Monday, October 06, 2008

I Made Cheese!

There's a change in the weather
There's a change in the sea...
...So from now on there'll be a change in me.
My walk will be different, my talk and my name
Nothing about me is going to be the same.
I'm going to change my way of living
If that ain't enough
Then I'll change the way that I strut my stuff."
Billie Holiday, "There'll Be Some Changes Made"

The weather is changing, and I won't be able to work outside every day. This is the time of year when I try to find things to do inside, to change my way of living in the backyard.

I've been making my morning coffee iced coffee all summer. Today is the first day I made hot coffee. I also had to wear slippers or my feet would be cold: another change from my summer bare feet. So, in recognizing these signs of seasonal change, it's time for me to change myself from gardener to homemaker.

So, one of the things I've wanted to do is make cheese. I experimented with a simple recipe using buttermilk and raw milk. I added fresh chives to mask the sometimes rather bitter taste of raw milk.

It turned out ok, but clearly I need to work on it. I'm getting some rennet and citric acid, and I'll "strut my stuff" by experimenting with other kinds of cheese.

But for a first try, I was pretty proud of it. It was supposed to be mozzerella, but it turned out more like feta in texture.

It was good on last night's dinner salad. Maybe, if I can learn to make reliably good cheese, somebody WILL love me when I'm old and gray.

5 comments:

Martha in Michigan said...

My girls regularly make paneer, and that's really easy. Of course, then you have to make some Indian recipe to put it in.... It reminds me of tofu in texture and uses. See Wiki:
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Paneer-(Indian-Cheese)

walk2write said...

It looks yummy, WS! When you get your cheese-making art perfected, strut your stuff this direction and open up shop. I was just telling Hubby the other day that with all of the wineries around here, somebody needs to open a cheese place. How can you have wine w/o a good cheese and vice versa?

Annie in Austin said...

It does look delicious, WS - but bet I'd need the chives to like it!
You put such ideas into my head! I wonder if we can even get raw milk here? What's sold as local cheese at farmers markets here seems to be mainly from goats on farms out to the west. And local is Texas-local...the farmers markets have some delicious cheese from Dublin, TX, more than 150 miles away. Austin is not exactly dairy country ;-]

Annie at the Transplantable Rose
(still amazed at no hot coffee until fall)

Unindicted Co-Conspirator said...

This is a very cheesy post.

Dr Zibbs said...

Funny you mention making cheese because I never even thought of doing it until I saw a how to video on Chow.com the other day.