Saturday, October 27, 2012

Marinated Cheese & Ah ha! Moments

It all started with a chunk of Mozzarella I'd bought to try individual pizzas on flour tortillas but never got around to. The Mozzarella needed using but I had just made a big pan of Macaroni and Cheese and didn't need more pasta dishes. I perused my Indian cookbooks for inspiration - no Mozzarella there. I grabbed a Vegetarian Sicilian cookbook (Strange, meat lovers that we are, that we have a vegetarian cookbook, but I did learn how to make good polenta from it.) A little Mozzarella in a salad there but not much else. Funny, I thought it was their cheese. Then I remembered how much I love the Caprese Salad with the marinated cheese balls and cherry tomatoes.
 
I hopped onto the Internet and found a balsamic and olive oil marinade. Up popped my oil conflict, I can never use olive oil fast enough to keep it from growing rancid. I called an experienced cook friend to discuss my olive oil problem and get her thoughts on bagging the olive oil for Canola and what she thought of the recipe I’d found. I suppose real Italians would cringe at my thought, but it’s that or rancid olive oil. Besides, I’m not really sure I’m really fond of fresh olive oil. Oh yes, I’ve eaten in those Italian restaurants where they serve a little dish of good olive oil in which to dip fresh bread chunks, it’s OK but when you’ve grown up with butter slathered on bread…. 
 
OK, back to my cheese chunk. It occurred to me that in the past I had marinated olives in Italian Dressing (which brought to mind an important Ah ha moment in my life). They were delicious, why not the cheese and tomatoes? In the past I used bottled Italian dressing. For several years now, I’ve made a homemade Tangy Italian Dressing (recipe in blog index) that we love. It has red wine vinegar and Canola oil. I am going to pick up some cherry tomatoes, but bag the fresh basil leaves (not sure I really like eating whole basil leaves. Basil is a whole other conundrum, always liked the idea of pesto, just don’t like it. I do believe if I set my mind to it I could develop a taste for it like I have the Indian spices. But I’m going to put aside that food adventure for now

Marinating cheese is a cool idea (and this is the first time I’ve tried it). The food concept is far away from my mother's imagination. Funny how different parts of the world come up with different food repertoires. I grew up in a middle class home with parents who worked blue-collar jobs. When I moved away as a young married, I began to meet people who lived different, and sometimes more sophisticated, realities.
 
At the home of one of these sophisticates was the very first time I encountered a marinated olive (probably just black olives in Italian dressing). Now, that may not seem so special, but for me it was one of those Ah ha! food experiences. My husband worked in a Custom Black and White photography lab that did archival photography. They did some work for the Seattle Post Intelligencer and he got to know a couple of the reporters over there. I remember we were invited by one of those couples to their home for a cocktail party.
 
Now, cocktail parties were a concept that certainly hadn't been a part of my growing up world. Parties involved whole families and, though not disdained, alcohol was not commonly consumed by the adults that I knew, not even wine. Well, here I was at my first sophisticated, adult, cocktail party. The evening, the house, everything is still very vivid to me and I really believe why it got imbedded in my memory were those marinated olives. I remember thinking, 'Amazing; I’ve eaten and loved black olives all my life but never even thought of doing something with them like marinate them in a tangy dressing'. For all the reasons I loved black olives, now they had a flavorful tang, as well. I was in love and enamored by encountering a food reality completely beyond my ken until that moment.