Tales of domesticity

That's right: I waited until the second to last day of vacation to do the things I had planned to do all along.

The salad greens are growing quite nicely. You are supposed to wait three weeks before your first harvest and we aren't quite there yet, but I like baby greens. They were quite good. I made Todd Ginsberg's buttermilk ranch dressing which, since I used a new organic sour cream, was a little thicker than I expected. The leaves ended up a little heavy but the dressing was delicious with it, on potatoes, on its own...

As a side note, you can see that the chives have gotten bushier with harvesting. I put them into my dressing. Even though I cut them all level (as you can see), one day later, some of them have already grown an inch!

I set up the second AeroGarden with the tomatoes, but the machine keeps flickering on and off, often enough to be annoying and concerning. I turned it off and took out the tomato plants and emailed AeroGarden.

I came into a lot of pork fat, courtesy of Rusty from Pine St. So I chopped it all up and put it into a 300 degree oven. A couple hours later, I have two completely full containers of white lard. This is probably the best lard I've ever had, so clean smelling. Yum. I should make tortillas or pastry or something.

So I made butter. It's super easy with a kitchenaid. You put heavy cream (and I used the Amish stuff we get at Dekalb Farmers Market) and basically whisk it until it turns to butter, which took far longer than I expected (30 min or so) even though the recipes said 10-12 minutes. I probably didn't have it on a high enough speed because I was worried about mess. I cannot believe that people would sit there with a butter churner rocking it until it turned to butter. How tedious.

Anyway, there is some magical time when the cream separates into butter and buttermilk. I am not quite sure when that is because although I was watching the cream most of the time, the magical moment of conversion happened when I was tending to the afore-mentioned broken AeroGarden. When it comes out of the mixer though, it looks like this goodness.

I got all the butter off the whisk and mostly out of the buttermilk and plopped it onto a plate. This would be a good time to have marble countertops, but we aren't all that lucky.

You knead the butter to get all the buttermilk out. I didn't salt it, so it's just a creamy clean flavor. Too bad I don't have some awesome bread to put it on or something.

I also made ricotta. A gallon of whole milk and a quart of buttermilk will get you about four cups of ricotta. Or so the story goes. Again, I used the Amish stuff from the Dekalb Farmers Market. So I put them in a pot and heated them. Stir occasionally, it said, til it's warm. I fretted over the point of warmness. I worried that no curdling had happened. The recipe I used, from Michael Chiarello, said that it curdles at 175 and to take it off the heat immediately. Plus, that the curds can stick to the bottom and they scorch easily. Stressful!

In any case, it all came together on its own in probably the last five degrees. I waited until the thermometer read 175.9 and then pulled it off the heat.

I bought some cheesemaking kids from cheesemaking.com, and so thankfully, it came with some good reusable cheesecloth. I have been using the crap that you can buy locally (that I will still use for sachets, etc) and was worried about using it for this cheese. Anyway, you line a colander with it, and then carefully ladle the curds into the colander so that you don't break up the cheese. When it's all in there, it looks like this.

I let it drain for a while but the recipe said that you could hang the cheesecloth from the faucet (!) so I rigged up this odd little setup with my pasta drying rack. It's not much to look at, but it did its job and I knew when it had stopped dripping.

At the top of the cheese, it still looks moist but as I got farther down into it, it looks a little dry. On second thought, perhaps the hanging is not necessary.

The recipe came out to a good amount, though I'm not sure if this is really four cups.

I used it to make pasta for dinner. It didn't really melt as I expected it to but it was good. I had originally intended to try to make Michael Chiarello's light-as-air gnocchi from Bottega, but I had forgotten that it is supposed to freeze for at least 24 hours. Oh well.