dsmWeekly - July 31, 2024

If your garden is bursting with tomatoes, why not whip up some fresh mozzarella?

FOOD & DINING

Make your own mozz
Fresh mozzarella cheese makes a world-class Caprese salad with nothing more than sliced tomatoes, salt, pepper, a drizzle of olive oil and a scattering of fresh basil. Pair it with crusty bread on the side for a satisfying lunch.

With the following recipe from contributor Mary Jane Miller, it’s fun and easy to make fresh mozzarella in less than an hour, with common equipment you probably already have at home.

You can buy rennet tablets and citric acid at your neighborhood grocery store. Since most grocery store milk is 3.25% dairy fat, far less than farm milk, you should replace a cup of it with heavy cream.

Ingredients
2 tablets rennet (the Junket brand works well)
1 cup water, divided in halves
1 1/2 teaspoons citric acid
1 gallon whole milk (raw or pasteurized but NOT ultra-pasteurized because it won’t firm up). For added richness, replace 1 cup of pasteurized whole milk with 1 cup of heavy cream.
Kosher or sea salt

Directions
1. Crumble the tablets of rennet in a small bowl, then add a 1/2 cup of water and stir to dissolve. In another small bowl, mix the citric acid and the remaining 1/2 cup of water.

2. Pour the milk into a large pot and stir in the citric acid mixture. Heat over medium heat, stirring, until it reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Then remove it from heat.

3. Add the rennet and stir slowly to mix well. Cover and set aside. After about 30 minutes, it should have the consistency of thick yogurt. Press it with your finger to check. You’ll want to be able to slice through it. If it’s not set, let it rest another 10 minutes or so.

4. Use a long knife or spatula to cut the curds in a grid pattern, all the way to the bottom of the pot.

5. Heat the curds over medium heat, stirring very slowly. Try not to break up the curds too much. Heat to 106 F.

6. Remove from heat and continue to stir slowly for another five minutes. The curds will separate from the whey.

7. Line a large colander with cheesecloth, muslin, or a flour sack dish towel and set over a bowl to catch the whey. Scoop the curds into the colander and allow the cheese to drain for about five minutes.

8. In a small pot, heat about 3 cups of the reserved whey to 170 degrees. Remove from heat.

9. Slip on a pair of rubber gloves to protect your hands. (Use gloves that don’t have a texture, or turn them inside out, to make the cheese smooth and pretty.) Work over the pot to scoop up a third of the curds and form them into a ball. Lower the ball into the hot whey, and let it sit for a few minutes. Use a large spoon to press the ball against the side of the pot until it holds together. The cheese will get soft and stretchy. Lift out the ball, flatten it slightly and generously salt it. Stretch and fold the curds onto themselves until they’re shiny and firm. Shape them into a ball. If at any time it gets hard to shape, dip it into the hot whey for a minute. Repeat with remaining curds.

10. Store in a container covered with cold whey, and refrigerate it for up to a week.

Pick up the latest books from food writers Nina Mukerjee Furstenau and Wini Moranville this Friday at Kitchen Collage.

BEST BET

First Friday two ways

The only thing better than a Friday would be two Fridays. So these doubled-up events come pretty close.

Mainframe Studios hosts its monthly First Friday open house from 5 to 8 p.m., when visitors can pop into the artists’ studios, take a peek at their process and buy art. This Friday’s theme is photography and visual storytelling. The first 140 guests can take part in a free polaroid portrait workshop led by photographer Jon Lemons.

At the same time, 5-8 p.m., you can head over to the East Village for First Friday deals and activities at various small businesses. If you go early, at 4 p.m., pop in to Kitchen Collage to meet local food writer and author Wini Moranville and the award-winning St. Louis journalist Nina Mukerjee Furstenau. Both will discuss their latest memoirs and sign books. Plus, Kitchen Collage will be serving nibbles from Moranville's French cookbook — a tasty way to kick off the weekend.

The Week Ahead

Not Quite Brothers at Jasper Winery (6-9 p.m. Thursday): This is the final concert of the winery’s summer concert series. The show is free to attend, and guests are encouraged to bring their own blankets and lawn chairs. Food and beverages will be available for purchase.

Barry Manilow (7 p.m. Thursday): The legendary singer and songwriter behind “Mandy,” “Copacabana” and a dozen catchy ad jingles like State Farm’s “Like a Good Neighbor” (whose celebrity singers now include Caitlin Clark) is still going strong at 81. Catch him at “The Last Des Moines Concert” at Wells Fargo Arena.

Hinterland (1 p.m. Friday through 10 p.m. Sunday): Most tickets for the weekend festival in St. Charles are sold out, but a few general-admission wristbands for Saturday remain, along with a specialty Saints packages for VIP access. Headliners Hozier, Vampire Weekend and Noah Kahan perform along with a few dozen other indie artists.

“Everything’s Fine” (5-8 p.m. Friday): Artist Chuck Hipsher’s latest collection opens with a reception at Moberg Gallery and remains through early September.

Gamer Jazz (2 p.m. Saturday): There’s nothing hush-hush about this library event. The Des Moines Gamer Symphony Orchestra performs a free concert full of your favorite video game tunes at the Central Library.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR
Sages Over 70: dsm magazine is pleased to announce the 2024 Sages Over 70 honorees: Bobbretta Brewton, retired teacher for Des Moines Public Schools and Des Moines Area Community College, and AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer; Richard Deming, medical director of the MercyOne Richard Deming Cancer Center and founder of Above + Beyond Cancer; Connie Isaacson, retired fundraising professional with Isaacson-Syverson Consulting and former vice president for external affairs at Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa; Gerry Neugent, co-chairman of Knapp Properties, and Mary Lou Neugent, retired classroom associate with Diocesan Catholic Schools and former board member for Habitat for Humanity; David Roederer, retired director of the Iowa Department of Management, former chief of staff to Gov. Terry Branstad, and owner and managing partner of StrataVizion Inc.; Rich Willis, owner and chairman of Willis Automotive, and Iowa Business Hall of Fame inductee in 2018. A reception will be held Nov. 12 at the FFA Enrichment Center on the Des Moines Area Community College campus in Ankeny.

From left: artist b. Robert Moore (photo by Andrew Sans), journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones (photo by Jason Hill) and regenerative land sculptor and activist Jordan Weber (photo by Andre D. Wagner)

ARTS & CULTURE

At the Art Center, an artist, journalist and activist examine race in Iowa's past and present

By Michael Morain

The local artist b. Robert Moore’s current exhibition in the Des Moines Art Center’s annual Iowa Artists series is like a good book in the way that it’s both intensely personal and broadly relatable. Through painted family portraits, a video interview with his mother, and even a re-created living room filled with ordinary furniture and tchotchkes, “In Loving Memory” memorializes some of the family and friends who shaped him. A somber grayscale portrait called “Mother of Pearls” honors his mentor Teree Caldwell-Johnson, who died in March.

But for all the visual cues that point toward Moore’s specific identity — biracial, father, early 40s — bigger themes about race, labor and military service place “the political and historic alongside the personal and poetic,” as curator Laura Burkhalter notes in the exhibition catalog.

She moderated a wide-ranging panel discussion on Sunday afternoon with Moore, the artist-activist Jordan Weber and the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning creator of “The 1619 Project” for the New York Times. Here are a few takeaways from their talk, lightly condensed for clarity:

Hannah-Jones on the nature of history: “We learn a very curated version of the past. It’s really about shaping our collective memory of who we are as a society to justify power, to justify inequalities, to justify all the systems we engage with.

“All three of us on this stage are trying to actively engage the history that's been left out of the focus of the lens, to expand the aperture. The silences are telling you just as much about your country and your community as the things that you've learned. With all of our work, we’re trying to bring those things out of the shadows and into the center of the narrative. And you know, it's not lost on me, of course, that I'm speaking about history in the state that tried to ban my work from the classroom.

“When you pass a law like that, what you're really trying to do is restrict our imagination. You're trying to restrict the way that we can collectively understand our country more holistically, so that we can imagine a different future.”

Weber on the state’s ecological and racial legacy: “Iowa is the No. 1 altered land mass in the U.S. We have less than 1% of native prairie, and we’re also consistently ranked in the top three states when you’re talking about Black and white discrepancies in the prison population. So when I think of history, I think of trauma – trauma on the land and trauma on the body. I’ve got a whole row of homeboys here who have probably been listening to the same thing for 10 years, because I can’t get it out of my head.

Moore on being biracial in Iowa: “I got two different experiences. I’ve always felt like it’s home, but I don’t know if I belong. It feels like a home that you go to, and you’ve got a mean relative. You still want to go home because there’s some good experiences there, but you know, you’ve got someone who’s not good. I’ve just kept a lot of things to myself over the years."

Hannah-Jones on the value of dialogue: “This type of conversation and openness is actually stimulating and spiritually affirming. Even when it feels a little uncomfortable, because we're being very candid, you still feel the willingness to embrace that and take it in, and that's so meaningful.

“I hope that you don't leave the energy at the door, that you carry it outside of theory and realize that collectively we have tremendous power to build a different world than what we have. Everything we see in our society that we don't like, everything that we see is unfair — that’s been constructed. That means it can be deconstructed, and we can build something better.”