I really think the cowl is going to find it’s way to me this winter. Maybe in white though.

Hello Birthday.

That is my actual wallet in the third photo. At the shoot there were several Queen Bee wallets to chose from when we were staging the shot, but my wallet just happened to look the best. And as a product shout out in general, I love everything by Queen Bee. I have two bags, one for my laptop and one for my Marantz recorder… another laptop back pack type of thing and both Eric and I carry a Queen Bee wallet. So does my mother come to think of it.

This is part of what we were selling in our yard sale. We had a dining set and a washer and dryer and loads of chairs on the front steps of the church.

All in all it went really well.

What we have left will be donated to the library, the woman’s shelter and the theater company I used to work at.

I’m glad it is all over now. I’m so tired and achy.

And this my friend was the best pie I’ve ever had. My friend Laurie’s friend Sarah made it with raspberries they picked that very afternoon. Seriously, if other people had not been around I would have eaten the whole thing, and when people later asked where the pie went, I would pretend not to know what they were talking about. I’d have been all like, “Pie? What pie?” Sarah was sweet enough to give me the last piece and I had it for breakfast the next day and I made Laurie take this picture of me with my pie plate so I could relive the memory.

If I was not already married, I would try to marry Sarah so I could have her pie making self around year round. It was that good.

Why can’t I learn to leave well enough alone already?

Please advise,

Kari

Click on our Etsy store link on the right over there to see them in our store. You get one jar and five different inserts so you can mix it up.

Check it out here.

I have made all of the above, save for capers, half and half and honey myself at some point or another. I have made butter, crackers, loads of loaves of bread and peanut butter all by myself. I have helped to gather honey though and I learned how to roast my own red peppers. I have perfected my preferred lemon and garlic mixture for olives, although Whole Foods does it so well I don’t bother very much any more. I have even roasted coffee – but I don’t have the means to do that at home obviously. That experience was thanks to a trip to a coffee plant in Boulder, Colorado.

Pretty much I’ll try to make anything, but until this weekend I had not tried to make my own cheese. Now I can cross that off the list with great pleasure.

Last month on one of my trips to Hadley, MA to grocery shop at the closet Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, I stumbled across a cheese making kit in the wine department of Whole Foods. I had just read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in May of this year and remembered the section where Barbara Kingslover visits the Berkshires (where we live) and takes a cheese making workshop, right here in my own backyard. I bought the kit, made by the same woman who teaches the workshops, and then, naturally, it sat in my kitchen for weeks with me doing nothing about it, except to move it to dust around it.

We were invited to a party this weekend and all attendees were invited to bring a dish. Since I have been thinking more and more about seasonal eating and the 100 mile diet, I thought it would be wonderful to try and bring a caprese salad made from basil and tomatoes from our garden, and cheese that I made myself. Naturally the olive oil and vinegar would have to come from the store – but let’s face it – if you serve cheese you made yourself, details like oil and vinegar seem silly to bother over. Full disclosure: our tomatoes are still green so those came from the farmers market.

So Eric’s mother Sharon came over on Saturday and we set out to make the cheese. I wish I could really tell you how easy it was to do and how delicious the cheese tasted. I got compliments galore, but that may have been because I stood by my dish at the party and announced loudly every time someone came near the food table, “I MADE THIS CHEESE MYSELF TODAY.” Never mind that though, I saw people having seconds even when I wasn’t lording over the table.

Here is the experience in pictures:

This the basil we picked from the garden. And I’m sorry about the photo quality. It was dark and cloudy. Sharon stacked the basil and then thinly sliced it into long strips so we could infuse the olive oil with it. We put half the basil in the oil, and I used the other half and some full leaves to garnish the salad before I served it.

Then you put some enzymes and other stuff into water and dissolve it. Meanwhile you heat a gallon of pasteurized milk to 88 degrees and and mix the water stuff in and then you wait for 5 to 8 minutes. This is a photo of the whey and curds forming and separating.

Here we are, ready to separate the curds from the whey. You ca sort of see how the knife is cutting into the thickness of the curds.

Next we scooped the curds out and squeezed the whey away (heh) with our hands. With the first batch of cheese we made, we did this squeezing step three times. We were much better at it the second time around, and strained the curds through a strainer. The whey is supposed to be good for plants, so I dumped it in the garden, which drives the dogs crazy. They seem to know right where I dumped it and they are very curious about it. Although you could use the whey to make pancakes or bread.

After you are done separating the curd, you microwave it and as it heats up, you stretch and knead it. This is what you wind up with. A sort of cheese blob.

Then you put it in an ice bath.

Now you have some yummy homemade mozzarella! Yay!

When I make it again, and I plan on making it a lot, I’ll do a few things differently. I would leave it in the ice bath a lot longer than we did and I would make it the day before I wanted to serve it. My cheese ball went kind of flat, maybe because I didn’t let it get cool enough in the ice bath. Instead of slicing the tomatoes and cheese in pretty rounds, I had to cut them up into cubes and serve the salad in a bowl. You could even make little balls of the cheese or braid it, which I may try next time.

You can get your own kit for the mozzarella and ricotta cheese here. It only costs 25 dollars and the only thing I had to buy was the gallon of milk. The kit makes 30 batches of cheese and when you add that up, this is a way more cost effective way to go. It took less than 30 minutes to make one batch and the process was easy and there was no mess. In fact, you could make a bigger mess baking cookies from scratch.

If you try it let me know!