Chives & Herbed Yogurt Cheese

Chives In My Garden

You can't go wrong with chives. They are well-mannered and friendly and get along splendidly with everything. They are the garden's equivalent of the perfect party guest: dependable and diplomatic, able to liven up even the most humble gathering. They are easy to grow and easy to harvest. A single clump of chives, happily soaking up sun in the ground or in a pot, is adequate for home culinary use, but why stop there? Orderly rows of chive plants add grace and charm to any garden, be it a sprawling vegetable patch or formal herb bed.

Chives are the ideal plant for the lazy or time-pressed gardener, for once established, they require little maintenance, and it is practically impossible to kill them. They will endure hot, dry, humid summers with nary a droop and are hardy to Zone 3. Pests virtually ignore them (as they do all members of the allium family), and they are even said to discourage harmful insects, including aphids and mites, from attacking nearby plants. Chives are a welcome addition to the organic garden.

Dormant in winter, chives will renew your sense of hope each year as their tiny green shoots poke out of the ground at the first hint of warmer temperatures. In early spring, while most perennials are still shaking off their winter sleep, your already verdant chive rows will be busy transforming themselves into cheerful masses of showy, lavender-pink globes that will delight your color-starved eyes and draw scores of grateful bees to your otherwise lackluster garden.

Inexpensive chive plants are widely available at nurseries and garden centers, and they can also be started fairly easily from seed. I sow seeds indoors in March. Once they have sprouted (this may take up to three weeks), I place them in individual plugs and move them into the greenhouse or outdoors (depending on the weather). When the seedlings are several inches high they are transplanted into the garden. I have been told that it can take a few years for chive plants to mature and bloom, but this has not been my experience. Seedlings planted in late spring were covered with flowers the following year.

Another option is to swipe some chive bulbs from a friend's garden and relocate them to yours. This will actually benefit both of you, as chives should be dug up and divided every three years. The best time to do this is in late summer or early fall, so start scouting around now for likely prospects.

The dividing process is simple: Water the chives a few hours before you begin. Then use scissors to snip them back to about four inches in height. Carefully dig them up and separate each clump into smaller clumps of three or four plants each. Replant these smaller clumps 1/2 inch deeper than they were growing before in a spot that will receive at least six hours of sun a day. They should be spaced four inches apart in the garden, or you can plant one or more clumps in a pot. Water them well and watch them grow.

Taking care of chive plants is a cinch: I fertilize with manure tea, mulch thickly with hay or grass clippings to discourage weeds, and remove spent blooms. Harvesting individual stems requires nothing more than a pair of scissors or a sharp knife.

If your perfect party guest is truly perfect, they should also be able to keep you company while you are in the kitchen, and this is certainly true of chives. Once you discover the hundreds of uses for chives, you will wonder how you ever survived without them. Their mild onion flavor perks up everything from chicken salad to quesadillas. They even make food look better, too. Like a beautiful strand of pearls, a sprinkle of freshly-snipped chives will add instant sophistication to almost anything: a serving of mashed potatoes, a platter of stir-fried vegetables, even plain old scrambled eggs. Your meals will begin to look as if they came out of a fashinably chic cafe. For a truly elegant touch, toss some of the edible, peppery blossoms into your salad, or float a few atop bowls of spinach soup.

Maintaining your new culinary style throughout the winter months is simply a matter of putting a few cups of chopped chives into an airtight container and sticking it in the freezer. The pieces will freeze individually, enabling you to pull out only a pinch or two whenever you need it.

Agreeable and compatible, chives are at their best when mingling with other herbs. One of the nicest ways to take advantage of this is to make herbed yogurt cheese. Yogurt cheese is simply unflavored yogurt that has had most of the whey drained from it. It is a tasty, healthy alternative to cream cheese, sour cream, mayonnaise, or butter, and can even be made with nonfat yogurt. Once you try it, you will probably be hooked. Best of all, it is a snap to prepare.

You can make yogurt cheese by putting yogurt in several layers of cheesecloth or in a paper coffee filter set in a mesh strainer and then placing them over a dish to drain into, but these methods can be messy. For many years I have happily used a pair of inexpensive plastic yogurt strainers that look like cone-shaped coffee filters. Unfortunately I cannot locate a current source for them, but during my search I discovered a handy-looking contraption I now have a hankering for. It is called a Yogurt Cheese Maker and is made by Donvier. It is neat and simple and probably well worth the $15.95 investment if you make yogurt cheese on a regular basis. (June 2006 Update: I finally got around to buying one of these, and it is absolutely wonderful. Easy to use, easy to clean, and it has a nice tight lid for storing in the fridge. I highly recommend one.)

The best yogurt cheese is of course made from organic homemade yogurt, which is also a snap to prepare: You heat some milk, mix in a heaping tablespoon of yogurt, pour it into little glass jars, and plug in the yogurt maker. Again, my yogurt maker (which I snapped up--brand new--at a yard sale for a dollar) is so old it is no longer made, but the Euro Cuisine YM80 looks similar and makes seven 6-ounce jars at a time. The Salton YM9 makes a one quart container of yogurt. I do not use special starters or add powdered milk or do anything fancy when I make yogurt. I simply use a little bit of the last batch as a starter for the next. Every once in a while, I will buy a container of Stonyfield Farm organic plain yogurt and use some of it for the starter to refresh the cultures.

You do not need a recipe to make herbed yogurt cheese. Just chop up whatever fresh herbs you happen to have around (I like to combine basil, oregano, parsley, and chives) and stir them into some yogurt cheese along with a splash of balsamic vinegar and some good salt and pepper. The amount of herbs you use is entirely a matter of taste. My philosophy is (as usual): More, more, more. When you think there will be more herbs than yogurt, that is probably enough. I recently made some of this for a friend who loves it, and on a whim I stirred in a container of cottage cheese. She pronounced the result even more delicious than the original version. The other day I discovered a container of ricotta in the fridge and mixed that in. It was very nice.

You will quickly find dozens of uses for this delightful concoction. You can spread it on toasted baguette slices and then stick them under the broiler for a minute or two. You can put it on a bagel along with thin slices of vine-ripened, heirloom tomatoes or serve it in a pretty dish alongside a plate of your favorite crackers. It makes a marvelous dip for nearly any fresh vegetable (my favorites are carrots, cucumbers, and sweet red peppers). You can even slip some into an omelette. It is a wonderful thing to bring to a potluck party or to a friend you are visiting for lunch. Just be sure to pack it in a container you do not mind parting with, for I have never had anyone offer to give any leftover herbed yogurt cheese back.