Jennifer Murch Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. -Twyla Tharp

Time 2021-08-31 06:24:13

Web Name: Jennifer Murch Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. -Twyla Tharp

WebSite: http://www.jennifermurch.com

ID:190018

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the,only,way,

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My brother’s family was here for the week, so that morning we’d all gathered at my parents’ house for breakfast. When lunchtime rolled around, everyone (minus my parents who opted to stay home and snatch a breather) transitioned to our place for lunch.Now, they are pricey (mine cost nearly $80, and that was with a discount) but they are even better — way better — than I imagined. Even in this hot weather, I wear them constantly. (UPDATE: Today, in 93 degree heat and sky-high humidity, I did notice that my feet were sweating a bit. So yes, feet will sweat in them, but in normal weather they re peachy.)And then one of the Merino ads popped up on social media: Better than bare feet, it declared, and I was like, See? I told you.My mother sent the link to me, and then my husband and I watched the two-plus hour live performance over the course of several days. Both of us loved it, probably because we appreciated Julia s persistant questions and identified with many of her observations about religion and faith. Only problem: it left me wishing I was part of a book (or video) group so I’d have more people to discuss it with!My brother and sister-in-law recently released this music video along with their new CDCoffee Cake. Each time I watch it, I can’t help but get a little emotional. Something about the beauty of the mundane: kids running around outside, grating carrots, conversation with a spouse. I’ve made mozzarella before, and it’s fast (only 30 minutes), but it involves several steps, lots of dirty dishes, whey splashes galore, and — this is the worst part — plunging your hands in painfully hot liquid. Add in this crazy hot humid weather, and making homemade mozzarella is like installing a sauna in the main part of your house: stupid.But homemade mozzarella is easy to make! It freezes well! It’s cheap! It goes with everything! I need my mozzarellaaaaaaaa!milk jello — right around the 100-degree mark (though that thick band of whey means I probably heated it a bit higher than I should have)So when I happened upon a video of an Italian dude making mozzarella by stirring the curd with a long wooden paddle, not his hands, I got excited. Just lots of stirring, extra hot water, and then — BAM — mozzarella, could it be? But THEN I saw that Kate (the quark lady) had recently done a post updating her mozzarella method and, lo and behold, she’d switched from hand-stretching to spoon-stretching (à la the Italian cheesemaker in the video)! To stretch the cheese, she just lifted it out of the whey with the spoon and let gravity do the work. The part I d been missing, I surmised, was that I hadn’t heated the whey enough.Kate’s new method is so relaxing and easy and efficient and — most importantly — painless. No more scorched hands! Once the cheese is sufficiently smooth (we’re aiming for “good enough,” Kate says), she just dumps the squishy soft mass into a square container (the easier to grate it, my dears!) and pops it into the fridge. Or freezer, since it only holds a few days in the fridge. I’ve been trying to make a batch of mozzarella each week. Sometimes I grate it prior to freezing, other times I wrap a whole chunk in plastic and then bag it, and yet other times I vacuum seal it.Course, if you want to shape the cheese into ropes and then drop them in ice water to set (though they will, once removed from the water, slump a bit), feel free!Mozzarella is short on flavor (but long on stretch, pun intended) so always make sure to salt it prior to eating it fresh, or while cooking with it. Most recently, I’ve been putting it on pizza (of course), tossing it into stirfries, eating fresh with slices of tomato, and sticking it in grilled cheese.Speaking of grilled cheese, yesterday I made a grilled cheese using fresh mozzarella and quark and I about fell out of my seat it was so delicious. The quark added a gentle creamy tang and the mozzarella the incredible stretchy gooiness, and goodness gracious, oh boy, WOW. No-Hands MozzarellaAdapted from Kate s blog, Venison for Dinner.Since I find it easier to spoon-stretch a larger amount of curd, I usually make my mozzarella with at least 2 gallons of milk.(Update: I just rewatched the video of that Italian guy making mozzarella. Maybe next time I should try hanging the curd to drain, crumbling it, stirring in salt, and then adding it back into the pot of hot, reserved whey? Might make a more flavorful cheese .)2 gallons milk3 teaspoons citric acid dissolved in ½ cup cool water½ teaspoon rennet in ¼ cup cool water½ cup non-iodized saltHeat the milk to 55 degree and gently stir in the citric acid. Continue heating the milk until it’s about 85 degrees, and then gently stir in the diluted rennet. Continue heating on low for another couple minutes — no stirring — until it’s about 95 100 degrees.Remove from heat and let sit for 10 minutes. At this point, the milk should be a solid block of curd — think milk jello — with a thin ring of whey around the edge. Make sure the curd is sufficiently set by sticking a table knife (or your finger) in at a 45-degree angle and then lifting up; the curd should split cleanly.Stir the curds to break them up into small pieces. Let sit for several minutes — the curds should sink. Remove 2-3 quarts of whey.Place over medium-high heat, add the salt, and heat to 130-140 degrees, stirring every couple minutes. Right around 120 degrees, the curds should start clumping together. Once they’ve pulled together, you can start the stretching process. (The hotter the whey, the easier this is, so feel free to wait until 135 degrees or so.)Using a sturdy spoon (I use one that my brother hand-carved), lift the curd out of the whey and hold, watching as the curd slowly stretches/falls back into the pot. Repeat this lifting and stretching process 10-20 times. At first, the curd will look dry and clumpy, but as it heats, it will soften and stretch. Once it’s satiny and smooth, lift it into a plastic container and pop it in the fridge.Use fresh within a few days (don’t forget to salt it!), or (grate and) freeze it for later.Welp, it looks like it’s time for my weekly dairy post! How about we tackle . . . quark? (Note: “quark” is best vocalized loud and fast, like a cross between a goat’s bleat, a duck’s quack, and a dog’s bark: QUARK!Go on, try it. See? Wasn t that fun?)I didn’t know anything about quark — QUARK! — until a few weeks ago. Turns out, it’s a German soft cheese, sibling to the French fromage blanc (or frais, or whatever), and similar to cream cheese but made with milk instead of cream. It’s actually a lot like the yogurt cheese I make but without the yogurty tang (and the extra step of making the yogurt).Quark yields a gratifyingly large amount: nearly two pouds per gallon of milk if you have high-fat milk (our Daisy milk only yields 1 pound 5 ounces). Also, it’s extremely simple: culture plus time, that s it. If you plan things right, you ll actually be asleep for the majority of the process.Quark requires mesophilic starter which is expensive BUT I’ve learned that I can save the whey from the quark and use that as my mesophilic starter for futures quark, cottage cheese, monterey jack, etc. It’s brilliant! (Locals, I’ve got plenty and am willing to share.)Since quark differs enough from cream cheese that we don’t use it as a substitute, at least not for fresh eating, figuring out how to use the quark has been a little challenging. So far, I’ve used quark…*in place of ricotta for lasagna-type dishes: fabulous.*baked French toast: since I can detect a slight different flavor, I thought the kids might fuss, but they gobbled it up, syrup is magic. Also, since quark crumbles kinda like feta, it was way easier to layer with the bread — no sticky cream cheese to swear at!*quiche: perfect.*cheesecake: lovely.leek and sausage, with a few fistfuls of quark and some leftover cuajadaI was skeptical about the cheesecake. I mean, I do already have the recipe for the perfect classic cheesecake in my files, and there was no way, I thought, a milk-based cheese with a slight texture could possibly compete, right? Right. EXCEPT, cheesecake made with quark is altogether different. More dense, and with a slight tang, it s less like a dessert and more like a nutritious food. Like if we re comparing cheesecakes to breads, a classic cheesecake would be a brioche while cheesecake made with quark would be a rustic wholegrain sourdough. Both are delicious.Eating the cheesecake, one of my girlfriends actually got emotional — Oh, Jennifer, she whispered, her eyes welling up (or did I imagine that?), this is incredible! — and another declared she liked it even better than regular cheesecake. Cheesecake of the traditional sort, she said, is so rich she can only handle a couple bites, but this? This now, she could do.My husband and I agree that this cheese requires a tart fruit sauce, and lots of it. For our small group supper the other night, I served the cake with sugared peach slices and they just didn’t pack the right punch. However, the leftover berry drizzle that I brought home from the diner (that they used on their weekend waffles) was perfect, as would be this red raspberry sauce. Saucy and bright, that’s the goal.Save a quart of the quark s whey to use in other cheesemaking recipes that call for mesophilic starter, like cottage cheese and monterey jack. (I generally substitute about ¼ cup whey for every ⅛ teaspoon of dry culture.) The whey should hold in the fridge for at least three weeks, and maybe longer.1 gallon milk¼ cup whey saved from making cheese with mesophilic culture (OR ⅛ teaspoon dry mesophilic culture)2 drops rennet mixed with 2 tablespoons cool water1 teaspoon salt, non-iodizedIn the evening before bed:Heat the milk to 85 degrees. Gently stir in the whey, and then the diluted rennet. Pour the mixture into a gallon jar (or keep it in the kettle), lid, and let sit at room temperature overnight, approximately 12-14 hours.In the morning:Using a long serrated bread knife, roughly cut the curd into squares. Let sit for 5 minutes. Pour the curd into a cheesecloth-lined strainer (don’t forget to save some of the whey for your next batch!), tie up the ends, and hang for about six hours.Dump the cheese — QUARK! — into a bowl and stir in the salt (I’ve used as little as a half teaspoon and as much as two). Transfer to the fridge — it should hold for about three weeks — and use it in recipes that call for cream cheese or ricotta.One gallon of milk should yield about 1½ to 2 pounds of quark, depending on the fat content of your milk.  Use this recipe, but substitute quark for the cream cheese, and double up on the fruit sauce.(A couple weeks ago) he asked if he could bring some friends over for supper.(photo credit: my older son s friend)Tidying my process: mixing milk and flavorings in the jars prior to adding the thinned-down starter.Friends treated us to a Dominican feast of mangú, saucy salami, fried cheese, yucca, and onions.Failed experiment: what with the high temps outside and hot oven inside, it did nothing. Delivery to a new teacher on the first day of school. (But my handwriting was so bad, she didn t know who it was from, oops!)Last time I posted about the coronavirus, I wondered out loud if maybe it was over. I knew better, of course — even from deep inside my vaccinated bubble, I could hear the Delta variant hoofbeats fast approaching — but for a few months there it felt like life was almost normal. I wanted it to be normal so I happily stuck my head in the sand and pretended. It was glorious.But now — [brushes sand out of hair] — the numbers are rising. Kids are getting sick. Masks are back. I read the news reports. I discuss vaccine science. I talk with exhausted medical professionals and scared parents and public health nurses. And just the other day I placed an order for another box of medical masks and I wanted to cry. I’m frustrated about the resurgence, and that we need to wear masks again, and that our daily activities are, once again, in jeopardy, but mostly? Mostly I’m angry at the unvaccinated people who are so stubbornly committed to their “freedoms” that they are willing to sacrifice the well-being of those around them. Yes, I realize we’re supposed to be respectful and open-minded, tiptoeing oh-so gingerly so as not to destroy relationships with those who think differently, but any more these days I just can t even. It s gone too far. I m done with civility. (Not really, but that s how I feel.) When I hear about unvaccinated people who end up in the hospital and then express dismay at the intensity of their illness and frustration with their inferior medical care, I want to scream, And the surprise in that is what? Did you think this was a JOKE? You do realize there is a pandemic going on, right? Hospitals are short staffed and the employees overworked precisely BECAUSE people like you haven’t had the decency to take basic precautions. Of COURSE your care wasn’t great! Did you honestly think it would be otherwise?The way they act — stunned, almost, or affronted — I get the distinct impression that they’ve been living in an alternate universe and have suddenly bumped up against reality. How could they possibly have missed the memo? I wonder. Could it be that they aren t savvy with their news sources? And as for the antivaxxers who play victim — Poor me! they blare on their Facebook statuses, I’m being bullied for my choices! — do not even get me started. Of course no one should ever be cruel to another person — I stand behind that — but when personal choices inflict pain on others, it’s only natural to get angry. I mean, isn’t vaccination refusal a gross breach of the basic social contract, that implicit agreement that requires all of us to work together for the common good? Break the contract, people are gonna get pissed, and then do something about it (I hope).Which leads me to my next point: when, oh when, are the unvaccinated gonna have to start taking responsibility for their actions?One of my local public health friends who is fed up with the unvaccinated bullshit says we should just stop treating the covid-positive unvaccinated people. That’s never going to happen, of course — it’d be unethical, and besides, medical professionals have taken an oath — but I get her point: half of us are bending over backward to stop the spread while the other half is just waltzing around, thumbing their noses at our efforts and wrecking havoc, and then we all come limping along behind them, meekly mopping up their mess. In a recent NPR report (if you ve got an extra seven minutes, give it a listen), a medical ethicist argued that it’s time to start making the unvaccinated people liable for any harms. He explains that he s not being vindictive or punitive. Just, people who live a high-risk lifestyle have higher insurance premiums, and if a drunk driver kills someone, there are consequences; likewise, unvaccinated people who are similarly endangering the health of others need to be held accountable.  Some places, like Puerto Rico, are being aggressively proactive. There, in order to be treated at the health clinics, patients have to produce either their vaccination record or a negative Covid test, and in order for unvaccinated employees to continue working, they have to provide proof of religious exemption and produce a negative covid test each Monday, and they have to pay the 80 dollars for each test out of pocket. The other night, I dreamed I was in a fancy hotel. Through the big glass window, I watched as a huge tsunami wave crashed against the hotel, swallowing all the screaming people on the beach. At first the hotel held up; we were safe! But then people started finding their way in: dirty people, poor people, angry people. Our fancy hotel turned soppy-wet and rapidly fell apart. We were no longer safe.I have close friends and family who are unvaccinated. I love these people, deeply, and yet I am angry at them. The disconnect is disorienting. I wonder if my anger at unvaccinated people is, perhaps, a scapegoat for a greater, generalized sense of powerlessness? Afghanistan, conspiracy theories, the climate crisis, Haiti, my pulled hamstring, impending old age: there are so many things I can’t control.But Covid, now. Covid, we could have controlled, should have controlled. That was in our power. And yet we failed and so here we are, being swept up in yet another tidal wave of destruction.But listen: loving someone doesn t mean you can t be angry at them. In fact, I believe it s actually a sign of respect to get angry at those we love because it means we care enough to be invested. And it’s a gift for us to know when we make others angry! My mother used to say it was important for me and my brothers to know that our behavior had an impact on other people — her. (And boy, did she ever let us know it!)Confession: despite what I just said, I m not directly confronting my friends and family, partly because I’m not sure it’d be constructive and partly — maybe mostly — because I’m chicken. So what do I do? I write. Putting my feelings into words helps me think. My brain is so chaotic (last night my husband compared it to a filing cabinet knocked over in a windstorm) that it takes considerable time, and many many pages of words, to process my jumbled thoughts. And that’s it, folks. This is all I’ve got. I don’t have the answers, obviously, and maybe there is no answer. A couple months after I pulled my hamstring, I d done everything I knew to help myself heal — complete rest mixed with stretches mixed with incremental moderate exercise — but it still wasn’t getting better. Or it wasn’t getting better fast enough to suit me. And then my knee flared up. At times, it was so painful that I had trouble sleeping, and for about a week I had to take the stairs like a toddler: one step at a time. I bought a knee brace and started wearing it during the day, both to provide support and slow me down. When I began worrying about irreparable damage — ground-down cartilage, shattered knee caps, crutches — I knew it was time for an expert to weigh in. I googled physical therapists, picked one, and went.Right away, they put my fears about my knee to rest. My injury was the hamstring, that was it. They barely even looked at my knee. Fix the hamstring, they said, and everything else would be fine. The peace of mind I got from that, right there, was absolutely worth the 150-dollar initial consult fee.To start, they did all the normal stuff like watching me walk and then testing my range of motion, and then they pressed on certain points on my legs — but not directly on the sore spots — to find the places where the fascia, sandwiched between muscle, had locked into, or fused with, the damaged muscle.Here’s how I understand it. Think of a piece of raw chicken and how the skin slips back and forth over the meat. That’s how the fascia is supposed to move, but when there’s been an injury, the fascia sticks to the muscle and then the muscles don’t slide properly.So what this particular physical therapy practice does (and it’s their specialty, apparently) is fascia work. At each session, they zeroed in on a couple stuck spots and then did deep tissue massage — five minutes or so per spot — which inflames the area, causing the blood to rush in, along with all sorts of other good, fight-the-stuck-fascia “things” which then loosens everything up and promotes healing. (Since the inflammation is good, anti-inflammatory meds during treatment are a no-no.) The spots they chose to work on depended on where I was feeling pain, but often were in some other part of my body altogether. Like, when my hip started bothering me, they worked on my inner calf muscle and my lower back. When my foot acted up, they worked on the top of my foot between my toes. The therapist would first use a percussion tool to numb the area and then dig in with her elbow or knuckles. At first it would feel painful — or “nervy,” rather — but by the end it would feel about fifty percent less bad, or at least that was the goal. After that, they’d wrap the worked-on area in towels and a heating pad and leave me to bake for about 10 minutes. Once the timer dinged, we’d review the stretching exercises from the previous therapy session and learn new ones, and off I’d go.Gradually, I began running again. First, only a mile every other day, then two miles, and then finally back up to 3-4 miles four times a week. And I was religious about my twice-daily stretches. The whole routine took a ton of time — mornings I did the complete running and stretching work-up, it took almost a full two hours! — but I was determined to wring as much healing out of the appointments as I could. My leg never stopped hurting — it continued to feel heavy and clunky when running — but I could tell it was much improved, and I wasn’t having any knee problems at all. And then, because I felt so much better, I canceled this week’s appointment and played Ultimate, the first time since the injury. For two hours I played — gingerly, slowly, carefully — and it felt wonderful, but even so, it aggravated my hamstring enough that I’ve had to lay off the running. [hangs head] I’ve doubled down on the stretching exercises, and now — because at a hundred dollars a pop, I feel like we should be able to do much of the therapy at home — each evening my husband works on my leg: I locate trigger points and set a timer, and he reads a book while mindlessly elbowing me in the leg. He even gives me a heat treatment afterward! (Maybe we should open our own PT business?) Seriously, though. How long does it take for a hamstring injury to heal? And do they ever completely heal? This whole process has been so long and drawn out, it’s beginning to make me wonder….To me, chocolate milk has always felt excessive. Or at least redundant. Cold, plain milk, sweet and filling, was treat enough. (To be clear: I wasn’t opposed to adding chocolate. Just, then it became a dessert food, one that was best sipped hot and right before retiring to one’s bed chambers for the night.) But then we got a cow and suddenly I needed ways to encourage milk consumption. And then I noticed that all the dairy-minded folk I’d started following talked about making chocolate milk like it was an ordinary thing, and I was like, Wait. Why not? We dress up all our other regular food — jelly on toast, brown sugar on oatmeal, coconut cream in smoothies — so why not milk? A daily glass or two of (not-overly) chocolatey milk isn’t that terrible. Besides, raw milk is packed with nutrition, so if we’re drinking more of it, yay!The way these people made their chocolate milk, though, I had my doubts. They all whizzed the dry cocoa-sugar mix straight into the milk. Without first cooking the raw cocoa, wouldn’t it be grainy?So I tried it and well, yes, my instincts had been correct. The drink was good, but I wasn’t much rocking the powdery vibes. So then I tried it with confectioner’s sugar instead of granulated sugar, like other recipes called for — maybe the sugar was the problem, not the cocoa — but no.Of course not. Sugar dissolves.And then I happened upon a New York Times recipe that called for boiling the dark cocoa, sugar, and water slurry after which more chocolate — this time unsweetened chunks — and vanilla and salt were added.The resulting sauce was so dark it was nearly black and so strong it almost tasted alcoholic. In the fridge, it sets up into a thick fudge. Prior to stirring it into the milk, I had to melt it a little.These days, I’m mixing up a half gallon of lightly chocolate-ed milk at a time for daily consumption. I first make a concentrate — a couple cups of milk in the blender with a scoop or two of chocolate sauce. Once whizzed, I pour the chocolate milk concentrate back to the big jar of milk.For treats, or for company, I make it extra strong, and for my husband and me, I ve been known to whirl it up with vanilla ice cream and Bailey’s. For sipping, right before bed, mm-mm-mmm.I just realized the recipe says this is to be mixed with 8 cups of milk. Eight cups!! That’s some seriously rich chocolate milk! I still have some sauce left in the fridge and I bet we’ve already made close to a gallon of chocolate milk.¾ cups sugar¼ teaspoon salt½ cup unsweetened dark cocoa powder½ cup water1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, chopped1 teaspoon vanillaIn a saucepan, whisk together the cocoa powder, sugar, and salt. Add the water and bring to a rolling boil over medium high heat, whisking steadily. Remove from heat and whisk in the chopped cocoa and vanilla. Once it’s completely smooth, pour the sauce into a jar, cool to room temp, and store in the fridge.To make chocolate milk: using a blender (stand or hand-held) or whisk, blend the chocolate syrup into the milk, using as much, or as little, as you like.Note to self: add mozzarella at the last minute; too long in the vinegar and it develops the texture of car tire. Whenever I’ve gone through a cheesemaking phase, I always think longingly of cuajada, the salty, fresh cheese made from raw, unheated milk that we learned to love when we lived in Nicaragua (back at the end of the last century).Doña Paula, our neighbor, had a cow and made the best cuajada. The process was equal parts fascinating and horrifying. The container of rennet hung from a hook on the adobe wall — a piece of calf stomach soaking in some whey (or milk or whatever) — or sometimes she used a cuajo pill from the little venta down the road. (Cuajar means “to set” or “to coagulate;” cuajada means “curd.”)Expats often called the cheese amoeba cheese because, well let s just say that our internal workings sometimes struggled a bit. Many times, I sat on a wooden stool in her kitchen watching as Doña Paula scooped out some rennet and stirred it into a big bowl of milk. Then she’d let it rest on the counter while she lumbered about, patting out tortillas or prepping a twiggy bouquet of chicken feet for a stew.When the milk had sufficiently solidified, she’d shoo away the flies that had gathered about the bowl and, gently and slowly, oh so slowly, press the curds with her hands, coaxing out the whey. The solids she’d place on the molino — a stone, similar to this one (though I know for sure it didn t cost 189 dollars!), for grinding corn into masa — and begin mashing and pressing on the curds until all the whey had been pushed out: a bit of the whey went back into the container on the wall to replenish the rennet, if I remember correctly, and the rest she’d divide between the chickens and dogs.Once she’d kneaded the cheese into a smooth mass, she mixed in an ungodly amount of salt, form the cheese into large, palm-sized ovals, and press her thumb into the very top to leave her mark.In our community, the cuajada was stored at room temperature in a plastic container and mostly served alongside a plate of boiled red beans. Simple food, yes, but there’s nothing quite like a freshly toasted corn tortilla, smokey from the cooking fire, with a thick slice of cuajada on top. I’d palm the plate-sized tortilla in my left hand and, with my right, tear off bits of warm tortilla to scoop up bits of the creamy, almost unbearably salty, cheese. Add a sugary cup of black coffee and that, my friends, is what Nicaragua tastes like.My double-boiler method for heating milk, though I often just heat it directly over the flame, too.I’ve always wanted to learn to make cuajada but I couldn’t, for the life of me, find a recipe. Considering the lack of refrigeration, running water, sanitation, money, and material Doña Paula was working with (or not), I figured it shouldn’t be that complicated, so I started messing around: Rennet. Room temp milk. Mashed curd. Salt.It kinda worked, but not really. The cheese didn’t have the right texture, the same depth of flavor. And then I found the blog of a woman living in Nicaragua and she, bless her heart, did a post about learning to make cuajada.Her instructions said to break up the curd with my fingers (did Doña Paula do that? I don t remember) and then add water and let it sit.I’m still not a hundred percent solid on my methods — I know they didn t hang the curd, and maybe I really shouldn t heat the milk? and Wah! I miss Doña Paula! — but it s getting close. Each time, I improve a little. I ve changed things, like slightly heating the milk to get it to set, and, in lieu of a molino, I use a food processor to mash the curd. For now I’m confident enough in the recipe to share it here, though I ll probably pop back in to to tweak and adjust, so stay tuned! When I leave the milk at room temperature, as per the traditional method, it doesn’t set. Heating it just a little seems to give it the necessary kick in the pants. Also, my use of the food processor is not authentic (obviously), but it’s what gets the most authentic final product.  1 gallon milk¼ teaspoon rennet in ¼ cup cool water3 cups cool watersalt, non-iodizedHeat the milk to about 90 degrees. Remove from heat and gently stir in the rennet. Let sit, undisturbed for 45 minutes, at which point the milk should be set. To test, stick your finger or a knife into the curd at an angle and lift up; the curd above your finger should split cleanly apart. If it’s still mushy soft, let it sit another 15 minutes or so.Using your hands, gently stir the curd to break it into pieces. Add three cups of cool water, stir, and then let the curds sit, undisturbed, for 10 minutes, during which time the curds will sink below the surface of the whey.Pour the curds and whey into a cheesecloth lined colander. Discard the whey. Hang the cheese cloth for 30 minutes or so, or if you’re impatient, you can twist and squeeze the bag to remove the whey. Or squeeze the curds gently with your hands. Whatever! Just get the whey out.Dump the curds into a food processor and pulse until creamy. Or, if you have a molino, knead and mash them by hand. Add salt to taste, making it saltier than you think it should be. The salt will dissipate a bit, but remember: this cheese is meant to go with bland food so it s supposed to pack a punch.Form the cheese into plump ovals, pressing your thumb into the top to leave your mark. Place the cheese, uncovered, on a plate in the fridge. More whey may come out, or not… After a few hours, wrap the cheese in plastic and store in a plastic container in the fridge where it should last for about two weeks.To serve: place thick slices of cheese atop boiled red beans, bowls of chili, steaming corn tortillas, scrambled eggs, etc.The cold weather — such a glorious reprieve — makes me itchy in my skin. I want to do EVERYTHING. At the SAME TIME. Right NOW. But then I end up doing just one small thing, like watering the plants or hosting a writing group, and then I collapse on the couch, tired and out-of-sorts because I can’t decide whether or not to make the peach pie filling for the bakery pies or make another batch of cottage cheese or bake a cake. So I do none of that and instead scroll facebook and check Instagram (on my computer only) and then get pissy at myself for being so undisciplined and pathetic.Pull yourself together, I say to myself, though not in those words, exactly. My get-with-it pep talk is more like a long, drawn-out internal moan: angsty and self-pitying and supremely uninspired.About Instagram: I hate it. I’ve recently been introduced to some fabulous cheesemaking instagrammers but I keep getting mad because the platform is so dang impossible to navigate. There’s no way to quick find the recipe/information I want, and then, once I do, there’s no time to dwell on it because the damn slides zip by faster than I can read them and I have to keep pausing and unpausing. And if there s sound to contend with? Oh good lord!To make things worse, IF YOU CAN IMAGINE, everything is video which takes a crazy amount of time to work through, and don’t even get me started on the disappearing stories which only heightens the gotta-click-on-this-before-it’s-gone addiction factor. (Unless the person saves them but I can’t know that at the time if they’ll be saved, gr.) And then there’s the whole “subscribe to be an insider” thing, and I know people gotta make a living but I HATE specials and deals and sign-up-here-now-or-else stuff. Just give me the information or stop talking, please.At first I thought me struggling with the Insta was just a result of me being too inflexible and uncool to catch on to the media platform’s wiley ways but then I asked my older son to please enlighten me and he was like, “You’re not doing anything wrong. Instagram sucks.” HA.So why do I persist if I hate it so much? Because, in spite of myself, it’s kinda fun (wiley social media sorcerers, indeed!), but mostly because there’s some good stuff out there that’s helping me up my cheesemaking game AND because it’s how certain people/businesses I know and care about communicate and, well, here I am.But hey! I bought a new cheesemaking book the other day. It holds really still and doesn’t make noise and the pages only turn when I make them. P.S. My older son and his friend went to a medieval-themed party. They asked me to take photos. We had fun.

TAGS:the only way 

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