From Parsley to Cheesecake:

A 3-day Odyssey Down the Kitchen Rabbit Hole

This trip took me from fresh parsley on a Thursday evening to warm potato salad on Saturday night, to orange cheesecake on Sunday morning.

Cheesecake with brown-sugar charred Cara Cara orange slice

Last winter I signed myself up to test recipes for America’s Test Kitchen. Everyone can do it, and they encourage even the most novice cooks to participate. They email a recipe, ask that you follow the recipe and instructions to the letter, and then complete a survey about your experience. It helps the ATK team fine-tune the recipes before they present them on TV or in their cookbooks. My inspiration for participating is because I’m forced to EXACTLY follow a recipe and that is a challenge for me, and I love a challenge….

The most recent recipe from ATK was a pasta dish that required fresh parsley as a garnish. That purchase of an entire bunch of parsley was the first leg of the odyssey I’m about to share.

The recipe needed a couple of tablespoons of parsley, and I needed to find a way to use or preserve the remainder of the bunch. I decided to hang and dry it. When I was preparing to tie it, I noticed a few sprigs had begun to turn yellowish green and decided not to include them for hanging, but to use them somehow ASAP.

I decided to make Persillade which is a sauce or paste made from parsley, onion, and other savories. I made mine by smashing 2 cloves of roasted elephant garlic with the chopped parsley and then adding minced green onion, lemon juice, olive oil, some dried oregano, salt, and pepper.

Next question was what to do with it. I was planning sausage for supper and on the fence between potatoes of some other starch. I decided that a warm potato salad would incorporate the Persillade nicely. Then out of shear laziness, I decided to, rather than steaming them separately, throw some broccoli flowerets and sliced radish in with the boiling potatoes for the last minutes or 2 to soften them up a bit. The warm potato salad morphed into a warm potato and vegetable salad.

Next was to make the dressing, I put the Persillade in a bowl, stirred in some diced onion, lemon juice and Dijon mustard, and then, rather than mayonnaise, I decided to use the plain 10% milkfat Greek yogurt I had purchased to make vegetable dip. I open the brand-new container and toss a really big dollop or yogurt into the bowl and notice something a bit off. The yogurt is kind of creamy in color and there are little specs of something in it. That’s because it was French vanilla and now I was committed…. I managed to add enough lemon juice and other savories to make it work for the potato salad – which I typically add a bit of sugar to anyway, but there was NO way I was going to manage onion dip.

You might be thinking, why wouldn’t you just eat the damned yogurt? And if it wasn’t 10% milkfat, it would get eaten, but while it’s rich enough to replace sour cream or mayo in recipes, it’s just too rich to eat by itself.

I got to thinking about sweet things one does with sour cream and landed on cheesecake. I made a crust in the food processor by combining melted butter, graham crackers and some ginger cookies I had laying around. I pressed the crumb crust into a springform pan and prebaked it at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. In the meantime, I beat 3 eggs in a large bowl, added the remainder of the 32-ounce container of yogurt (more than ¾ of it), and a can of sweetened condensed milk to hopefully replace the 3rd element of most cheesecakes, cream cheese (I had none in the house and didn’t want to venture out). One of the traditional cheesecake recipes that I’ve made calls for lemon zest, but I had a couple of beautiful Cara Cara oranges kicking around so I decided to zest one of them and fold it into the batter.

When the crust had baked for 10 minutes, I added the cheesecake batter and put it in the oven for 35 minutes to see what would happen – hoping that it would set up.

Then I’m pondering this zestless orange that I don’t feel like eating but don't want to waste, so I slice it fairly thin lay the slices on a cookie sheet lined with a silicon mat and sprinkled the slices with dark brown sugar and put the tray on the bottom shelf in the oven to bake along with the cheesecake.

After 35 minutes, the cheesecake was perfect, I turned the oven off, opened the door and let the cake sit for 10 minutes. I took the orange slices to cool on the counter.

After the oven cool down, I put the cake on the counter to cool for another 10 minutes. Once it was cool enough to handle, I refrigerated it.

Since none of this kitchen escapade was planned, photos are scarce, and I can only remember the quantities because, the cheesecake is literally in the fridge while I’m writing.

Fast forward to 7 PM.......

Yogurt cheesecake after it's cooled and removed from the pan.

When it’s ready to serve, the plan is to include the candied orange slices as a garnish. I remembered to take a photo of that.