Marinated Mushrooms Coming Soon...

So I've been working on my grandfather's recipe for marinated mushrooms and feel like I've got it close enough to his now. I'll be posting a step by step guide to making marinated mushrooms soon. I gave out the second batch in December and now working on getting my glass jars back. Once I've got them all back I can grab my next 10 lbs of mushrooms and then take pictures.

This is a jar of mushrooms from the second batch. 

Ingredients:

10lbs mushrooms

Garlic

Peppercorns

Vegetable Oil

Herbs

Cheese Please. Bury Me With Cabot And Triscuits.

Making Cheese.

First The Research:

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/cheese/cheese_course/cheese_course.htm this is an excellent resource. Takes you from A to Z on how to make cheese. Lots of techniques to learn, fascinating stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBPYopcoeqs YouTube video about how to make a simple cheese. What the good Dr. Cheese above would call Neufchatel. Also breathes some humor into cheese making.

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Cheese-at-Home Another step by step how to make cheese. This one uses pictures with little instructions and provides a grocery list of ingredients.

http://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2008/06/you-dont-have-to-be-cheese-whiz-to-make.html YouTube video from above imbedded in the complete entry from Author. Includes ingredients from the video and good writing style. Great food blog.

Next The Ingredients:

Using blogspot recipe above.

• 1 quart fresh, local whole milk
• 1 cup active-culture buttermilk
• 2 tsp lemon juice or white vinegar, more if needed
• 3/4 tsp salt, or to taste

Next Up, Economics Of Cheese.

It's less expensive to purchase cheese then it is to buy the ingredients and make cheese. You can find a decent soft cheese made from different animals for less money at any large grocery store or specialty shop. It costs us $8.17 for the milks and lemon juice and approximately $12 for the cheese cloth and a set of 4 bouillon bowls or ramakens. We'll be able to use the cloth and containers again though but you deffinetly purchase alot of store bought cheese for less!!

Making The Cheese

We purchased the ingredients from a local market in Milton. They had specialty whole milk and butter milk that was sourced from the New England area.

We followed the directions from the youtube video above, except that I added the butter milk to the whole milk at the start instead of adding it to the whole milk when it hit 175 degrees. It doesn't seem to matter when you add the butter milk as after we waited the 10 minutes there were ample amounts of curds.

This was deffinetly an easy recipe; minimal effort and could be a great family project. Kids 4 and up. Lexi and I enjoyed it although it is a very quick one to do with not much time spent in the kitchen. We like cooking and creating together so this was a little quick for us, but it sets up what will be nice time enjoying the creation. We are now waiting the 30 minutes for the remaining way to drain from the curd in the cheese cloth, I suspect that when all is complete this will be a great first cheese!



Cheese was done so I added salt and a little fresh ground pepper, placed it in 2 seperate ramaken bowls. 1 for the home and 1 for work. Tasted a bit I liked the taste Lexi says a little salty. I think the salt taste will thin out while curring in the fridge. We'll add some more fresh ground pepper and some EVOO to taste.

The texture while mixing with the salt was somewhat like a feta cheese. I wonder how feta gets its taste from. I have to assume that the methodology is the same perhaps a different animal?


THE FINALE

Took out the cheese and added EVOO and more fresh ground pepper. Wow! Success. I totally made cheese from sratch. If I can do it, so can you. Deffinetly worth the experience. Waaaay more expensive than store bought varieties but think of the possibilities. I'd like to make a cheddar and a blue cheese. Long way from here and this was a great start. Love making things from scratch. It's art because you make it.

Hi And Welcome To My Blog

My name's Alex.

Twitter feed is AlexJ_May

This blog is food related. It's a food blog because I love to make food from scratch. To me, food is art. It brings out my creative side and keeps me busy. I'll be creating things like cheese, beer, briscut, sausages etc. . I'll research the idea first and post my findings and from there head right into the making. I'll post reviews of restaurants and tie into the food bloggers in Boston. I hope to meet people and am ready for where this takes me.

First up in the next blog post. The first experiment, cheese making. I will post once per week for now.