Sunshine

It's been cold here. So cold I had to put my heater back on. So cold I'm constantly putting my sweaters back on. I'm starting to really wonder if I'm premenopausal because I get really warm, take my layers off, then get really cold and put them on again. All day long. I also seem to be on the rag every week. Philip tells me that my cycles are just as they've always been and that I have always been surprised by my periods and suspicious that they've come too early. So what do you think? Memory issues?

As if I haven't already made you uncomfortable enough, how about this? What do you imagine it was like for neanderthal women getting their periods? It must have been how it is with dogs...leaving a trail of blood everywhere they go. Everyone knowing that they are menstruating. But they wouldn't have cared because this was long before In Touch could have caught them on film. Most of them probably didn't live long enough to go through menopause either. I don't think I'd enjoy life back then with even the saber tooth tigers knowing you're on the rag.

Life sure was messy one hundred thousand years ago.

It's been cold here until yesterday. Yesterday was warm. Not hot, for which I'm very thankful, but warm. It was the last day of school. I was finally allowed to tell my son the truth about our feelings about his teacher. Which gave him the opportunity to admit that she hasn't been as bad in the last few days. The sun was shining and by some miracle (for which I still cannot account) my kid has been agreeing to get on his bicycle again. He's been on a bike strike for many months now. So we're pretending that we don't notice that he's been agreeing to cycle around with us for the last week. We're trying very hard not to draw attention to our pleasure.

Philip and Max rode downtown on their bicycles and Max played video games at Philip's work for a couple of hours while I made chevre cheese out of cow's milk, finished cutting the pasta I had made the night before, and filled the car with a load of Goodwill donations. Then I went downtown on my bicycle too. I went to the farmer's market and got strawberries, lettuce, swiss chard, and zucchini. I picked Max up and we visited our friends who live near the downtown. It was such pleasant afternoon. Like a perfect summer day. The kind I like- the kind that don't make roast pigs out of human beings.

After visiting our friends we went back down town to meet with Philip for dinner at Hotel Oregon. We couldn't find Philip but we did find some other friends of ours. Everyone in town was out for a stroll, for a beer, or for ice cream. We sat outside, drank way too much beer, laughed a ton, and then rode our bikes home in the warm evening air. Now that, was a good day!

I don't know what today will bring. I'm not looking for trouble. I'm not looking for bad news. I'm not looking to slide downhill again. I don't have to look, it will happen as if by magic. Perhaps I'll have another reprieve today. I'll make good food. I'll visit our 150 tadpoles!

Have I mentioned the tadpoles? In our little pond there are at least 150 of them and a couple of them are even sprouting legs. They are eating the mosquito larvae which is great. I keep thinking, though, that so many tadpoles in one small pond cannot be healthy. I'm thinking we're going to see some sort of tadpole reenactment of "Lord Of The Flies" soon. Then if even fifty of them make it, what then? Fifty frogs in one yard? No way. Uh uh. My dog would sprout horns in her excitement to catch and eat them.

Incidentally, making chevre is not difficult. So for those of you who would like to embark on a little cheese making but don't know how you can fit that into your full time schedule? In the evening you heat up a gallon of milk, add a culture to it, then you let it sit over night. (Wrap the pot in a towel to try to stabilize the temperature.) In the morning you put the curds in cheese cloth to drain. Go to work, come back, and eat it.

You can, of course, put it in molds to shape it and let it drain more, but it isn't necessary. That is a cheese for the working person to make. If you can't afford, or can't get your hands on goat milk, make it with cow's milk. The culture will give it the characteristic tangy chevre flavor. You just won't get that delightful dusty animal fur aftertaste that so many people love about goat cheese.

It has become plain that I need more roses in my garden. I've got five about to bloom. That's not enough!! Lisa B. brought me a little vase of roses from her garden to cheer me up (and it did!!) which I'm enjoying very much. I have rose greed. I had about thirty five roses in my garden in California and at least twenty five of them were chosen by me for their scent, their beauty, and their history. I don't plant roses with names like "Sexy Rexy" or "Paris Hilton" or "Bubblegum Parade".

The coffee's gone. It's almost lunch time. And I'm not showered. Nice.

Mozzarella

I have a few hints for making mozzarella:

• Don't forget to salt it.

• Kneading really hot cheese is dangerous, so don't be a cowboy about it.

• Don't expect it to miraculously roll itself into a tidy ball like you see in the fancy cheese section.

• Forget about trying to make those tiny little balls you see in extra-fancy cheese sections because hot cheese has a mind of it's own.

• If you're using pasteurized milk this cheese will get soft and messy if you store it in water.

• Don't be afraid of it after you've made it.

I think my cheese could have had more flavor but two things must be considered: the first thing is that I failed to salt it, even though I fully intended to and the second thing is that this was a quick recipe which means the flavor didn't have time to develop. In spite of that I put it on this locally made focaccia bread with tomato sauce and a light sprinkling of jack cheese and the flavor of my own cheese was really nice.

The next time I make mozzarella I plan on making it using the longer method in which the curdling is accomplished with the slow action of enzymes added to the milk and kept at a warm temperature instead of doing it in minutes by using an acid based additive like lemon juice or vinegar. My friend Lisa B. did some research and discovered why I wasn't able to make ricotta successfully from the whey left over after making my cheeses. The reason is that you can only make ricotta from whey that has not been treated with acid. So the other reason to take more time to make mozzarella is one of economy: if you let milk and whey separate using an enzyme you can get two products out of one gallon of milk. Ricotta is a byproduct of cheese making.

That's a two for one situation.

One gallon of milk should yield about a pound of mozzarella cheese and a half a pound of ricotta which means that if I make my own it will only cost me $2.53 p/lb*. Tell me, when was the last time you got artisan quality cheese for that price?

Most average cheeses cost between $5 and $8 dollars a pound in my town. Artisan cheese goes for somewhere between $9 and $20 p/lb. With gasoline prices on a pretty steady climb I don't think we're going to see good cheese get cheaper.

*My local milk costs $2.69 for a gallon, plus you have to add the cost of a packet of cheese culture which costs about a $1.00. You can actually get a culture that you can keep alive indefinitely if you learn the art of feeding your enzymes and then the cheese would only cost $1.79 p/lb. I'm not there yet. Milk often costs close to $5.00 a gallon so sometimes this good price might not be possible. You also have to consider the different yields for different cheeses which vary some.

Further Adventures In Cheese Making
Yogurt Cheese: Tink's Way

In my post about making yogurt cheese one of my commenters, Tink, described her own space saving method of draining the whey off the yogurt. I couldn't quite picture exactly what she was describing so I discussed it with Lisa B. and together we used Tink's idea to come up with this interesting riff on Tink's method. I'm just going to call it "Tink's Method" because I want to say "Tink" as often as possible.

What you need:

• Two large commercial yogurt containers, one must be slightly smaller than the other at the bottom but the tops must be the same circumference. I used a Nancy's container and a Lucerne container.

• A clean screw

• cheese cloth

• yogurt

The first step is to use your screw to make a ton of holes through the bottom of the smaller of the two yogurt containers. It is very important that you make them from the inside going out otherwise the texture of the displaced plastic will create a bumpy surface that will not drain the liquid well.

It should look like this when you're done. I admit that my thumb was a little bit raw by the time I finished. It took me about fifteen minutes to do this.

Next you place the smaller container inside the larger one. If the tops are the same circumference then the smaller one should hang on the lip of the larger one and there should be room at the bottom of the larger one to collect some liquid.

Next you line the inside of the hole punched container with cheese cloth and fill with yogurt. I put the contents of a larger container of yogurt into it, so it didn't all fit super well at first. I just draped the cheese cloth over the top to keep it clean and from spilling over.

Tink is so right that using this method takes up so much less room than a pot with a wooden spoon does. I just squeezed it in on the top shelf.

Be sure to drain off the liquid after the first couple of hours which is when the most liquid will have already drained. After that you don't need to check again for many hours.

You can see that as the liquid drained off, the yogurt condensed in bulk and is much smaller in mass than it was when I first put it in there. This method works brilliantly and I love that I was able to use two containers I already had on hand to make it with, keeping at least two more containers from my trash can, at least for a while. Thank you Tink and Lisa B. for making it even easier to make yogurt cheese!!

The Yogurt Cheese Experiment

Once, a long time ago, back before the Universe decided I needed the excitement of my first broken bones and a renewed relationship with poverty, I discovered why Meyer lemons are not the ideal lemon. Many a Californian has a deep love for the Meyer*, but I'm going to go against the grain here and suggest that the ONLY thing a Meyer lemon is good for is for making lemonade. A Meyer tastes great...but they are lemons with all the fight and zap bred out of them. I suppose that most of the time it is not an attractive quality to be able to make anything curdle.

If anyone told me that I made them curdle inside I would feel very wounded.

However, one of the uses to which lemons are put is to curdle milk. To make most cheeses you need to curdle the milk. You can do this with rennet, a very disgusting liquid or tablet that is made from the stomach linings of mammalians, (I reckon we could harvest human rennet too, but for obvious reasons we don't), or you can use a vegetable rennet, vinegar, or lemon juice. If you are going to use lemon juice it must be the really sour kind.

Not Meyers.

I know this from personal experience.

This holds true for any baking in which lemons are featured. Lemon curd is best when the lemons are Eurekas or Lisbons. This is true of marinades too which involves the acid of the lemon to slightly cook the food you are marinating.

If you want to suck a lemon though, always choose the Meyer.

I am a little afraid of trying to make farmer's cheese again right now (paneer is basically an Indian farmer's cheese) because motivating to do anything that takes actual EFFORT will hurt my head, but I'm trying to work up the courage to make feta. (Do you hear the angel's singing?) Not sheep feta or goat feta...I like cow feta. I miss it. I want it. I need it. Feta is one of my all time favorite cheeses.

So here's the plan: make yogurt cheese which is similar in texture to cream cheese and is about the easiest cheese to make (I will tell you how in just a minute). Next I will make a farmer's cheese but give it the Riana treatment (she cures it in brine which makes it similar to feta) and then, lastly, after I have seen a new psychiatrist, I will tackle the more involved craft of feta making.

To make yogurt cheese you need:

2 pounds yogurt (32 ounces)- make certain it is a "live culture"** yogurt like Nancy's.
Cheese cloth
A colander
A bowl to set the colander in
A long wooden spoon
A tall pot
Fridge space

You line a colander with the cheese cloth. Set the colander in a bowl that is large enough to catch the whey that will drain from the yogurt. Dump the yogurt (or pour it if you're one of those more elegant types) into the colander and stick the whole mess of it in the fridge for a few hours.

My colander is not blessed with enough holes for this to work really well. So after a few hours I skipped to the next step which is to gather up the cheese cloth and knot it over the handle of a spoon like this, and rest the spoon on the edge of the tall pot. More pressure from being suspended will force more whey out which is what will make the yogurt thicken.

Put the pot in the fridge and let sit for up to twenty four hours. You can eat it at any time, really, it all depends on how thick you like it. I'm going for cream cheese consistency because I have some pepper jelly that I would love to eat (I would have to make homemade crackers for it too) and it's perfect with cream cheese. So I will check it in the morning.

It will last up to two weeks in the fridge. When it's at the consistency you desire, you put it in a container, and keep it in the fridge. Or just eat it.

If anyone else makes it, will you please tell me how it turned out and what you ate it with? I'll bet it would be incredible with home made bagels (Which Riana has written about making and included the recipe so you can troll her flickr pages for it if you like.)




*Don't be offended Claire! I do love a good Meyer, but I have to report the truth about their culinary usefulness. If I could give you a thousand Meyers...you know I would!!!

**"live culture" means that the healthy bacteria that makes yogurt what it is have not been killed off during the pasteurization process. If you are eating yogurt for health benefits, then it should always be a live culture kind. Otherwise you're just eating custard.***

***Yogurts that have stabilizers and sugar and weird crap in them are not the wholesome food many Americans think it is. My favorite of the yogurt impostors is Yoplait, but I haven't eaten it in years because it's total junk. For a brief period of time I let Max eat "Gogurt" which is a hideous fake yogurt for kids (by Yoplait) with all kinds of dyes in it that turned Max's poop blue. I draw the line at blue or green poo.