bwhaha goat cheese and sourdough!

difficulty rating: rolling in her grave
i love goat cheese. i love sourdough. i hate that they're both fairly expensive. nearly anything you make at home is better so why not try these too?
the goat cheese is stupidly simple. you just heat goat's milk to just boiling (stir constantly, watch carefully), remove from the heat and add vinegar to curdle, then drain (in cheesecloth or an old pillowslip) and add salt. i used 2L of milk to 1/4 cup white vinegar and a tsp or two of salt. this turned out a little dry (read: kinda rubbery?) so i'm going to stir in a little whipping cream i have leftover to add a bit of smoothness to it but it was still wonderful on the fresh bread with some red wine.
i've tried sourdough before but was never able to produce anything edible. this time i kept on the starter and fed it every day for three weeks till it was good and healthy. you can make your own with a cup of water and a cup of flour, stirred together in some kind of container that lives on your counter. to feed it you dump out half (or use half) and add about a half a cup more water and flour. i never bother measuring anymore. it lives in a jar. i'm calling him jeremy. he's my kitchen pet. all the recipes i've tried before led to bread that didn't rise or didn't taste like anything or gave me a nasty stomach ache. apparently there's some tricks to this:
1)give up on the measuring. you shouldn't be doing this unless you already know how to make bread and if you do know then you are perfectly capable of tossing in "that much" until the dough looks and feels right
2)be patient! it takes at least 3 hours for even the most active starter to rise your dough and the longer it rises the better the flavor will be. you can even put it in the fridge overnight to do it's second rise and then finish it in a warm environment the next day
3)give it a nice warm place to grow. like your oven that you turned on to the lowest setting for 5 min with a pot holder under the container so it doesn't get too hot. heat kills yeast, cold makes it dormant. for it to make bread you want it in a warm-sauna or just-above-body-temp environment.
4)don't tear into it immediately out of the oven! the wild yeasts are still active and will make you sick. give it a good 30-45 min to cool down first. it will still be warm, don't worry.
the "recipe" i did was pour 50-75% of my active starter into a bowl, added a bit of warm water (maybe half a cup?) a good splash or two of oil, half a palmful of salt, a palmful of sugar (makes yeast grow faster), and stirred it up, than added flour and stirred and kneaded until i had a solid, elastic, slightly sticky dough. i let it rise in a greased bowl for 3 or 4 hours, then shaped the loaf and put it in the fridge overnight (i don't think this made much of a difference to be honest), next morning it hadn't risen much so i put it back in the warm oven for a few more hours, till it was good and rounded over the lip of my loaf pan, then i turned the oven up to 375 for 35 min. it didn't sound hollow when i tapped it but it was getting pretty brown so i turned the heat down to 325 and baked for another 10 min, then let cool for about an hour. this turned out lovely but, like many breads made with basically just flour and water, it lacked richness. next time i'm going to add warm milk instead of water and maybe an egg and butter instead of oil to give it a nicer rich quality, kinda like my favorite buttery buns recipe but with a sourdough flavor. there's lots of ways to do this so don't let anyone tell you that it must be perfectly precise. sourdough takes time and effort and experience but it is satisfying and healthy. anyone who knows baking will tell you that off-book homemade sourdough is fucking hardcore.
i also have two different sour cream experiments a-brewing so i'll let you know what works best. and did i mention that the homebrewed hard apple cider turned out AMAZING? i have a 4 gallon batch brewing for samhain but i'm using different juice and sugar so we'll we how it differs. if it's not as good and/or i can't get the simple mead to cooperate in time i'll be making a 4 gallon batch with the organic apple juice and regular sugar to be drunk at yule

advetures in cheese and butter

as part of my intrepid homesteading, i want to learn to make cheese. i've made ricotta before and that's pretty idiot proof but it's not *real* cheese. so this time around i was trying to make mozzarella and while i was at it, butter.
the butter is also idiot proof: take whipping cream, whip it way past the normal point until the fat separates from the milk, squeeze the liquid out (rinse in cold water to get the last of it), and add a bit of salt. fantastic! it goes on the fresh banana bread and is wonderful.
the mozza i was making was somewhat hampered by the fact that i can only get junket-brand rennet here and that's not really meant for cheese making, it's meant for custards and things. it is rennet, just rather weak. knowing this, i added quite a bit more then usual and let it set a lot longer then normal. i still ended up with a weak and sickly separation between curds and whey but i managed to drain it. unfortunately, in the heat-and-stretch stage, it became fairly apparent that i could not extract enough whey from the curds to make it a solid and it wasn't melting to enable stretching. all this tells me that (i'm pretty sure) FOREMOST IS ULTRA PASTEURIZING THEIR MILK AND NOT LABELING IT AS SUCH! this severely annoys me, not only because i now have ricotta instead of mozza, but because ultra pasteurizing milk not only damages the proteins, it also makes it significantly less healthy! it would be one thing if it said on it that they'd super heated it to the extent that NOTHING could ever possibly live in it from now till the twelfth of never. that would be ok, i would have been informed and would have chosen a non-dead milk because i know better then to try to make cheese with that crap and i also know that it's sad and pathetic compared to normal pasteurized or raw milk. i now have the choice between trying dairyland or lucurne (big companies, probably same story), attempting reconstituting powdered milk, or seeing if any of my farmers' markets carry real milk. *sigh*. i was really looking forward to the mozza too. i bought some beautiful kalamata olives and i had rosemary trisuits and the first fresh tomato of my garden and wine to make a nice little platter. instead i had leftovers. *sniff*. my only consolation is that i can make very good stuffed shells with the ricotta.

update: I DID IT! it started out like the first batch and i really thought lucurne ultra pasteurized as well so i upped the temp to turn it into ricotta and it started solidifying and getting all melty and stringy just like it's supposed to! finished it off and had some with garden tomatoes and basil, so fantastic and deeply satisfying. i even got a bit of ricotta out of the whey leftover. i probably would have gotten more if i'd followed all the directions despite the not-normal-looking outcome. this was certainly easy enough to make again so more experiments will follow. eventually i'm going to fashion a cheese press and take on something more ambitious like parmesan.

B12 update

so it really is making a difference! even when my life truly is sucking (hate my job, hate my apartment, have no life) i'm finding it much easier to stop the downward thought spirals and keep some perspective so i can do something about it. i suggested it to a co-worker who is also suffering from really bad depression and he's noticed a difference too (and he's not even a vegetarian, maybe we're onto something here!). i can't say i'm no longer depressed, but it now feels much more in control and circumstantial then all-pervading and unavoidable. it's opened an inch or two of space for daylight in my brain and for now that's all i ask. if you're having similar issues i highly recommend trying it out for a couple of weeks and let us all know if it works. our diets in north america tend to be deficient in many vitamins these days so it wouldn't surprise me at all if improving our nutrition overall would also very much help the increasing mental health issues as well as physical ones

name change update

the paperwork is officially in! i should have my certificate in a few weeks and then i just have to replace all my ID *groan*. it's annoying how people only take you seriously when you get a $250 piece of paper from the government, as if that somehow changes who we really are. course i find myself more adamantly correcting people and getting more annoyed with those who know better and use my old name anyways so it's partially my fault. i imagine most people who do this feel more justified insisting on their choice once it's "official". i've been introducing myself as my new name since my religious ceremony in march and nothing gets you used to it like answering the phone "thank you for calling, my name is..." 40 times a day. it's felt like mine since then and i actually bitched out my boss for trying to tell me i couldn't sign emails with my new name until the legal change is done and they change my email address, claiming it would cause confusion. i can't see how the change can possibly NOT cause some confusion. i believe my comment was "well that's a crappy reason to not respect someone's life choices" accompanied by a nasty glare and the paperwork in a week later despite not being able to find my birth certificate. it will all be easier with that one stupid piece of paper. have i mentioned lately that i hate the government and our society? of course i hate everything to do with my boss and workplace and company and field but that's besides the point. we all know i pray every day for the building to burn to the ground.

turning of the seasons

is it just me or is fall in the air? we're supposed to have a long growing season and have it stay warm right into october but i'm not so sure about that. my tomatoes are certainly hoping for it but the sun is starting to get that sunset angle and golden colour as early as mid-afternoon and at night it smells like fall: like drying leaves and rain to come and the radiant warmth of the ground. indeed, i find myself writing out my list of stuff i want to do with the end of the summer and the coming autumn. i didn't get to make as much of the summer as i'd hoped but i'm already dreaming of sipping mulled wine and jumping in piles of leaves. i'm also learning how to make cheese just for the fun of it and i want to try out making some simple jam and maybe some pickles before produce becomes expensive. this time of the year i end up learning new subjects, letting go of things that are no longer useful or i've been clinging to for too long, and turning inward to hearth, home, and inner strength. i'm hoping to have a potluck BBQ for mabon and my homemade hard apple cider should be ready for tasting by then too. i'll soon be pulling up the last of the garden that wont overwinter and checking to see if there's any finished compost to mulch on top and feed the earth over the cold time. it's soon time to plant garlic and spring flower bulbs so they get the hard freeze they need and check the almanac for what kind of winter to prepare for. so how do you prepare for the colder time? have anything fun on your fall must-do list? anything you just HAVE to fit in before summer is officially over?

wine!

difficulty rating: do you want fries with that?
i've always wanted to learn how to make wine at home and i'm told the best way is to just jump in and try stuff and learn from your screwups. so here we go. i did one bastardized red wine with wealch's grape juice and baking yeast, one simple mead with champagne yeast, and a fresh cherry wine with champagne yeast. i'm using sterilized milk jugs as my carboys and balloons with holes poked in them as air locks. all the homebrewers are spinning in their graves right now but humans have been doing this for a damn long time with much worse equipment and dirtier environments and it worked out just fine. i'm a little concerned that the cherry wine's balloon hasn't puffed up yet, which would normally indicate fermentation is taking place. could be i poked more holes or something. the yeast is all bubbly and nasty like it's supposed to look so i'm not going to worry about it too much. only issue is i don't really know when it's done without the balloon behaving itself. oh well, so we learn. i also learned that when you take a potato masher to a pot of cherries it squirts everywhere and the pizza guy thinks you killed someone :) the process really is impressively easy: mix fruit-type-thing what contains sugar with yeast, throw in some raisins, tea, and orange slices with the rinds for yeast health. add airlock, ignore for a month or two, siphon. that's it. you can age it longer and people go on and on ad nauseum about perfect sterile technique and specific gravity and and and...oh fuck it all. you're growing yeast and having them feed on tasty things and stealing the end result. stop making it into brain surgery. i'll get some pics up once i feel up to fighting with the stupid software for my phone again.

one of my new favorite poems

i LIKE this girl! and i think she's a beautiful person, SO THERE