue cheese. I invested a hefty percentage of my children’s college fund in blue cheese.

The path from tomatoes with blue cheese to blue cheese dressing is a somewhat hazy, twisting one. We needed a salad dressing for a meal, and I happened on a blue cheese dressing in Sara Foster’s Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster’s Market that looked passable, and concluded if I could eat blue cheese in tomatoes, why not in salad dressing? It called for mayonnaise, buttermilk, blue cheese, a little white wine vinegar, salt, pepper and chopped chives. It was quick, and sounded like it would fill the need. I didn’t actually use St Agur in the dressing—in the first place, St Agur is one of the wetter, more goopy blue cheeses, and in the second place, I was running out of college tuition money (St Agur goes for about $32 a pound, or $2 an ounce, so in a recipe that called for 4 ounces of blue cheese it seemed a little excessive). We decided the dressing was everything we wanted in a blue cheese dressing, and it’s become a household standard that I now keep in an old spaghetti sauce jar in the refrigerator and replenish regularly.

As with just about every recipe I make more than once, I’ve tinkered with it a little. The original recipe calls for a cup of mayonnaise (I use homemade), plus a quarter of a cup of buttermilk. I find this makes too thick a dressing for us, so I use closer to a half a cup of buttermilk—probably a quarter cup plus two tablespoons, if I really stopped to measure it, and then add a splash more here and there until it reaches the desired thickness. This looks pretty runny when you first combine it, but it firms back up in the fridge, and adding the blue cheese thickens it too.

For blue cheese, I confess I’ve stooped to the Danish Blue crumbles that they sell in little plastic tubs at the grocery store. I’ve tried buying and crumbling my own, but I can’t get the crumbles small enough. Whether this is because I lack experience with crumbling blue cheese, or because I’m buying the wrong kind, I can’t say, but since it’s getting smothered in mayonnaise, I figure the highest quality blue cheese is going to be suffocated anyway. I did once try putting everything in the blender and whizzing it, but the result, while blue cheese flavored, was disappointingly smooth, lacking those little chunks of blue cheese that make blue cheese dressing…well, blue cheese dressing.

As for the remaining ingredients, the recipe calls for a teaspoon of white wine vinegar, a couple of tablespoons of chopped chives, salt, and pepper. I use a capful of plain old distilled white vinegar, which I find to be perfectly acceptable. I also left out the chives one time, and then used them the next time, and I was informed that it was actually better without the chives, so the chives have now been deleted from the ingredient list. I use a few grinds of black pepper. Generally the combination of the mayonnaise and the blue cheese is enough salt, but I taste it and might add a quick grind or two of sea salt.

Once it’s done I put it all in the aforementioned old spaghetti sauce jar and keep it in the refrigerator. It’s wonderful on a spinach salad with some bacon, and we use it daily on the salad we always take along to work to accompany whatever else we’re having for lunch.

I’ve now completely about-faced on blue cheese, and love it so much that when my husband and I went out for our anniversary dinner (to a first-class wine bar called Purple), we ordered an appetizer that was slices of Cashel blue cheese, fig jam, crackers, and a wine chosen to accompany it (Joel Gott Zinfandel, 2004). We loved it so much that we sought out a bottle of the wine, picked up some of the cheese, some crackers, and cracked open the jar of fig jam we had in the pantry and recreated the appetizer two weeks later. The dinner that followed was rib eye steaks with a salad with…blue cheese dressing.

My Addiction

I have a confession to make. I am an addict. Yes, I admit it. It’s a recent development, but one that I wouldn’t have expected, so I didn’t have any defenses prepared against it. It just snuck up on me. I have this (somewhat) new job, and everyone here is into it, so I naturally got dragged along once or twice, and I figured I’d go, but it would be harmless. I’d just be enduring this, not really participating.

Boy, was I wrong. I’m hooked.

If you’d told me two years ago, or even a year ago, that one day I would have to admit this addiction, I’ve have laughed in your face. But now I have to confront it.

I love Japanese food. There, I said it.

And I don’t mean sushi either. I’m still not caving to the call of sushi. It doesn’t call that loudly to me, and it doesn’t appeal. I love the idea of those delicate little rice roll things, but frankly there are just too many things in there that I’m not really interested in. My weakness is the bento box.

It started innocently enough. Some coworkers were going out for “all you can eat sushi” at the local Benihana. I was assured I could order from the menu, so I agreed to go. I got a salad and tempura scallops. The dressing on the salad was a wonderful slightly creamy (in texture, not in content) ginger flavored one. “Not bad,” I thought. Of course, the scallops were great—hey, deep fried anything, right?

A couple of weeks later, a friend suggested a Japanese place up the street. Only what she suggested was “a curry.” I had visions of Indian, which I adore. It turned out to be a Japanese place that serves a curry noodle soup (I had no idea the Japanese used curry powder), so I figured I’d just deal. I got a bento box with chicken yakisoba, and tempura. Of course it came with all the usual accompaniments: miso soup (I’m still not a huge fan of this), a salad (again, tasty dressing), rice. It was surprisingly satisfying for what seemed like not a ton of food (there’s plenty of rice, but I try to stay away from rice, and the primary offerings are in somewhat delicate portions).

Last week, after a lunchtime trip to get my hair cut, my husband suggested that, in the interest of speed, we just order take out from the Japanese place on the ground floor of our office building. I got a chicken and a beef component in my bento box. I couldn’t tell you what they were called (the beef sounds something like kohlrabi beef, but that’s not it). The chicken was a sautéed dish with lots of cabbage (I love cabbage), and the beef was grilled short ribs. The salad had a slightly sweet dressing on it that was more vinegar-and-oil like than the one at Benihana, but was still wonderful. These boxes come with six pieces of sushi (I just ignore it), and the ubiquitous miso soup.

Since then I’ve had two more bento boxes from the place in the lobby. I’m sadly hooked. The worst thing about it is that a bento box costs a minimum of ten bucks, and that’s $50 a week for lunch, minimum. Really, I can’t afford that (my monthly daycare costs are somewhere in the range of the national debt, so eating out every day really isn’t an option for me).

What’s an addict to do?

I suppose I could do the other thing that would have caused me to laugh in the face of anyone who suggested it a year ago: I could buy a Japanese cookbook and learn to make the beef, the chicken, and the salad dressing myself. This is what I normally do when I find a new kind of food I like, although I wouldn’t have ever expected to be actually mulling over the idea of buying Japanese cookbook.

I guess the cookbook option is probably the best way to go. It’s a single expense (minus the cost of the ingredients, which I don’t really count, because we have to buy food anyway, so to buy a Japanese ingredient, instead of a can of enchilada sauce or some other ingredient, is negligible), plus I enjoy the thrill of the hunt in finding the cookbook that has the majority of what I want in it, and then I make a mental list of other cookbooks that I might pick up at a later date that also look good.

This really took me by surprise. I’m still a little shaken and having trouble accepting the truth. There must be a support group for people like me. There seems to be for everyone else, after all. And just wait—in another year, I’ll have to confess to being a sushi addict. Where will it all end?