Saturday, July 31, 2010

Easy Cheese

Vinegar cheese is the easiest cheese you can make. All it takes is milk, vinegar (you can use lime or lemon juice but the results are more predictable with vinegar), a thermometer, cheesecloth (can be purchased at just about any grocery store) or butter muslin to strain it with, and a pot to heat it in ( you can also add salt if you choose). It is a versatile product that can be used in a wide range of ways. It is a little rubbery and doesn't melt. It can be used rather like tofu since it will take on the flavor of what it is cooked with. I like sprinkling it over pinto beans cooked in the crockpot or on tacos. It can also be pressed into a more solid mass and sliced into cubes. If you have ever had queso blanco or paneer, this is the same thing just under a different name.


I started with two quarts of fresh raw milk though you can use milk purchased at the store. Avoid ultra-pasturized milk as it will not always separate as needed in cheese making due to the extremely high temperatures used during the pasturization process. I have read that the labeling required to show milk is UP can be very small and is not always noticed by the buyer, so check your labels carefully.

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I heated the milk to a temperature of 185 F and then turned the heat down to the lowest setting to maintain that temperature while I got the vinegar and measured out 1/4C. I used regular white vinegar though you can also use cider vinegar, lime, or lemon juice. I haven't tried cider vinegar myself as I heard that the white vinegar keeps the flavor nice and neutral. I get more consistent results with the vinegar than when I have tried lemon juice. I have never tried using lime juice myself but I know it is supposed to work just like lemon juice (all you are really using it for is the acid which causes the curds to separate from the whey).

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Once the vinegar is added and stirred in, the curds and whey separate immediately.

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I used regular cheesecloth which I purchased from my local grocery store but since the weave is very loose, I doubled it over a couple times so I didn't lose too much of the curd when I strained it.

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After I poured it into the cloth (with a strainer under the cloth for support), I pulled the corners of the cloth up and secured it with a rubber band. I attatched it with the same rubber band to my sink faucet and placed a cup underneath to catch any remaining whey. I let it sit there for an hour or so.

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When it stopped dripping, I opened the cheesecloth and broke up the curds with my fingers since I was using it as a topping. If you want to press it together for slicing, you can do that at this time. I transferred it to a bowl and then to the fridge. I had some on that night's tacos and beans. Yum!

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Do not throw away the whey! It can be used in several different ways. It can be used to make some types of cheese. You can use it in baking and cooking. It can be given to pets and plants. I will do a post on whey shortly, but for now just know that it has it's uses. Look up "uses for whey" and you will be pleasantly surprised at what you can do with it.



*Again, sorry for the poor quality of the photos. These are still pictures I took with my phone while my husband and kids were gone camping.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Overloaded with lemons!

I responded to a freecycle ad placed by a woman who lives near me and has a wonderful lemon tree with more lemons than she could handle. I went to her house and picked as many as I felt I could use and didn't even make a dent in the supply! I made lemon curd and lemonade. I juiced a bunch and froze it. I sliced many of them thinly and packed them in quart freezer containers and froze them for future use. I zested them before juicing and froze the zest. I made candied zest. I also made, for the first time, lemon marmalade. Why not, right?


Lovely lemons waiting to be put to good use.
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Zested and waiting to be sliced.
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I have a couple different zesters that make different sized zest. For this, I wanted a medium zest, not too thick but also not teensy, tiny strings. I think the resulting zest was perfect.
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I removed the white pith from the zested lemons, sliced them and put them in with the zest.
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The mixture then was stirred with water and put in the fridge for several hours to soak. When I took it out of the fridge, I put it on the stove to start cooking.
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As the mixture cooked and was eventually mixed with sugar and cooked some more, it turned a much darker color.
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I transfered the hot mixture to prepared jars, put on lids and rings, and they went into the water bath.
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I didn't want to fill up my large water bath canner for only three pint jars, so I used my stock pot that has a removable basket for boiling pasta. It worked great as a water bath canner. It kept the jars from touching the bottom of the pot and it was super easy to lift them in and out of the boiling water.
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All that work resulted in three jars of lemon marmalade. The recipe was decent, but I think next time I will look for something a little less labor intensive and time consuming. It was a lot of work for three jars!
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*I want to apologize for the picture quality in this and a few future posts. My husband took the kids on an extended camping trip and so had the camera with them. These pictures are taken with the camera in my phone.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Post hiatus

Just wanted to let you know that while I have pictures of some recent projects waiting to be posted they will have to wait a little while. I have internet access on my phone but I don't currently have a computer to transfer those pictures to this blog. Keep your eyes open for upcoming posts and pictures on what I did with too many lemons and an excess of milk. I will be doing another hive inspection soon as well and will post pictures as soon as possible!

Friday, July 9, 2010

Harvest

I haven't taken pictures of everything I have gotten from the garden this year, but I do try to take pictures every once in a while, especially if I have a fairly diverse bunch of veggies in one day. Here are a few of the pictures I have taken so far this season.


Beans (some that I have allowed to dry on the vine to use for next season's seeds), sugar pie pumpkin, garlic (teeny ones), cherry and fireworks tomatoes, and some carrots.
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Eggs (I get those every day of course, I just thought they looked nice included in this picture), a couple little jalepenos, several different kinds of tomatoes, beans, and zucchini.
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Zucchini, cucumber, turnips, tri-color beans, carrots, fingerling potatoes, and some cherry tomatoes.
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Just for fun, a "snow"man made of pumpkin.
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Saturday, July 3, 2010

Tomatoes on the brain and in the garden.

I have found myself fascinated with heirloom tomatoes this year... well just tomatoes in general have captured my attention, but heirlooms that much more. I think my interest in heirlooms started while I was browsing through the online catalog at Seed Savers Exchange . They are all about preserving diversity in our food supply and promoting the saving and sharing of heirloom seeds. Much of the seed I have bought in the last year has been from them with even more seeds on my wish list for the future.

Why I have become interested in tomatoes, I'm not sure. I don't even like eating tomatoes raw, just in things like sauce and salsa. Last year I had only one tomato plant and I don't even know what variety it was as my husband brought it home from some big box store in a large pot. It stayed in that large pot and produced enough tomatoes for some salsa, but I didn't do anything else with it. I really, really liked the fresh salsa I was able to make however, and decided to plant more tomatoes this year.

I started out with a couple Early Girls and a Sweet Millions (both hybrids), then moved on to The Garden , a local organic nursery that suffered a devestating fire last year and was hosting a tomato mania as a way to celebrate their re-opening. I took my youngest boy with me and he helped me pick out several varieties. We got Sweet 100, Red Currant, Brandywine, San Marzano, and Fireworks. Shortly after those went in the ground, there was a thread on a gardening forum I belong to that asked about what kind of heirloom tomatoes everyone was growing this year. I had no idea if I had heirloom tomatoes or not so I looked it up and found that my heirlooms were Red Currant (picked by my son), Brandywine, San Marzano, and Fireworks. I had picked these tomatoes willy-nilly as I had no thought for flavor or use beyond knowing that the San Marzano is a paste tomato. I started having day dreams about jars of homeade spaghetti sauce gracing my pantry shelves. I think this is when I started to get a bit out of control. If I saw an heirloom variety while shopping at the nursery (usually for tomato cages for the plants I bought the week before), I would get one. I just couldn't stop myself.

I added more plants until I reached the count as it stands today: two Early Girl, Sweet Millions, Sweet 100, two Roma, four Mortgage Lifter, Yellow Pear, Black Krim, Green Zebra, Pineapple, and Fireworks (the first three on the list are hybrids, the rest are heirlooms). That is fifteen tomato plants for a family of people who don't eat tomatoes other than in the forms of salsa, sauce, or ketchup (the Brandywine I had at one point suffered an early demise before setting any fruit). My boys do sometimes eat cherry or yellow pear tomatoes like I eat M&Ms, but I imagine after a week of having a bowl of them on the counter, they will forget they like them (I wish that would happen with the me and the M&Ms). It always seems to happen that way with my kids. They eat yogurt every day for a week and so I break down and get a bunch of yogurt only to find the rush on yogurt has passed. Darn kids.

So, what to do with all these tomatoes? I guess I will find out when they all start ripening. So far I have been getting Early Girl, Fireworks, Sweet Million and Sweet 100. The first of the Roma and San Marzano are just about ripe and the rest have a while to go.


Today's garden harvest included all the varieties of tomatoes that have started producing ripe fruit, tri-color beans, zuchini, and a couple teeny jalepenos.

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The Sweet Million and Sweet 100 look exactly the same. So far though, the Sweet Million is the only one living up to its name, though the 100 is producing a little bit.

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The Fireworks are producing the most out of all the larger tomatoes. I have had a couple people ask how they taste but I really don't know because, well, I just don't care for tomatoes... I will try a piece of one eventually when I have other kinds to compare it to, but for now they make great salsa!

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The Roma has quite a bit of fruit on it, but most of them are quite small. These are some of the only decent sized ones, I'm not impressed so far.

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The San Marzano is doing much better than the Roma. I'll have to have more next year if I ever hope to put up more than one jar of sauce.

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These baby red currant tomatoes are about the size of a pea and won't get any bigger.

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The Yellow Pear is doing well, I planted this one specifically for my oldest son since my Mom said he loved them when he was at her house recently.

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A few Early Girls. They have lived up to their name being the first of my tomatoes to set fruit.

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This is a baby Pineapple. Before about a month ago, I had no idea there were so many kinds of tomatoes, let alone one called a Pineapple.

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A baby Green Zebra. Since these stay green in color, I'm not sure how I will tell when they are ripe.

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Flowers from the Black Krim. I am really looking forward to this tomato, if nothing else than for the interesting color it will give to anything I make with it.

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A Mortgage Lifter flower. I have no idea why I bought these (and in a four-pack no less!), other than I just wanted to be able to say I had another heirloom. It is supposed to be a great slicing tomato, so of course it's a great buy for someone who doesn't eat sliced tomatoes.

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I have tried telling myself and others that I bought all these different varieties to see if there might be one I actually like to eat on sandwiches and such. I'm hoping that is true. If not... anyone want some tomatoes?