fresh from the press

On the way home from work yesterday, I stopped by my newest blueberry patch find. It appears that very few people know about its exsistence since it still had a bunch of ripe berries on. The other blueberry patch is huge (over 100 bushes)but everyone knows about it and it's hard to get anything near ripe. This newer one is only about10 bushes but definitely worth my time over the other one. The birds hang out there all day and get the pick of all the berries which means I don't get the big juicy ones but they are still yummy. There are plenty still left and I'll be visiting it intermittenly to get more. This time around, I am dehydrating them for winter use. I got about a pound.


But the real subject of this post is cheese...homemade cheese. I made my first batch Monday. I have to wait a couple of weeks to taste it and I'm really excited to see how it turns out.

One gallon of milk makes about one pound of hard cheese but you can use the whey and make ricotta cheese with that so it will yeild more cheese after I finish with that. I'll save the recipe for after I know it worked but here's a brief summary. I heated up the milk with buttermilk and let that sit overnight. In the morning, I added some rennet and heated again. I*t took about 1:30 to move onto the next step.

I cut the curds.


You have to heat it all up again and stir with your hand for 15 minutes. This sets the curds and it really starts to seperate from the whey.

You drain the whey from the curds. I saved it since I'll be making ricotta with it. You salt the curds and wrap it up in cheese cloth.

This is an old book press and isn't the ideal press for making cheese but I made it work just this once. It belongs to Barry and weighs about 40 lbs. This pic was taken before I actually turned the handle to press it. Once pressed, it was not open very much at all.

It sits in the press for about 12 hours. I unwrapped it, rubbed salt on it and wrapped it in clean cloth.

For the next week or two, I'll have to change the cloth as it gets wet, then it's ready to use. The flavor develops over that time...right now it tastes even more mild than string cheese, but it is definitely a hard cheese.

margharita pizza and raw brownies

Dinner...mmm. I'm so hungry right now that just thinking about it is making my stomach growl. Anyway, a couple of nights ago, we made dinner together. Adam had bought this log of fresh mozzerella and while we were snacking on it, I decided we needed to have a margharita pizza. It's our favorite kind, followed by hawaiian. After baking the crust, we topped it with a pizza sauce Adam made, chopped basil, pieces of tomato and small chunks of the fresh mozzerella. It doesn't melt very much like the hard blocks of mozzerella does. It was so good! Unfortunately, it didn't last very long. But the recipe made enough for 2 doughs so the other dough will be made into the same pizza in a night or two. Can't wait!

Then, for dessert, I made these raw brownies. I started making these when I was on the raw diet. I don't make them very often but they are good on occassion. They don't taste like brownies but they satisfy my sweet tooth.

It's a cup of dates, a cup of walnuts, a tsp. of cocnut oil (though you could sub butter, I'm sure) and 1/4 cup cocoa. You process it all in the food processor. The longer you proccess, the more dense they become. That's the way I prefer them. Then, you press into shape (I used a Ziploc container) and chill for an hour. Adam's never tried them.

Little Miss Muffet

Again, I got this from the book "Nourishing Traditions" that I got for Christmas. This recipe makes "cream cheese" and whey. The cream cheese can be used like you would use cream cheese except that it is kind of gritty when cooked in a dish. Maybe if I used whole fat yogurt that wouldn't be the case but I have no experience so can't say for sure. It's healthier though because it's full of probiotics unlike real cream cheese. The whey is what I use to lacto-ferment things like sauerkraut and the carrots that I really like. Also, you can put some in the soaking water for beans and it helps to lessen the things in beans that give you gas.


It's super simple to make. You take a muslin cloth, or a few layers of cheese cloth, draped over a bowl. Dump the yogurt into the cloth.


Tie up the ends and hang it above the bowl.



This is what's left over. The cream cheese lasts a few weeks and the whey lasts a few months.

Sandwich on cast iron and a weed on the broccoli

I have been reading this book about this couple who lived in the Canadian wilderness from the 40's-60's. They talked some about the wild foods they ate. This wasn't one of them that they talked about eating but it inspired me to get back outside and see what food I could find to eat. I noticed in the fall that we had garlic mustard plants growing in the side yard so I went back to see if they survived the snow we had this week. They did! There's not much left but it's still there so I grabbed a handful.

Garlic mustard plant has a garlicky flavor/smell to it though it's much more mild than garlic. I really could have used more than I got but I didn't want to use it all at once. I'll get back to that in a second.

On Christmas, Lanette told me about this cast iron griddle/grill that they had for years but they weren't sure where it came from. They never used it so were getting rid of it. I said, "Oh, give it to me!" So she handed it over thankful to have it out of her house...and I'm thankful to have it in mine! I made use of it today for my sandwich which I have named "ham & cheese pannini with a twist". The is the grill side, the other side is smooth but you've got to have the marks for a pannini. I would have liked to have had a bacon or steak press to squish this sandwich down but I don't have one so I left it its original size.

So, back to the garlic mustard...or is mustard garlic....I can't quite remember. Anyway, back to the plant. I cut it up into thin strips and threw it in a pan with a little bit of butter. After a few minutes, I threw in some cooked broccoli. I let that cook for a few minutes while the cheese was finishing up melting on my pannini.

The twist on the sandwich is that it has apple butter and sliced apples in it. I've had it before with the apples but never with the apple butter. I really liked both the sandwich and the broccoli. I was a little worried about the garlic mustard because the wild greens I've tried so far are extremely bitter but this wasn't at all. I'll definitely be using it again. But I probably only have enough for one more dish. Then I'll have to wait until spring/summer for more to grow.

My first attempt at cheesemaking

I like to have a book to read while I’m eating breakfast. I eat alone so I’m not being rude to anyone, except for the dogs who are busy waiting for some of my food. I unpacked a book called “The Encyclopedia of Country Living”. It has tons of recipes in it. I flipped toward the back and began looking at the dairy stuff. I took one bite of my cereal and noticed that the milk was getting a little sour. I would finish my breakfast and pour the almost full gallon down the drain, I thought. I couldn’t eat another bowlful of that. But as I was reading, I came across for making cheese out of sour milk…not rotten milk, just sour. So I decided I would do that the next day, which would be a Saturday.

I followed the recipe and spent time helping Adam with some of the house project. I snitched a piece of cheese after I scooped the curds from the whey. Now that was some tangy cheese! The vinegar taste came through loud and clear! After draining it, I put it in a baggie in the fridge and didn’t touch it for a couple of days. I tasted it again. It wasn’t quite as tangy but it did have a unique flavor still. I wouldn’t say it was my favorite thing to eat plain but when I put it on my taco, and a couple of other things since then, I thought it was really good! And it kept fine in cheese form for a few weeks until I finally used it all up.

So if you ever find yourself with sour milk, now you know what you can do with it. :o) This is the recipe as it is printed. (I don’t know what a measurement “slug” is so I guessed on the amount. I used somewhere between ½ - 1 cup and I think it was a bit too much but don’t know for sure.)

SAVE-THE-SOUR-MILK VINEGAR-CLABBERED CHEESE

This is a Sloppy Carla’s quick-and-easy money-saver that works for city people, too. You have a container of milk and your kids say, “Yuk, it’s sour.” Do you throw it out? Not unless you have pigs or chickens who will love it. You can salvage it by pouring it into a microwaveable or oven proof bowl. Toss in a slug of white vinegar. Let set undisturbed until it clabbers – 30 minutes or so. Then heat in a microwave or oven until the curds are nice and firm and the whey is seriously separating out. Pour off the whey and – if you don’t eat the curds on the spot because they’re so delicious – use them in cooking any way you would melted cheese, such as in a lasagna. But only make this from just-recently-soured milk, which is still really good food – not truly rotten milk with 3 colors of mold on it!

The curds were small, somewhere between the size of ricotta curds and cottage cheese curds…but more the consistency of ricotta than cottage cheese (dry).




After draining it, on it's way to the fridge.