A Big Vegetable Roast

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Tasha

I think we first came up with this idea last fall. Instead of roasting various winter foods as we need them, why not save oven power and kitchen time by roasting a whole bunch of things at once? I love this idea, and it can save me a bunch of time later in the week.

I set the oven to bake at 400° F, and start prepping things. I like to do garlic first, since it seems to take at least as long as anything else. Slice just the tops from a head or two, and put in a small oven-proof container. Pour in water to come about halfway up the sides of the garlic. Drizzle olive oil right on top of the cloves. Cover with foil or ideally, a lid. I use the foil as many times as I can, but I’d love to have a container with a lid for roasting garlic, and beets. It’s on my list but I haven’t found it yet.

Place the garlic container in a corner of the oven somewhere where it can roast along while you take other things in and out.

Ok, let’s talking about peeling veggies for a second. Peeling a raw beet or squash is such a pain that I almost never do it. But the roasted ones peel like magic.

In my oven, beets get a similar treatment to the garlic, except without the olive oil (probably no harm in adding it too …). Cut off the tops and any long tails, then place them in a pan, add water, and cover.

Put the beets in the oven too. No need to check on them for at least 20 minutes, big ones can take up to an hour or so.

Believe it or not, this is the exact set of beets I got in a bag at our CSA store. Who knew they would fit so precisely?

One of my favorite things to eat all winter long is butternut squash. It’s good in so many things: soups, winter tacos, quiches, seasoned slices. Search some of your favorite cookbooks or sites and you’ll get many more ideas. It’s also much easier to peel when cooked!

Cut the squash in half, and scoop out the seeds. Said seeds are delicious roasted with a little salt and any other spices you wish. I usually put them in after the squash is done.

You can either cut the squash into slices, or roast the halves as they are, depending on your later squash plans. I did some of each. In either case, rub a little olive oil on the cut faces.

If you are roasting slices/seeds/small things, be sure to check on them after about 10 minutes, and then every 5 minutes or so. It’s easy to lose track and burn them while the bigger things are still happily roasting.

I flip the slices over when they get brown on the bottom, so that both sides get nice and toasted.

These slices are done, but the bigger chunks need to cook for a while yet.

Not pictured, but also great to roast are:

Sweet potatoes and/or regular potatoes in their skins, or as slices.

Nuts. Sometimes it’s a lot cheaper/easier to find quality raw nuts and roast them yourself. These are another thing that’s done quite quickly, so set a timer.

By the time the second round of slices (potato) are done, the big pieces of squash are too—easily pierced with a fork.

Beets are also done when fork-tender, and when the peel slides off with just a push from your thumb!

And finally the garlic. I’ve never overcooked it, but if it’s been in the oven for quite a while, check to see if the water has all evaporated. If so, it’s probably done, and if not, add water so it doesn’t dry out. To me, done roasted garlic = squishy and a little caramelized on top. Yum!

So there you have it, all the roasted veggies you need for the next week or so.

What are some of your favorite winter foods?

Washing Fruit and Veggies on the Road

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Tasha

So, you’re driving along on a late-summer road trip, the farmers’ markets and road-side fruit stands are overflowing with beautiful produce, but you hesitate to buy a bunch of berries or tomatoes if you can’t figure out a way to wash them, right? Here’s our solution. All you need is a container (a tub that yogurt came in is perfect) and some water. A cooler is optional. I’m not really sure why it took us so long to figure this out. It works a lot better, and uses a lot less of our drinking water, than trying to pour water with one hand while somehow holding and scrubbing fruit with the other hand by the side of the road. Even if you are on your way to a house or hotel where you could wash fruit, this has the advantage of letting you eat it right NOW, while you cruise along with the windows rolled down, or at your favorite picnic spot.

Put your produce in your little tub, and pour in enough water to cover it. Swirl everything around with your fingers for a minute or so, and then hold the fruit back and pour the water off. If a lot of dirt comes off in the first round, or you just want to make sure it’s really clean, repeat.

Then you can put the clean tub of fruit in your cooler, or on top of the parking brake between the seats for easy access. If you’ve washed something like tomatoes that does better dry and room-temp than cold and wet, you can dump them out onto a towel, or use one of those little green plastic baskets to store them. If you knew how many picnic style meals we’ve eaten, consisting mainly or entirely of various versions of caprese sandwiches, you’d laugh out loud.

A couple more notes: basil does well in the cooler with the stems in the water, or in a sealed plastic bag with a little moisture inside (kind of like the cooler version of this method), but not if the leaves touch the ice (they’ll frost and turn black). Thanks to Bryan for hand modeling, and for being as enthusiastic about fresh local edibles as I am.

Recipe Sketch: About a Million Ways to Make Orange Marmalade

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Tasha

Remember when I posted about how to make French toast, and the “failed” orange sauce I had tried making to go with it? Well, it wasn’t that bad in the end. In fact, at least a few of my friends really liked it. Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about different approaches to marmalade, and how that sauce, which seemed like it was going to be a total waste of time and effort, did actually come together, and with a little more time and effort, become something good. Here I send out a silent (yet public—interesting) prayer to the universe that I will one day say the same about all the things which that sauce represented to me on the first of this year.

Anyway, orange marmalade:

It’s really just a combination of orange peels, juice, and sugar (and usually pectin to thicken it for canning). My New Year’s orange spread had all of the pith inside the peel, and all of the membrane around the orange slices, still in it too. I just washed & sliced the oranges (discarding the ends), pulled out the center strings of pithy stuff, chopped the slices to get out the seeds, and put them in the food processor. I added the juice of a couple more oranges, and some sugar to the pot, and started boiling it on the stove. For a while, it seemed like a kind of bitter, barely cooked orange goo … and eventually I realized that I was going to have to add a lot more liquid, and a lot more cooking time, and some more sugar. All the pithy parts of the orange needed to absorb a LOT of liquid in order to cook down, more than I wanted to juice oranges for, so I started adding water. After that, all it needed was time—a couple of hours of simmering on the stove. Check on it periodically, adding more water and sugar to taste as necessary, until all the parts of the orange are tender enough to eat on toast, and the sauce tastes as sweet as you want. The result has a full, whole-orange flavor—some of the bitterness remains, but you get lots of other flavor elements as well. At the time, I didn’t feel like taking a picture of the finished whole-orange sauce, but it comes out mostly opaque and pale orange, with darker bits of peel mixed in.

I’ve made a quick kumquat marmalade using a similar method. Kumquats have a lot of seeds, so be sure to chop them in quarters and check each one for seeds before putting them in the food processor. They don’t have very much pith or membrane at all though, so you can cook them fairly quickly into some tasty preserves. Just add juice and sugar and boil them on the stove until you get the consistency you want.

On the other end of the cooked-orange-peel-and-juice spectrum from the whole orange spread is a quick thin sauce we made quite a lot a couple of years ago, because it’s awesome on crêpe. It’s mostly orange juice, with just the thin outer peel grated into it. Save a little fresh juice, and put the rest in a small saucepan with the peel. Add sugar to taste as you go, and boil until it thickens somewhat. Add the reserved juice back in when the sauce is done, it brings the brightness of fresh orange to blend with the more mellow cooked flavors.

And of course, you could use other citrus. You could blend them. You could add honey, or a different juice, or another sweetener you like. You could cook it thick or thin, add pectin, can it, freeze it … At first I was going to wait to post this until I had tried a few more variations, maybe one somewhere in between these in terms of how much pith is in it. But the more I thought about it, the more ideas for different marmalade I thought of, and it seemed pretty silly not to just put this idea out there and let you all do whatever you want with it. It might be a fun way to wait for spring.

An Efficient Way to Chop Fruit

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Tasha

I’d like this blog to be, at least in part, a primer for those didn’t have a mom or grandpa who could show them the basics of a handmade life. A lot of the tricks that really help are about efficiency. This post is pretty much an extension of the one about chopping vegetables, and most of my thoughts about efficiency and hobbies are there. But I wanted to add a bit about fruit.

I cut up fruit, using exactly this method, every single morning that I can, and have it for breakfast. I’ve found that if I don’t cut it up and put it in a bowl, I won’t eat it, it just seems too messy or something, but I really like eating it out of a bowl with yogurt, raisins, and nuts. In the summer, I’ll use ripe melons, berries, whatever is fresh, but in the winter, it’s all about pears and apples. I love this breakfast any time!

It’s also true that guests will devour fruit that is cut up and ready to eat, but tend to leave whole fruit in a bowl alone.

So, let’s get started. Just like for veggies, one of the keys is having a big knife, so you can cut whole sections at once. Using a small knife makes it take forever, and at least for me, anything that takes forever is not going to be a daily occurrence.

It’s pretty much all about the photos from here on down.

Cut the fruit into quarters. Then cut out the cores.

In the pear crisp recipe, I mentioned that I love it when pears are ripe enough to cut the core out in one smooth stroke. This is what I mean, this one barely is ripe enough, you can feel where to slide the knife along the edge of the hard core, from the top to the bottom.

Then slice the fruit quarters. Cut the slices thick or thin, depending on if you’re going to chop the slices or leave them as is, if they’re for presentation or for a pie, etc.

If you want chunks of fruit, hold the slices together and chop them again.

So, that’s pretty much it … There’s only one difference for apples, you can’t slide the knife around the core, so cut it out from each side on the diagonal. Once you cut one side, you can give the apple quarter a little flick and it will spin on its round base to the other side.

There you go, three minutes later, breakfast. Did I mention I love breakfast?

How to Make French Toast—and Happy New Year

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Tasha

With variations, tips and tricks to customize your own perfect French toast recipe.

It took me long enough, right? (Can you believe it’s been almost two years? Yeah, me neither.) For a blog with this name, which features recipes, the lack of actual directions for making French toast was getting a little ridiculous. Here’s the thing, I didn’t want to post just a recipe for French toast, that seemed silly, everyone already knows how to make French toast, right? Instead I would put together some marvelous, unheard-of combination of toppings and put that in a post, with the actual French toast just included almost as a by-the-way, here’s how I make it.

I started off yesterday morning with just such a plan, to make a seasonal orange-based sauce. I wasn’t going to tell you this next part, but it now seems important: it did not go well. In fact, it reminded me specifically of the part of the year just passed that I would very much NOT like to repeat in the year to come: me trying very hard for a goal which I (perhaps) have somehow misjudged in one or more ways, expending a lot of time and energy but not quite getting where I’d like to go.

I like to think I’m not superstitious, but at first, this seemed like the most inauspicious possible sign for January 1. Then, as it rolled around in my brain a little more, I started to think that maybe the ~~failed~~ orange sauce (it came out ok after all) was a cautionary tale, and if I took it the right way, I could use it to steer away from the process I don’t want, and towards the one I do.

I started thinking; maybe just French toast is enough. Of course not everyone already knows how to make it. Especially since I have some tips and ideas to get you started with your own never-before-seen, awesome variations. After all, this space is supposed to be about empowering you to make things, and not about me showing off, even though I love sharing the things I make here.

In 2014, I’d like to be more grounded, less hectic. I still have a million dreams of every kind, so many things that I’d love to do. But my journey towards them might not be about reaching as far as I possibly can in one grasp, or frantically trying to fit as much as I possibly can into every single day. Maybe it will be more about doing one little bit at a time, and even about recognizing and sharing the good bits I already have right in front of me.

Happy New Year, friends! May it be a good one for all.

How to Make French Toast

First, and most importantly, you need bread. You can use any kind, and it’s not just a metaphor, or part of the 6 words I chose to describe my life, it really is the best possible use for bread that’s staler than you’d like to eat it. Brioche, or banana bread, or any other thing that’s called a “bread” and maybe borders on dessert, will make amazing, Ann-Sather-worthy French toast. I’ve used my homemade bread for our most recent versions. As always, a quality bread (or any ingredient) will lend even more layers of subtle delicious flavor to the toast (or any finished dish), but it also may be a tastier use for a less-than-stellar bread than eating it alone. How much batter the bread will soak up varies wildly depending on the type of bread and how dry it is, etc.

Next, you need some egg and stuff to soak the toast in. I like it to be mainly egg, because I do not like the inside of the bread to be soggy when it’s done. I like to whisk up the egg etc. in a glass dish with a flat bottom rather than in a bowl, so I can put a few pieces of bread in to soak at a time, and not be left with a little well of liquid at the bottom that the bread can’t reach. For about 6 pieces of bread (again, this varies a LOT depending on your bread, but you can always add a little more to the pan) I use:

3 eggs, whisked up well with:

1/4 cup milk (it’s Ok to substitute non-dairy milk here)

A pinch of salt

A larger pinch of sugar

Next, add some flavorings to the egg mixture—whatever your heart desires. A generous sprinkle of cinnamon, a pinch of ginger and a pinch of cloves is a good way to start, especially in winter. A splash of liqueur is good—for an especially luxurious version, substitute a generous splash of cream for the milk, and add the lost liquid back in by way of brandy or rum etc. Vanilla extract is good (but probably choose it or liqueur), or try another extract, maybe paired with a spice or two, for a unique flavor. I especially like to compliment whatever I’m planning to put on top with a bit of something in the batter, but keep it fairly subtle.

Soak the toast in the batter for a few minutes, then flip the slices over, and let them soak for another couple minutes.

To cook the toast, heat up a heavy skillet over medium heat and melt some butter in it, maybe 1/2 Tablespoon butter for four slices (in my little skillet I used less). The toast should sizzle when it hits the pan, and the egg batter should start to set up right away. It only takes a few minutes to get lovely brown spots on the bottom side, at which point flip the toast over. You may need to add a little more butter between batches.

If not all of the toast is done at once, you can keep it warm on plates in the oven at 200° F, until you’re ready to serve it.

For toppings, really, the sky is the limit. It’s—ahem—delicious with just real maple syrup and homemade crème fraîche. A little orange zest (or even iffy orange sauce) is really good with this basic setup. Practically any fresh seasonal fruit is amazing on French toast, strawberries in spring are particularly wonderful. Any jam you have is good. Coarsely chopped toasted nuts are great (bread with nuts in it would also be great as base). Melted butter, fruit syrup, whipped cream . . .

Some of my favorite flavor combinations may yet appear as time goes on. Please share yours as well!

A Simple and Delicious Way to Cook Artichokes

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Tasha

Phew—who’s ready for a break and some easy cooking? I know I am. As I mentioned in this post about broiled asparagus, spring came along just in time for me this year. I’ve been busting my booty over my recently launched beginning sewing e-book for the last couple of months, so anything that tasted delicious and and fresh without a whole lot of time and effort in the kitchen was a major bonus. We’ve eaten a lot of artichokes this spring.

I love artichokes. That time of spring when they appear at our CSA farm store, tiny and fresh and beautiful in their variations, would get me excited whether or not I needed some easy food options. So we’ve eaten a lot of them, practically one every day for a while there. I also wasn’t running to the store unless absolutely necessary, so I did some experimenting with what I added and how I cooked them. Considering how cool this spring has been in many parts of the country, I’m hoping their are still some artichokes available near you!

Simply Delicious Artichokes

Rinse the your artichokes and trim the stems flush with the bottoms. I don’t trim any of the leaves. Especially when they are small and fresh, I like to leave on each possible delicious morsel. My mom cooks the stems along with the rest, but I find they are often somewhat bitter.

Put the artichokes in a pot in a single layer. Use a pressure cooker if you have one (more about that below). Either put the artichokes stem side down in the pan and add about 1/2″ of water around them, or put them in a steamer basket with either the top or the stem up and add water below. I haven’t found any difference in how they come out with any of those methods.

Optional: add a drizzle of olive oil on top. It doesn’t change the flavor very much, but it does the usual jobs of added oil: making sure that the artichokes don’t dry out and adding a little smoothness to the taste.

Optional: add a drizzle of lemon juice. This doesn’t change the flavor much either, but without it the water left in the pot turns an amazing dark green color which could stain your cookware. However, I cooked a bunch without any lemon and they came out fine.

Put the lid on the pot and cook until the leaves are tender. Pull one out from somewhere in the middle, and pull the base of the leaf off with your teeth to see if it’s tender. It’s hard to overcook them. I knew they were taking a while to cook on my stove, but I didn’t realize how long until I started keeping track for this post. It was anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half! So then I did what should have been obvious, at least at high altitude, got out the pressure cooker. 15 minutes later (12 minutes at high pressure plus warm-up and cool-down) I had cooked artichokes!

Ok, you knew I was going to say this, right? But it’s no joke, artichokes are totally delicious with crème frâiche! And possibly even more delicious with just a bit of good quality balsamic vinegar on top, so that each leaf you dip gets some of each. If you’ve never eaten one before, there are illustrated directions here, among other places. I may have to try a clove garlic in the water next time I make them. But I bet the flavor of the artichokes themselves will still be my favorite part. (By the way, they contain a chemical that can change your perception of other flavors, so beware of eating them with your best wine.) Enjoy!

Broiled Asparagus – Simple Spring Vegetables

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Tasha

I’ve been working super hard on my soon-to-be-released project lately, as you may have noticed since no post has appeared yet this week! Luckily, some spring produce has also arrived lately, heralding the long season of practically effortless vegetables. Perfect timing! I could use some easy dinners right now.

If you’ve never tried asparagus broiled, it’s great. It’s just a little caramelized and crispy on the outside, juicy and delicious inside.

If your asparagus varies widely in thickness, like this bunch did, either separate it into two batches or take the tiny ones out when they’re cooked, sooner than the thicker spears. Cut or snap off the ends of the asparagus spears, put them in a broiler-safe pan and smear a little olive oil on them. Start your broiler on low heat. Put asparagus pan close to the broiler and check it every couple of minutes. The spears will turn bright green first. When they have caramel-colored patches and the ends are barely crispy, they’re done.

Broiled asparagus is delicious as a side to just about anything I can think of. On the day I took these photos we ate it on lemon pepper pasta from Decio (a Christmas gift) with a little cheese, accompanied by a salad and then artichokes.

Enjoy! And feel free to share your favorite spring vegetables/recipes . . .

DIY Crème Fraîche – and Kohlrabi Salad

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Tasha

Or, why I like The Joy Of Cooking so much.

I know, it looks like strange bedfellows, but keep reading . . .

If you’ve never had crème fraîche, I recommend trying it. It’s kind of like sour cream, but a little less sour and much more subtly flavored. And expensive, at least here. It’s a cultured food, so we figured that if some of the cultures are still active, we might be able to get more crème fraîche by adding some of what we had to some plain cream. Good quality organic heavy cream is about 1/4 the price per ounce of crème fraîche, at least in Flagstaff, AZ.

And in fact, if you look up crème fraîche in the KNOW YOUR INGREDIENTS section at the back of The Joy of Cooking (I love that part of the book), they suggest as a substitute: adding one tablespoon of buttermilk to one cup of heavy cream, warming it to 110° F on the stove, and then pouring in into a jar, letting it set loosely covered “until the cream has thickened and has a pleasant mildly sour flavor,” anywhere from 6 hours to 3 days.

We tried the same thing, using one tablespoon of store-bought crème fraîche to one cup of cream. And, almost three days later, tada! It’s funny because it looks like nothing is happening for quite a while, the cream still very liquid, and then finally a few more solid clumps appear, and the then bam! it’s done. Once it gets as thick and mildly sour as you would like, store it in the fridge to keep it from becoming overly acidic.

These directions say to leave it in a warm place while the cultures are working. Our house is short on warm places in the winter, so the first time I tried it, I left the little jar near the stove, figuring that whenever I heated something up it would get a little warmth. That was the time it took almost the whole three days, but definitely worked. The next time, I actually forgot to heat it at the beginning, I just added 1 tablespoon of the first batch to one cup of fresh cream and stirred it around. I thought it might benefit from a warmer place, so I put it in the middle of the burners on the stove as I was cooking dinner, checking from time to time to make sure the jar was getting warm, but not hot, and to rotate it around a bit. That time the whole jar had become thick crème fraîche by the next morning!

Ok, so once you have some crème fraîche, kohlrabi is probably not the first thing you are inspired to put it on. Dolloped in soup or on waffles might sound more luscious, and both are wonderful. But, if you’ve never had kohlrabi, I definitely recommend it. It’s one of those winter vegetables that looks knobbly and scary on the outside, but on the inside has a lovely subtle flavor, in this case a little cabbage, a little nutty, and quite good.

I tried one recipe for kohlrabi salad earlier this winter, but I thought the amount of lemon juice in the dressing overwhelmed the soft flavors. If you look up almost any specific vegetable in Joy, it will tell you not only whether it is good raw or cooked, and how to cook it, and whether to peel it first, but it also gives a list of flavors that compliment that veggie particularly well. That features was a huge help when we joined our local CSA – even though I had never heard of most of the greens we got, they were almost all listed, and I could figure out at least whether they were for cooking or salad, and what they were likely to taste like.

Under kohlrabi it says, among other things, that it goes well with cream, parsley, and dill. As do carrots, and so . . .

Recipe Sketch: Kohlrabi and Carrot Salad with Crème Fraîche

This makes enough for 2 or 3 servings, feel free to make more!

Peel, taking off the woody outside layer (chew on a bit if you are not sure), 2 small kohlrabi

Scrub one medium carrot (I pretty much never peel carrots)

Grate the kohlrabi and carrot on the largest teeth of your grater (a trick I only recently figured out is to leave the carrot top as a handle, start grating from the skinny end, and stop when you get almost to the top).

Put these in a bowl, add 2 – 3 tablespoons of crème fraîche, and mix with your fingers, it should be slightly creamy all over.

Sprinkle on about a tablespoon each of chopped fresh dill and fresh parsley. (Remember how I keep herbs in a jar in the fridge? Dill keeps practically indefinitely that way.)

Mix together, taste, and add a pinch of salt if desired. If you are not serving it right away, you may find that the veggies have absorbed some the liquid and the salad is a little dry, if so you can add a little more crème fraîche or regular cream before serving.

I love all harmonious delicate flavors in this salad. And, as you might guess, some crème fraîche mixed with the cream for carrot and raisin salad is pretty great as well.

If you can’t find any crème fraîche to start from where you live, you may be able to get the cultures from a source like New England Cheesemaking Supply.

I did a little research on using the same process to make perpetual yogurt, which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never tried, but it’s now next on my list of kitchen projects. From what I’ve read so far it seems only slightly more complicated, heating the milk, I presume to kill of any unwanted bacteria, then adding the yogurt or culture once it’s cooled back to warm.

What about you – have you made your own crème fraîche or yogurt, or other cultured food? Any tips or thoughts?

Simple Homemade Cheese – Goat Cheese and Paneer too!

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Tasha

My friend Tom comes up with some good ideas sometimes (shh – don’t tell him!) especially when it comes to food. The other day he appeared at my house with some goat cheese he made. I have been making fresh paneer cheese for Indian food for a while, mainly because we live a fairly small town and (to my knowledge) you can’t buy it here. So, I already had a method for fresh cheese that’s pretty foolproof and I know works with a variety of different ingredients, and thanks to Tom’s idea, I tried it with goat milk too, and it worked great! I got a soft fresh goat cheese.

I first learned this method from reading the paneer cheese directions in Laxmi’s Vegetarian Kitchen by Laxmi Hiremath, my favorite Indian cookbook. Since then I have figured out a few tricks and variations. One thing I love about this way of making cheese is that you don’t need anything you don’t already have in your kitchen or can’t easily get. And there’s only one thing you need to know that may not be obvious if you’ve never made cheese before – read on.

Recipe Sketch: Simple Homemade Cheese

Start with milk. You can use whole or low-fat, cow or goat etc. If you can get small-batch pasteurized, or non-homogenized milk, it will make a big difference in the texture of the curds and the cheese, for the better. We used to get local dairy milk in glass bottles in Madison, which worked great. Organic Valley has a non-homogenized “grass milk” I can get here, which also works great. Don’t worry if you can’t find anything other than ultra-pasteurized milk though, you can still make cheese! The only goat milk I could get was homogenized and ultra-pasteurized, and it still worked, as you can see.

Put the milk in pot with room to spare. You can use whatever portion of milk you happen to have left in the fridge. Most of what’s in milk is water, so be prepared for to more to become whey than cheese. I used 1 quart of goat milk and got just over 5 oz of soft cheese, a ball about the size of my fist.

Heat the milk until it starts to boil, stirring occasionally. Stay around the kitchen for this part, even though it will take a little while for the cold milk to heat, because as soon as it starts to boil it will want to boil over! I like to put away the dishes or something while I’m waiting.

Also while you’re waiting, get out something acidic to curdle the cheese. You can use fresh lemon or lime juice, or yogurt, cultured buttermilk, or even vinegar. Each one will give a little different flavor to the cheese. One of my favorites is a little lime with a little buttermilk. Use whatever you have and experiment to see what you like best.

When the milk starts to boil, turn it down to a simmer and add a little bit of your acidic substance of choice. Stir and wait for about 30 seconds, then if nothing is happening, add a little more acid, stir and wait again. At some point a separation will occur, instead of milk you’ll have solid curds and translucent whey (yup – little miss muffet). This is the key to knowing if the separation is complete, the whey will be yellowish and almost clear, you will be able to see distinct white curds floating in it. The curds may be tiny flakes or huge globs, depending on the milk, but all the white milk solids will be in them, and they’ll be floating in the translucent whey. I could have sworn I had a picture (from my not-well-lit kitchen) of what it looks like when the curds are huge, but I can’t find it anywhere. I’ll take one next time it happens. For this goat milk the curds are tiny.

Once you have curds and whey, turn off the heat and let them rest for a few minutes while you get ready to drain the cheese. Put two layers of cheesecloth (yup – that’s why it’s called that) in a colander. If you want to save the whey, put a bowl under the colander. You can use the whey instead of milk to make pancakes, etc., as a soup stock, or to make other kinds of cheese.

Pour the curds and whey into the colander. If you want to make a firmer, sliceable cheese, add any flavorings you want at this point, while you can still stir them into the cheese. For soft cheese you can do it later. In any case, then gather up the edges of the cheesecloth and tie it together, so that the cheese continues to drain. I have a long, plastic coated twist tie that I use, one end is twisted into a loop that goes over my faucet, and I twist the other end around the cheesecloth and let it hang it the sink, still inside the colander. You can also tie the cheesecloth to a wooden spoon or other tool laid across the top of your colander. You just want the cheese in its cloth to be suspended so it continues to drain.

That’s about it! Leave your cheese to drain for an hour or more, depending on how firm you like it to be. If I’m making paneer I want it to be sliceable, so I’ll leave it longer than for soft goat cheese. You can always open the cheesecloth and check to see if it has reached the consistency you want. If you’d like it to be firmer, just tie it back up and leave it to drain a little longer. You can also press the cheese after draining, between two plates with something heavy on top, and leave it in the fridge like that for a few more hours to make it even firmer. So like I said, lots of options.

Ta-da! Cheese! You can now scoop it out of the cheesecloth and into a bowl or container to save it. For soft cheese, you can stir in a little salt or any herbs you would like to add to the flavor.

So there you go, I hope that’s enough to get you started on your own cheese-making adventures!

Storing Herbs in the Fridge

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Tasha

Ok, one more thing related to our super haul from the last farmers’ market last week. It’s also related to a big bag of assorted herbs that some visiting relatives left at our house this summer. They were from the garden, and I made it my “herb challenge” to use every one, and in some cases to figure out what they were. After having fresh oregano in pasta sauce, rosemary potatoes, lemongrass syrup for soda, and tarragon butter – the finale – I decided this was way too much fun to stop just because we got to the bottom of the bag, and I’ve been buying more fresh herbs ever since. They just add such a punch of round, fresh flavor.

This tip for storing them is something we figured out last fall while visiting friends in Bend, OR. You know how basil wilts in the fridge pretty much immediately? Well, the farmer at one stall told us to try putting the stems in a jar with water in the refrigerator, which we did – and it wilted immediately, maybe even faster than in a bag. I was telling this story to another farmer the next week and he said, “But, did you put a plastic bag over the top?”

Aha! This works amazingly well, like some kind of magical super-cold greenhouse. Put the bag loosely over the herbs, and then use a rubber band to keep it tight to the base of the jar. For basil, I also trim the stems just a bit like I would cut flowers. The basil in this picture is already a few days old, it will stay fresh for about a solid week. The other herbs have so far all been eaten before they show signs of wilting.

Hope this inspires you to add some fresh herbs to your fridge!

Update: If your basil stems aren’t long enough for a jar of water, I’ve had good success keeping them sealed tight in a plastic bag in the fridge, with just a little moisture inside. If it seems dry in the bag, I sprinkle in a little water and distribute it by gently mixing the leaves around, then seal the bag again. This works in a cooler too, as long as the leaves don’t touch the ice.

Tasha Miller Griffith

Sustainability and Belonging through Textiles

Category Archives: Basic Cooking Techniques