Gherkins & Tomatoes

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life

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Category Archives: Cheese

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Bread loaf 2

Cheese + Flour + Yeast + Salt + Eggs = The Ancient Mystery of Bread

March 22, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

To contemplate bread even more, please go my previous post, Panis Gravis, or, Bread, Endless Nurturer. I’ve baked bread for years and years. In fact, except for the odd hamburger bun, my family never eats “boughten bread,” as my mother-in-law called it. In a time when “carbohydrate” evokes images reminiscent of horror films, singing the merits of bread may seem like advocating for the return of feudalism. But, in spite of all the denial of bread as a food in […]

Categories: Baking, Bread, Cheese, Cooking, Eggs, Photography, Russia • Tags: Acharuli khachapuri, Baking, Bread, Celiac Disease, Demeter, Gluten intolerance, M. F. K., Persephone, Republic of Georgia

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Nik Silver cobwebs

Weaving the Ties that Bind, One Bite at a Time

October 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I stood by the wooden fence, peering over the barbed wire fringing it like a lace collar. For some reason, I couldn’t focus the camera lens clearly on the Holstein standing a few yards away. The cow gazed back at me, her jaws moving with the steady precision of a slow motor. When I stooped just a bit, I saw it clearly. But it wasn’t the cow in the viewfinder. No, the camera had zoomed in on an exquisite spider […]

Categories: Books, Cheese, Cooking, Food writing, Photography • Tags: Charlotte's Web, Cooking, Cows, E. B. White, Feta, Photography, Spider webs, Spiders

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Chiles

What the Eye Doesn’t See …

September 29, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I decided to sign up for a photography class, because I wanted to move out of AUTO on my lovely Nikon D5100 camera. Below, you’ll see some of the food photos that I’ve been fussing with:

Categories: Cabbage, Cheese, Chile Peppers, Cooking, Cucumbers, Ingredients, Photography • Tags: Cabbage, Caviar, Cheese, Chiles, Coffee, Cucumbers, Cups, Photography

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French cooks cheese bread Paris 2011

Food First, First Things

October 4, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

After a long day flying, and given the “food” served on the airplane, the first order of business when I arrived in Paris included real food. I needed to drop my bags in the apartment and seek sustenance. Quick. (Actually, after taking the RER from Charles DeGaulle airport to the center of Paris, through the banlieues that François Maspero wrote about in Roissy Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs, I snapped a picture of my “new” (and  quite decent) kitchen. […]

Categories: Cheese, France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Bread, Cheese, France, Olive bread, Paris kitchens, Pavé d'Auge

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Making White Cheese During the Middle Ages (From Tacuinum Sanitatis (ÖNB Codex Vindobonensis, series nova 2644), c. 1370-1400)

At the Table of the Monks: Cheese, Of Course (Part V)

May 22, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Smelling like something dead, washed-rind cheeses* with their soft non-acidic centers offered a taste of animal protein to medieval monks prohibited from eating meat for over 100 days in the average liturgical year. The fact that these cloistered souls liked the results of their odiferous labor ought to cause us to wonder something: what did their meat taste like when they ate that? But we’re thinking of cheese, not the perfectly wrapped and labeled cheese available today from various Trappist […]

Categories: Cheese, Middle Ages • Tags: Cheese, Cheese-making, Cistercians, Middle Agess, Monasteries, Monks, Paul Kinstedt, Washed-rind Cheese

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In the Refectory

At the Tables of the Monks: Charlemagne Loved Cheese (Part IV)

May 21, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A possibly apocryphal story, told  in many places — print and Internet — reads something like this: After a long day of traveling, the emperor Charlemagne stopped at a bishop’s residence to rest, conveniently at dinnertime. In a ninth-century biography of Charlemagne, written by an erudite monk at St. Gall monastery in Switzerland, the author says, Now on that day, being the sixth day of the week [Friday], he was not willing to eat the flesh of beast or bird.  […]

Categories: Cheese, France • Tags: Belleaye, Benedictines, Beval, Brie, Briquebec, Chaligny, Chambarand, Champaneac, Charlemagne, Cheese, Cheesemaking, Citeax, Cluny, Conques, Gorgonzola, Igny, Laval, Maroilles, Monks, Mont-Des-Cats, Munster, Parmigiano-Reggiano, Port Salut, Saint-Maur, Saint-Nectaire, Tamie, Tête de Moine, Wash-rind Cheese

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Meli Duran-Kirkpatrick

Goodbye to a Dear Friend

May 12, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

This post is dedicated to my childhood friend, Meli Duran-Kirkpatrick, who died early in the morning on May 11, 2009. I lost a very old friend yesterday, one who wasn’t all that old, not really. Meli and I grew up together, and together we went through Campfire Girls, junior high and high school, college, and marriage, staying in touch as best we could. We spent a year, more or less, pregnant at the same time and only two months separate […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cheese • Tags: Cannonball island, Chile con Queso Dip, Cougar Gold Cheese, Meli-Duran Kirkpatrick, Ozette

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From the Tacuinum of Paris

Carnevale Cometh: Ricotta and Fritters, Oh My!

February 13, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Fritters and Carnevale, lumped together like ham and eggs, mashed potatoes and gravy, risi e bisi, rice and beans. Ricotta fritters, to be exact. True, most people associate ricotta fritters more with St. Joseph’s Day, March 19 in Italy. But those fritters lean toward the filled variety, sweetened, creamy ricotta delivering a tantalizing surprise with every bite. No, these particular fritters include ricotta in the batter and puff up like popcorn, spitting and swirling in the oil like little balloons […]

Categories: Cheese, Desserts, Italian Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Carnevale, Carnival, Cooking, Food, Fritters, Mardi Gras, Recipe, Ricotta

Photo credit: Alberto Ferrero

Carnivale Cometh: Lasagne di Carnevale

February 6, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

And now for the food of Carnival, as interpreted by cooks in what is now Italy. (See previous post on Carnival for more history.) Greasy, fatty, protein-rich, oozing with cheese or sugar, the dishes created for Martedi Grasso (Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday) served a higher purpose than merely feeding hungry stomachs: the severe Lenten proscriptions of the Roman Catholic Church meant that the ingredients — meat, cheese, butter, sugar, fat, eggs — couldn’t be touched until the Gloria rang out […]

Categories: Cheese, Italian Cooking • Tags: Carnevale, Carnival, Cooking, Food, Italian Cooking, Lasagna, Mardi Gras, Recipes

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Food forms the very essence of life, from the fruit fly to the elephant, with humans in between. So much of what we do revolves around cooking, eating, and the finding of food. Here you'll discover stories, meditations, and photographs celebrating the places that we call home. And, of course, the food that garnishes it all.

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What’s Cookin’ Here

  • A Bare Table is Like an Artist’s Canvas
  • “Stew’s so comforting on a rainy day.” *
  • Singkong, Manioc, Mandioca, Mandió, Tapioca, Yuca: Singing the Praises of Manihot esculenta (Cassava)
  • The Promise of Apple Blossoms

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