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by Nick Kindelsperger It was only a matter of time...

It was only a matter of time before moved on from grinding beef to pork, and started making my first sausage.  Even more than burgers, sausage absolutely require grinding meat at home.  And now that I had had practice it was time to move up in the world.  It seemed like an important step forward--on par with making homemade bacon and cheese. 

Little did I know that making fresh sausage requires very little skill, knowledge, or talent.  And it's unbelievably cheap.  Of course, this only applies to fresh sausage. And I'm still a little bit away from casings and smoking and anything to do with dry-cured salami--that will come a little later when I get enough nerve. The nice thing about fresh sausage is you can mix the spices with ground meat and not bother altogether with trying to stuff it into casings.

And while breakfast sausage is good and fine, what I really wanted to make was Mexican chorizo.  It's one of my favorite ingredients, and I use it as often as I can, or my wife lets me.  It's fatty and highly spiced, and lends a wonderful aroma to essentially everything it touches. 

Mexican chorizo differs from the Spanish variety in many crucial ways, and not just because it is a fresh sausage and not a cured and smoked one.  While they are both red in color, what turns the sausages that color can differ drastically.  Spanish chorizo almost always has a healthy dose of paprika.  Mexican chorizo can differ in ingredients based on what region you happen to be in. 

I had to first find the right Mexican recipe, but all these differences were a little confusing.  Not only did the kind of chile differ, but the cut of pork changed, too.  All they really agreed on is that chorizo should be very finely ground, an almost paste-like mixture.  Michael Ruhlman's recipe from Charcuterie even whipped the meat in the mixer with the paddle attachment. 

What I settled on had nothing to do with what was the most authentic version: it just seemed the simplest.  

For the past few weeks I've been eating salads for breakfast. I eat huge bowls of mixed greens sprinkled with dried fruits, toasted nuts, and whatever else happens to be on hand. If there is half an avocado in the fridge I'll cut it up and toss it in, same with roasted vegetables, chickpeas, goat cheese, carrots...you get the idea. I eat until I am no longer hungry. It has nothing to do with a diet, nor is it some devious plan my wife concocted to get me to lose weight. At least, I hope not.

I'm eating salads because I dislike most breakfast foods. Sure, I have a soft spot for perfect pancakes and Eggs Benedict, but I'm talking about what most people eat on a daily basis: boxed cereal and pop tarts, the kind of food I'd never dream of eating for dinner, but somehow seems necessary in the morning when I need to hurry up and get to work. Most mornings for the past 15 years of my life have consisted of me just opening a box of cereal.

That changed when I read a book, oddly enough, about ultra-marathoners called Born To Run. The book tries to explain why some people can run incredibly long distances and not get hurt (like, oh, 100 miles), while others (like myself) can't run more than a mile without getting shin splints. The author Christopher McDougall spends most of his time explaining how we should run differently than we were taught (on the balls of your feet, not the heel). But what I really latched on to was that these incredible athletes do all of this activity on a mostly vegetarian diet.

His main subjects, the Tarahumara in Mexico, eat pinole (a flour from crushed toasted maize) and chia (think chiapet), which the author attempts to purchase, before realizing he'd probably get tired of the diet quickly. He consults a nutrionist. She asks, "Have you ever had salad for breakfast?"

It's not the most dramatic part of the book, and the author quickly speeds on to detail his theory on running and the evolution of man. But the breakfast line always stuck with me even as I began to run for the first time in 5 years. It's such a simple thing to add more vegetables to the day. I mean, I already dislike my breakfast routine, so why not give it a shot?

The Paupered Chef is run by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer (left, right). We both love cooking and writing more than anything, except maybe cocktails.

Nick has written about food, wine, and bars for Serious Eats, Gothamist, the Washington Post, and Time Out Chicago. He is currently the Editor of Grub Street Chicago.

The concept of making cheese has always fascinated me, the idea that you can take milk and add a little acid (or rennet) to magically separate it into curds and whey. Milk seems like such a stable liquid, a wholesome elixir of childhood, but with a little citric acid, lemon juice, yogurt, or rennet it completely de-stabalizes into thin, watery whey and fat chunks of curd.

What you do with the curd presents endless possibilities. In Montreal they stud it into gravy-covered fries to make Poutine, a glorious dish I had the pleasure to sample in a search through Montreal. But usually what the curds become is proper cheese, pressed into molds to age with various bacterial cultures, becoming anything from Cheddar to Parmesan.

There are many cheeses, though, that require no aging or bacterial cultures: ricotta, for example, or Greek feta.

Though Nick has explored making ricotta cheese using citric acid tablets, I was on the search for something made more easily with household ingredients. Ricotta is sometimes made with lemon juice, and I thought about exploring that--but I've recently become fascinated by paneer, which is an Indian cheese that's heavily pressed into cakes and fried.  While ricotta is meant to be fluffy and creamy, all the liquid is mercilesly pressed from paneer to make a dense, crumbly cake. Its taste is clean and milky, and I love how it can be caramelized in a pan -- the combination of savory and dairy is intriguing.

A while back, a good friend of mine in New York from India had his parents in town visiting, and they cooked a lavish meal for a handful of friends. One of the dishes was Mattar Paneer, a simple curry with peas and  paneer (the literal translation is "Peas and Cheese"). His mother was kind enough to email me the recipe, both for homemade paneer and the curry.  The paneer recipe is the only one I've seen that uses yogurt instead of lemon juice or vinegar.

What follows is a step-by-step, fully photographed overview of the process.  It's pretty foolproof, and a lot of fun.