This post harks back to the whole austerity cooking thing of buying the most bang for your buck, as yesterday I made some very pretty little cheese dumplings with Parmesan. Any well-flavoured hard cheese would do, but Parmesan was to hand so I used it. A cheese with little flavour would have been cheap compared to Parmesan, but more would have been needed which balances it all out. You gets what you pays for. And for the same flavour cheap cheese would have meant eating much more fat.
The cheese was in fact free to be honest, as I just returned from a press trip to Parma with a suitcase weighed down with some wonderful samples, gratefully received, though I had some in my fridge anyway and it is what I would have reached for.
In the morning I had made some chicken stock with the carcase of a bird roasted at the weekend and a few pot vegetables - turnips past the first flush of youth, a carrot, sage, onion, garlic, leeks, par-cel and bay all from the garden or allotment, and a half chilli looking sad and unwanted. To make it more substantial as a first course and to use up a dried-out bread roll I later made some dumplings to poach in the stock.
Bloke cooking means no precise measurements were made, but in rough terms I used about half the crumbs from the roll, added the yolks of two eggs, some seasoning, and maybe three or four tablespoons of finely grated Parmesan. The egg whites were beaten till stiff-ish, a little stirred into the crumb/cheese mix to loosen it, then the rest incorporated as lightly as possible. More crumbs were needed to make a consistency that would hold together. In wet hands I formed the resulting mix into big marble shaped and sized pieces, and dropped them into the simmering stock to poach for about five minutes.
The results looked and tasted so good - they were really light and soft, (very different from my usual efforts in meat stews) that they were served out of the stock with more cheese grated on them, the stock served as a consome after them.
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