One of the few remaining good food magazines is Culture Cheese Mag, to which we've subscribed for more than ten years. Because we love cheese. And one of the things that Culture does periodically is reader giveaways; we've actually won twice, once a decade ago, and once this month. What do they give away? Well, cheese, of course.

This month's contest was six assorted cheeses from Widmer's Cheese Cellars in Wisconsin. It included a butterkase, "Alpine" cheddar, mild cheddar, colby jack, brick cheese, and cheese spread. After a little recipe searching, we have plans for this cheese.

The mild cheddar was used for sandwiches. I'll use the brick cheese for Detroit pizza, the butterkase for spaetzle, and the colby for quesadillas. My sweetie used the "Alpine" cheddar for ... a souffle!

Since this was for a casual weeknight dinner, she cooked Jacques Pépin's maman's souffle. Mme. Pépin's is a great recipe; it's easier, faster, and doesn't dirty as many dishes. That's because she doesn't separate the eggs. According to Jacques, when she got married she didn't really know how to cook, so she made a souffle ... but she didn't know to separate the eggs. And it worked anyways! It's a little less fluffy than a beaten-egg-white souffle, but still quite good and great for an easy meal.

Even though you haven't won free cheese, I know you'll want to make one too, so here's a recipe:

Jacques Pépin's Maman's Cheese Souffle

• 6 Tbs unsalted butter, plus more for greasing
• 6 Tbs all-purpose flour
• 2 cups whole milk
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 5 large eggs
• 9 ounces grated cheese (see below), plus optionally 1oz in thin slices.
• 1/2 oz parmesan cheese or similar
• 2 tablespoons minced chives
• bowl, whisk, medium pot, 2qt wide baking pan or gratin dish

Heat oven to 375F.

Melt the 6 Tbs butter in the pan. Whisk in the flour until well combined. Cook over medium heat for around a minute. Pour in the milk (cold is fine), whisking. Cook, whisking frequently, until the milk begins to simmer and the white sauce becomes thick. Remove from the heat and season with salt and pepper, and stir in the cheese. Set aside to cool for 10-15 min.

Grease the baking pan with butter. Powder it with the parmesan until lightly coated.

Whisk the eggs in a bowl until well beaten and fairly frothy. Add the minced chives. Whisk the cheesy white sauce into the eggs, and then pour the mixture into the baking pan. If using, decorate with a few more chives plus the slices of cheese.

Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until puffed up, brown all over the top surface, and completely done. This souffle can be a bit soupy in the middle, so if you don't care for that (we don't), cook it for another 3 minutes or so after you think it's already done.

Serve very hot, with a simple vinagrette salad.

Note on cheese: this souffle works best with a semi-soft, melty cheese with a medium-strong flavor, such as cheddar, swiss, gruyere, gouda, manchego, raclette, or kasseri. It will not work well with a blue cheese due to the higher fat content.

Thanks to Portland's large Slavic population, I've been able to readily buy sulguni cheese for the first time in my life. This has me wanting to make khachipuri, the famous "Georgian Pizza", frequently. However, while the cheese is readily available, dough is another thing entirely, until I found a shortcut for weeknight dinners.

Imeretian Khachipuri, which is a disk of dough, stuffed with cheese, with a small hole in the top, is my favorite kind, probably because that's the first type I had in Moscow. I have two dough recipes for it, one is a yeasted dough that takes 1.5 hours, and one is a yogurt-based dough that's faster, but finicky delicate and hard to work with. Neither was really suitable for a weeknight dinner of khachipuri and lobio, starting cooking at 7. And then, at Albertson's, I discovered this:

Thin-crust, prerolled pizza dough, like they sell in many parts of Europe. It's not a very good pizza dough, but it makes an excellent yeasted dough wrapper for empanadas, and for other things. Like khachipuri!

Since then, we've had more "weeknight khachipuri" than is really good for my chloresterol level.

Now, a note on the cheese: if you can get sulguni, do use it for this. Most folks can't, though, so a good substitute is 2-3 parts dry part-skim mozzarella (but not pre-shredded) to 1 part crumbled feta cheese. In the recipe below, that would be 3oz dry mozz, and 1-2 oz feta. In a pinch, just dry mozz or even Monterey Jack would work.

weeknight khachipuri

• 4-5oz sulguni cheese, or substitute
• 3 Tbs minced cilantro, parsley, or green onion
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander, unless using cilantro
• 1 egg
• 2-3 Tbs greek yogurt
• 1 thin-crust "European style" prerolled pizza dough

Place a baking stone, or inverted cookie sheet, into your oven and heat it to 475F.

Grate the cheese on the large holes of a grater. Mix with the egg, yogurt, minced herb, and coriander (if using).

Unwrap the pizza dough and unroll it, smoothing it out. Make a circular heap of the cheese mixture in the middle of the dough, and then press it into a compact disk. The cheese should only cover about the middle 1/2 of the dough.

Fold the dough over the cheese, turning it 1/8 with each fold, so eventually you have an octagon of folds. The edges should not quite meet in the center; you want to leave a hole that's 1-2" wide.

Trim the baking parchment the pizza dough comes on so that it's not a lot wider than the khachipuri. Slide the khachipuri onto the baking stone (or sheet). Switch the oven to convection (if you can). Cook for 11 to 15 minutes, until the dough is brown and the cheese is foaming and threatening to bubble out of the hole.

Take the khachipuri out of the oven and put it on a rack to cool for 5-10 minutes; you want it hot, but you don't want to destroy your mouth. Cut into 4-6 wedges and share.

Note: Pillsbury also sells "prerolled pizza dough" in a carboard cannister. This is not suitiable for this recipe, or much of anything else either; it has a texture like factory biscuits.

Since it was just a few of us this last Chistmas and not the usual crowd (thanks to you-know-what), we decided it was time to make our dinner a tribute to St. Nicholas. Specifically, Saint Nicholas of Myra, the Bishop of Turkey. Which means ... Turkish cuisine!

Now, a proper Turkish feast means lots of different dishes. But I didn't want to go crazy given that there were just the four of us, and there was only so much we could eat. So I settled on a menu of two meze (small dishes), two salads, a palate-cleaning soup, manti as the main course, and a pastry pudding as dessert.

The two meze were what I jokingly called "cheese sticks and meat sticks". The "cheese sticks" are a very common Turkish appetizer known as "sigara böreği", or "cigar pastries", for reasons that should be obvious if you look at the picture. If you can locate the correct dough, called yufka, these are very easy to make. Yufka is about twice the thickness of phyllo, but doesn't dry out or tear as easily. Better, in a well-stocked Middle Eastern grocery you can find yufka cut into triangles perfect for rolling sigara in the freezer case. Grate some village cheese or kasseri, add a little yogurt and chopped mint, and roll them up, then fry.

The meat sticks were even easier, because I bought them pre-made from the butcher at Basics Market on Sandy. They were a mixture of beef & lamb, a simple kebab I didn't need to prepare myself (especially since I wasn't going to eat it). Then, the salads.

For a touch of seasonality, both salads were red and green. Red with a little green is this salad, made from rehydrated sun-dried tomatoes, peppers, pomegranate seeds, feta and mint. This was excellent, and worth making again as a winter salad. But it wasn't as good as then other salad.

This one was green with a little red. The red was just hothouse cherry tomatoes, but that wasn't what made the salad great: that was the herbs. Like other near Eastern recipes, this salad treats herbs as salad greens, having handfuls of parsley, mint, basil, watercress, and dill. Now, as you can imagine in the middle of winter that made it a bit spendy, probably $20 worth of herbs there. But boy was it worth it, so that's the salad I'm going to share with you.

Herb Salad with Pomegranate Dressing

based on a recipe from Istanbul & Beyond

Salad greens

volumes below are loose packed, and very approximate. More of one herb can substitute for less of another

• 1/2 head of Romaine lettuce (full leaves, not just hearts), torn into bite-sized pieces, about 3 cups
• 1 bunch watercress leaves, about 1 cup
• 1 bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped large, about 1 to 1.5 cups
• 1 small bunch basil or Thai basil, leaves stripped and very roughly chopped, about 1 cup
• 1 small bunch dill, roughly chopped, about 1/2 cup
• 1 bunch mint, leaves stripped, around 1 cup
• Leaves from several twigs of oregano, about 1/2 cup
• 1 basket cherry tomatoes, halved

Dressing

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 Tbs pomegranate molasses
• 1-2 Tbs fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp salt

Put the greens in a very large bowl and toss them until completely mixed. Add the tomatoes on top.

Whisk the dressing together, and taste it for tartness. It should be pleasantly tart; if not, add the extra tablespoon of lemon juice. Drizzle it onto the greens. Toss again, and serve within 1/2 hour of tossing.

Enough for six people as a first course.

Blintzes vie with bagels for "best Jewish breakfast food", but in our household they've already won. The problem is that they can be enough of a process to make that they are a special occasion food, which is sad. So I'm gonna give you a few shortcuts to help you make blintzes, in less than an hour the day you want to eat them, using what you can find in a big-city supermarket.

The first shortcut is the blini. Proper blintzes start with an egg-flour batter crepe, cooked only on one side, as your blintz wrapper. For a dozen blintzes, this is already an hour down and the cheese is still in the fridge. Fortunately, more and more supermarkets are now carrying premade crepes of one kind or another. The Melissa's brand, for example, is carried by Albertsons and Safeway. While not as good as making your own, these save you a ton of time, and the blintzes you make are always better than the ones you don't.

The trick with packaged crepes is to learn the foibles of the particular brand. For example, Melissa's are stored at room temperature, and used that way; either chilling them or heating them will cause them to become stiff and crumbly and unworkable. But other brands need to be heated in a pan before folding. Buy an extra package and experiment with yours.

The second bit is the cheese. Properly, blintzes are made with Russian farmer's cheese, a soft, pasty relative of ricotta. If you live near an Eastern European community you can find this, and soft farmer's cheese is common in places like Wisconsin and Amish country. Belfiore and Gina Marie brands offer it in some places. Otherwise, you need to substitute.

One of your best choices is Galbani ricotta. This standard supermarket brand is too dry and chalky to be good ricotta ... which makes it a pretty good farmer cheese. Another option is getting small-curd cottage cheese and draining it in a cheesecloth or paper towels; expect to lose about 1/4 of the weight in this process. If you can get "cultured" cottage cheese, it's nice. You can easily make your own farmer cheese, but then we're back to taking 3 hours to make breakfast, so we'll skip that.

The final part of this is perfecting your burrito roll technique. Like just about any other stuffed tube, blintzes are made as little burrito rolls, where you fold, fold, fold, and roll. It's worth getting the hang of this technique, because you'll find it's useful across any number of stuffed food recipes.

shortcut blintzes

10-14 premade crepes
1 lbs farmer cheese, or substitute
2 eggs
zest of one medium lemon, about 1 Tbs
1/2 tsp fresh-ground nutmeg
1 Tbs sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
At least 1/3 cup butter and 3 Tbs vegetable oil for frying
Assorted fruit jams or sliced fresh fruit

Make the cheese mixture: add the cheese, eggs, zest, nutmeg, sugar, and vanilla into a bowl. Mix until homogenous.

Now, time to make the blintzes. Add around 2 heaping tablespoons of cheese about 1/5 of the way from the bottom edge of a crepe. Fold the bottom edge over, then the sides, in classic burrito roll technique. Roll the cheese crepe up into a tube, and place on a plate or board, seam side down. Do this with the other 9 to 13 crepes. Put them on your plate in a single layer; do not stack.

Heat a large nonstick pan or griddle over medium-low heat. Melt around 3 Tbs butter and 1 Tbs vegetable oil in it (the oil helps keep the butter from burning). The bottom of the pan should have a good coating of butter all over. Place 4-7 blintzes in the pan, seam sides down, as many as you can without crowding them (the are hard to flip, so you'll need room).

Fry for 2 to 3 minutes, until the bottoms start to brown. Carefully flip each blintz; I use two spatulas, one in each hand. They can be tricky to flip without breaking them, so use patience, and be prepared for a few "ugly" blintzes. I do not recommend tongs.

Cook for 2-3 minutes on the other side. At this point, the bottom of each blintz should be browned, and the cheese filling should have firmed somewhat.

Continue cooking batches until all the blintzes are done. You can hold your first batches in a warm (180F) oven to serve them all at once.

Serve with a choice of two or three different fruit jams, or with sliced fresh fruit. Diners cut off a piece of blintz and dip it in jam or scoop up some fruit from their plate. Feeds two to three people for brunch, particularly if you serve them with vegetarian Kosher sausage.

Cooked blintzes keep well in the fridge for a week, but do not freeze well.

So we're into the sixth week of isolation, and you've already mastered sourdough. What's next? Well, making your own cheese, of course!

While many cheeses like cheddar or brie require special aging environments, there's several cheeses that either require no aging at all, or can be aged in a household fridge. The obvious one to start with is ricotta, which is probably the easiest cheese there is and has the benefit of being worlds better fresh-made than from a store. But after you've done that, what's next?

Well, in Italy we were introduced to crescenza (aka stracchino), which is a very young, soft-curd cheese ideal for melting over pasta. Because it's a young cheese with a short shelf-life, it's really really hard to find for sale in the US. It also goes great with a lot of veggies that are in season right now, like asparagus, fiddleheads, and agretti. It doesn't require special cheese cultures you need to mail-order, and you can "age" it in the fridge. So let's make some!

The below is based on a recipe from Ricki Carroll's Home Cheesemaking, a book I heartily recommend to anyone interested in getting started with making cheese.

crescenza cheese

1 gallon of milk
1/4 tsp calcium chloride (if milk is pasteurized)
1 Tbs fine salt
2-3 oz live culture yogurt, Bulgarian or Russian style
1/8 tsp liquid rennet or 1/4 rennet tablet
non-chlorinated water
equipment: large pot, large spoon, long knife, instand-read thermometer, 2 cylindrical cheese molds (but see note), 2 cheese mats (but see note)

Slowly heat the milk up to 100F/38C. If using, dilute the calcium chloride in 1/4 cup water and add. Stir in the salt, then the yogurt. Cover and keep at 100F for 30-45 min.

Dilute the rennet in 1/4 cup water, and stir in for 30 seconds. Cover and let sit (keeping at 100F) for another 60 minutes, at which point the curd should give a clean break. Cut the curd into 3-inch cubes and let "heal" for 30 min. Cut the curds in quarters, and carefully and gently stir them around. Cover, let sit 5 minutes, and stir them again. Do this twice more.

The curds should sink; spoon off most of the whey from the top. Ladle the curds into the two molds, trying to distribute them evenly. Place the mat across the top of each mold and flip it over. Let them drain for an hour, then flip them back over, and then do this twice more (3 hours total). Finally, let the cheeses rest in the molds for at least 4 hours, ideally 8, and preferably in a room that's between 72F and 78F.

Remove the cheeses from the molds, carefully because they will be very delicate and soft. Put them on the mats in a big tupperware and put it in the fridge. Let age for 3-5 days, periodically taking them out and draining out any excess liquid.

Once you're ready, you can put the cheese on pasta, although it's equally good on bread.

Note: the yogurt really needs to be Bulgarian or Russian style, because those contain some different cultures (Y-1 yogurt culture) from other yogurts. On the West Coast, I recommend Pavel's brand.

Equipment Substitution: you can also use ricotta molds for this cheese. If you don't have cheese molds at all, get two empty 1qt yogurt tubs and punch a few 1/8" holes in them at different levels, four holes in the bottom and 12 holes around the outside. For cheese draining mats, you can use sushi rolling mats, or a relatively tight-mesh cooling rack, or basically anything that forms a tight mesh and can be sterilized.

pasta with crescenza, fiddleheads, and asparagus

1 lbs short, ruffly pasta (campanelle, farfalle, torchietti, garganelle, etc.)
12 oz cresenza cheese
10-12oz skinny asparagus, stemmed and cut into 2-inch pieces
8-12 oz fiddleheads
small bunch chives, minced, about 3 Tbs
salt
black pepper

Boil a 4-6qt pot full of salted water. Blanch the asparagus and fiddleheads, together, for about 2-3 minutes. Drain and put in a big bowl. Top with the chives and the crescenza cheese, diced small or pinched into small blobs.

Cook the pasta (you can use the same water from the blanching) until al dente. Drain, reserving 1 cup pasta water. While still very hot, toss the pasta with the cheese and veggies. Add pasta water as needed to make it creamy. Salt and pepper to your taste, and optionally drizzle with olive oil. Serves 4.

Note: you'll notice that this is essentially the same recipe as the taleggio pasta

Tasting parties are a great foodie activity for an evening in with friends. If you stick to tastings of purchased, semi-perishable foods, then you have an activity for a weeknight party as well; you do your shopping the weekend before. The classic tastings are wine, cheese and chocolate, because they offer quite range of variety and almost everyone likes them. They even go together; I've done a number of wine-and-chocolate tastings myself. Even for the "big three" though, you have to decide what kind of tasting you're going to do.

The first kind of tasting is a "range" tasting, where you taste a range of different things within your category in order to train your palate or get the full flavor of what's available from a single source. This is probably the better kind of tasting to do with friends who are not that gourmet or at least new to being foodies. For serious foodies, you can make it challenging by blind tasting and asking people to guess what they're trying. Examples of this:

• Tasting a chardonnay, merlot, syrah and port from the same vintner or wine region.
• Tasting three different bars (milk, dark, varietals) and two truffles from the same chocolatier
• Tasting four different cheeses from Northern Italy (Parmigiano, Fior di Latte, Talleggio, Mascarpone)
• Tasting five different cheeses from a single cheesemaker.

The second kind of tasting you can do involves tasting very similar products from a variety of sources, generally to compare quality. Usually these kinds of tastings lend themselves more to "serious" tasting, with blind tastes and scorecards, and are more fun with a bunch of friends who see themselves as serious foodies. Examples of these would be:

• Tasting champagnes from five different cellars.
• Tasting regular dark chocolate from 4 different chocolatiers
• Tasting single-origin dark chocolate from four different countries.
• Tasting five different cheddar cheeses, either from different places or different cheesemakers in the same region.

You'll notice that I'm recommending four or five different samples in all of the above. I find that that's the right number to strike a balance between having enough to make the tasting interesting, and palate (and wallet) exhaustion. If you're will a really hard-core crowd and have a long evening, you might go as high as seven items; beyond that, only a trained professional is going to notice differences. Also, it's useful to have something complimentary to cleanse palates between tastings: mineral water, crackers, bread, cheese and fruit can all work depending on what's being tasted.

Also, you're making a mistake if you limit yourself to only wine, cheese and chocolate. There are thousands of other possible tastings; pretty much any food which has a variety of preparations or ingredients. Here's some general tips for holding a successful tasting party:

1. Set aside 2-3 hours for the tasting. A slower tasting avoids palate fatigue and encourges fun, so don't be afraid to draw things out.
2. Pick something which everyone coming over likes. Don't assume, check with them.
3. Have a "palate cleanser" to eat or drink between tastings, such as bread, crackers, sparkling water, or cake.
4. Some items require tasting on things, such as butter, salt, olive oil and hot sauce. Pick "neutral" items of good quality for those.
5. If items need to be tasted hot or cold, plan to bring only one or two out at a time.
6. If doing an alcohol tasting, make sure nobody needs to drive home.

If you've done these before, or your friends are sufficiently "gourmet", you can make tasting parties more fun with additions like secret ballot and guessing games. For example, you can have each person write their evaluation of each tasting down on slips of paper, and then read those out once the tasting is done for "impartial tastings". If your friends are sufficiently involved, you can have them bring over the various items to taste, one or two per person, with some coordination beforehand; this works well with secret ballot. You can also hide the details of the items being tasted and have people try to guess what they're tasting, with token prizes for the winners. I was pretty shocked when someone correctly guessed "Pinot Noir from the North California coast" at a wine tasting!

What follows is an idea list of other kinds of tastings you could do:

Tasting a range of things:

• Olives: Picholine, Nicoise, Castelvano, Manzanilla, Kalamata, Oil-cured
• Hams: Virginia, Prosciutto, Sopresatta, Serranno, Jamon du pays
• Smoked Fish: trout, whitefish, salmon, sturgeon
• Pickled vegetables: dill pickles, gerkins, caperberries, asparagus, greenbeans, etc.
• Beer: blonde, IPA, amber, wheat, porter, stout
• Fancy Salt: Fleur de Sel, red, black, Sel Gris.
• Whiskey: Bourbon, Canadian, Irish, Scotch
• Peppers (for the brave): Thai, Serrano, Jalopeno, Pasilla, Anaheim, Habanero
• Vinegars: cider, white wine, red wine, balsamic.
• Coffee: brewed different ways: french press, moka pot, vaccuum pot, toddy and drip.
• Apples (in October): Granny Smith, Rome, Fuji, Pink Lady, Arkansas Black
• Tomatoes (in July): Early Girl, Lemonboy, Green Zebra, Cherokee Purple, Roma
• Herbal Liquors: Chartruse, Frangelico, Benedictine, Dubonet, Campari

Comparing very similar things:

• Balsamic vinegar from four different producers.
• Olive oils from five different presses.
• Smoked salmon from three or four different smokehouses, or smoked with different woods.
• Bacon from four different producers, or with four different preparations.
• Coffees from five different roasteries.
• Six different coffee blends/origins from the same roastery.
• Vodka or Gin from five different distilleries.
• Four different single-malt Scotches.
• Butters from five different dairies.
• Soy sauces from different producers, with sushi.
• IPA beers from four different breweries.
• Hot sauces from five different manufacturers.
• Mineral waters from five different springs.

Hopefully that gives you some ideas for your own home tastings. Blog them, and link back to this post.