Making Ricotta Cheese

I got it into my head that I wanted to make ricotta cheese this weekend. I think it was partly because my favorite cooking blog posted a tutorial about it recently and partly because I would be up on the South Hill where I could get milk from a local Spokane dairy:

 

 

I met the woman who owns this farm with her husband last March when I took a cheese-making class. The milk is pasturized only to 145 degrees, not homogenized, and has the cream on the top like in the good old days. I used a recipe from a blog called Annie's Eats. The ingredients are simple: white vinegar, milk, salt, and lemon juice. 

 

 

After mixing salt and milk, I heated the milk to 185 degrees, took the milk off the heat, and stirred in the lemon juice and vinegar. After leaving the mixture to curdle for about 10 minutes, I poured it into a curtain-lined colander over a bowl to catch the whey. I used the curtain in place of cheesecloth and it worked perfectly.

 

 

Here is the colander over the bowl of whey:

 

Here's me squeezing more whey out of the cheese. I have to admit that it was ridiculously fun to squeeze out the warm whey. My housemate was laughing at me.

 

 

It's amazing how much whey is left over after making the cheese! Good thing my co-worker sent me a link to a blog with 16 uses for whey. I'm thinking of freezing some of my whey in ice cube trays, using it to water my house plants, and cooking potatoes and oatmeal in it. I tasted it, and I can hardly describe the taste: fresh, slightly sour, rich.  

 

And here's the finished product!

 

It's amazing that eight cups of milk makes only two cups of ricotta. It made me realize how precious cheese is and why it's expensive. I have several ideas for how to use my cheese. I'm thinking of spreading it on sliced ciabatta bread with salami (from Trader Joe's!) and garden tomatoes. I'll let you know how it turns out. :)

Have you made something from scratch before? How did it turn out? Was it worth the effort?

Gratitude



In this season of late summer bounty, a post about gratitude seemed necessary. In fact, the words were chomping at the bit to get out on the "page" and the pictures practically leapt off my camera. Without further ado, here are the things I'm grateful for with hope that they will inspire your own gratitude.

 

1. Fresh summer flowers. I'm thankful to have planted zinnias and cosmos in my garden this year. I'm even more grateful that miniature black-eyed Susans, snapdragons, marigolds, and nasturtiums appeared in my garden as if by magic (also known as re-seeding to the practical among us). I've tried to keep a fresh bouquet on our dining room table at all times. 

 

 

2. Simple and creative summer meals. The top photo is caprese, which is simply stacks of sliced fresh mozzerella and tomatoes sprinkled with basil. The bottom picture was my dinner tonight: zucchini nachos with garden tomatoes, zucchini, and green onions and lots of cheese.

 

3. Provisions for winter. My mom willingly threw herself into two huge canning projects with me over Labor Day weekend. We canned 23 quarts of peaches and 20 quarts of applesauce. It gives me joy to see the bounty of summer stored up for the cold and dark days of winter. 

 

4. Garden bounty. Today, I picked all the veggies you see below in Dottie's and my garden. (I'm harvesting veggies in Dottie's garden while she's out of town.) Lots of green beans, four cucumbers, four zucchini/summer squash, and a bowlful of Sun Gold and Juliet tomatoes. That being said, does anyone have zucchini recipes they'd like to share with me? :)



 

 

5. A working kitchen sink! We were without a kitchen sink for exactly a week. As I made dinner on Wednesday night, I had several impulses to take my dishes to the bathroom to wash them. I was so happy when I looked over my shoulder and saw this shiny new faucet to dispel all thoughts of inconvenience. 

 

 

6. Visiting with old friends. I've gotten to see my friend and former housemate Heidi four times in the past week for which I'm very grateful as she's now started a busy semester of school and work. On Tuesday, I spent time with my friend Sam and her husband Andrew. Sam and I went to Whitworth and studied abroad in England together. Tomorrow morning, I'm having breakfast with my freshman year roommate and her husband. (I'm also grateful we're meeting at the Petit Chat bakery!) Old friends are comforting because they remind me of the good ol' times, but also of the new ways in which friendships are preserved over time and distance.

 

7. My first-ever baby shower for a friend. It's a new season of life I'm entering with marriages of friends and now the babies of friends. Tomorrow, I get to attend two baby showers, one for my college friend Angela and another for her sister-in-law Karinda. I had my first experience with gift registries at Target today and, despite being confused about baby stuff in general, I managed to buy some pretty cute duds. For the record, the baby bib says "Revved up for Snacktime." I thought that was perfect coming from me. :) 

 

8. My ice-cream maker. I have to say that my impulse kitchen purchase of the summer has turned out to be brilliant. In the past week, I made Thin Mint Peppermint Ice Cream and fresh peach pie ice cream with chunks of cinnamon sugar pie crust. My mom and I enjoyed both ice cream flavors over the weekend.

 

9. Inconveniences and struggles. On Sunday, my pastor talked about the story of the ten lepers in Luke 17:10-19 in a sermon titled "Eucharistic Repentence." He used "eucharistic" to reflect its root meaning of gratitude and "repentence" to mean an action needing a 180 degree turn. Gratitude, especially for the hard things, does take effort, a 180 degree turn to recognize that even inconvenience and suffering come from the hand of a good God. Sometimes, like in the case of the 10 lepers, "eucharistic repentence" means turning from a lesser good to a greater good. The nine lepers probably ran back to their families and were full of graitude for health and wholeness. That's good! But the tenth leper who returned to Jesus was the only one to direct his gratitude in the most proper place: to the only One through whom healing and wholeness was possible. The sermon gave me a lot to think about. In this season of late summer, I have many good gifts for which to be grateful. But there will be seasons of life that aren't as cheery and the call to be grateful will be no less.

 

10. The Giver of all good gifts. "Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17, NRSV).

 

What are you thankful for in this season of your life?

Canning Peaches Without a Kitchen Sink

It is possible to can peaches without a kitchen sink! And I have pictures to prove it. :)

Here's my game face:

Here are the instructions I followed from my grandma's Ball Canning Book: 

The peaches!

 

The work station:

  

Here's a view of the work station with the broken faucet in the foreground:

  

By the time the cans of peaches were simmering for the second time (I wasn't sure if they had sealed the first time), I was starving, so I ate the whole box of mac and cheese. :)

  

The outcome! The Tupperware on the left is peach sauce (like applesauce). I had a number of peaches left that were pretty bruised, so I cooked down the peaches, added sugar and cinnamon, and then mixed in cornstarch to thicken it. It tastes like the filling of a peach pie. Yum!

  

So while a broken kitchen sink is an inconvenience, it can't stop the process of preserving fresh fruits and veggies for the summer! What fresh produce are you enjoying?

You Never Know What a Day Will Bring

My mom has a saying. "You never know what a day will bring." I came home today and unloaded all my stuff as usual...lunchbox, Costco purchases, purse, keys. I was buzzing around the kitchen mentally preparing to start canning a small batch of peaches when I decided to check my phone. I had two texts and one phone call, all from my housemate. One text read: "The kitchen faucet is broken. Like out of commission broken." I gasped and looked up. Sure enough, the top of the faucet had broken off. I desperately tried to latch it back on to see if I could get some water out of the tap, but no luck. Well, there goes canning peaches, was my first thought. Momentary panic ensued considering I'm supposed to can many quarts of peaches and applesauce this weekend. I hurriedly sent a text to the landlord and called my parents. Of course this would have to happen in the middle of preserving season!

Fortunately, we have a deep sink in the downstairs laundry room right next to the washing machine. After dinner, the top of the washing machine looked like this:

Not ideal, but actually it wasn't too bad an arrangement for the short term. I was also consoled by a delicious dinner I made. I've been so busy with cooking projects and other things that I haven't had much energy to cook meals for myself. Tonight, though, I used zucchini and garden tomatoes and green onions to make a fresh garden quesadilla with pepper jack cheese. As I sat down to dinner, I reflected on my housemate's second text which admitted several points of conflict between the two of us that we needed to talk through. When I thought of her text, my heart's pace picked up and my appetite drained away. Conflict is hard for me to deal with, especially receiving criticism.

After dinner, I set off on a walk feeling distressed. A paraphrased quote came to mind that seemed to apply to the situation: "If God took things away one by one that we had failed to be thankful for, what would be left? Would we have hands or ears? Eyes or lungs?" As I crunched along on the gravel path, I thanked God for basement sinks, hands, eyes, and ears, but I was still distressed. I started up the big hill that leads to Whitworth and each step seemed to pound out my frustrations. I was mostly angry at myself. Angry that my plans had changed because of the sink and that my own selfishness and short sightedness had caused conflict with my roommate that is yet unresolved.

When I got to the top of the hill, I was gasping for breath and tears stung hard in the corners of my eyes. I didn't feel at peace, per se, but I had come to grips with the situation, conflict and broken faucet both. I knew, despite my bumblings and the circumstances that cause me to cry out my mom's saying, that God was still present and at work, even when I'm too short sighted to realize my own mistakes. Thankfully, walking gave me the thinking space to recognize my guilt and made me eager to talk with my housemate. And thankfully, it's not too late to reconcile with her.

There's still one problem though. How does one can peaches without a kitchen sink?

Early August Garden Update

My garden (for the most part) is growing well this year. This post will show how far things have grown since my last garden post. My dad had the idea to juxtapose pictures of the garden in June with pictures of the garden now. I've done that with the first four photos. Here's the contrast with how the straw bales have grown:

 

We put black plastic in the center to keep the weeds down and it's worked well. We had some trouble with aphids on the tomatoes, so Dottie asked a man at a nursery what to do, and he said the straw bales need to be fertilized once a week. Dottie has been graciously adding fish emulsion (or, as she says, fish poop) on all the bales once a week, and I have also added granular fertilizer twice and will again this weekend.



 

Here's the main part of the garden in June. Everything looks so tiny!

 

 

Explosion! In this picture you can see hollyhocks (far left), bush beans, three varities of potatoes, cosmos, snapdragons, and you can faintly see basil in the middle of the photo. I also have four tomatoes, a bush cucumber, and some lovely volunteer nasturtiums behind the hollyhocks.

 

 

Here's the same patch as above, but from a slightly different angle. My cosmos bolted up, but the zinnias didn't do as well this year. I also planted carrots twice with nothing to show and my peas didn't do well. Dottie and I are wondering if something in the soil is bad, since it seems to be a certain patch. Any gardeners out there want to give their thoughts?

 

 

Here I have two lovely lemon cucumber plants. My family grew these when I was growing up, so my sister and I have always loved them. I've already picked one small cucumber, and I'm hoping to have a couple to take to my family when I visit next week.

 

These are Juliet tomatoes in the plot behind the hollyhocks. The Juliet is a thin Roma variety that Dottie loves to grow, so I thought I'd try them out this year. So far, so good! I'm also so excited because my heirloom tomato "Ananas Noire" that has big multicolored slicing tomatoes is looking so healthy! It has dark green foilage and the little green tomatoes are starting to appear. I'm praying the August heat will be enough for them to grow big and flavorful.

 

 

An baby English cucumber in one of the straw bales! Looking good!

 

A beautiful, delicate Seashell Cosmos. The cosmos have grown well this year, and I've already used several of the blooms for a flower bouquet. I love having fresh flowers in the house!

 

That's the garden tour for August! I'll have another report in early September. Oh, I can hardly wait! How's your garden coming along?



A Weekend With Ruth

Soon you will tire of these posts where I post pictures of fun things I've done with friends and family and you'll want something serious. I don't blame you. Unfortunately (for the serious reader), my life is filled with such visits. Fortunately (for the forbearing reader), they will come to an end when the summer is over. Summer is a great time to celebrate bounty. (I'll share pictures of my garden bounty with you soon.) And I'm realizing there are different kinds of bounty. This summer has been flush with friends and family bounty. My dear friend Ruth--a friend for 10 years now!--came for a visit last weekend, and I have some pictures to prove it. I hope you enjoy the photos and are reminded to thank God for the friends and family in your own life.

 

Ruth and I spent the afternoon and evening at Manito Park closer to downtown Spokane on Sunday. We enjoyed the beautiful flowers, warm evening, and had a picnic dinner in the garden you see behind us.

 

 

After the picnic dinner, we went to Riverfront Park downtown for the Royal Fireworks show in which a Baroque band performed music on a floating stage in the Spokane River with a fireworks show at the end. We sat with my housemate Pam, her two friends, and my friend Katie and her husband Ben. We had about an hour before the concert started, so we were experimenting with funny pictures. It was a delightful concert and the fireworks show was amazing!

 

Ruth brought me these wonderfully colored pot holders from Guatemala where she spent a month earlier this summer. I've put the pot holders on the wall in my dining room because I can't bear to have them not displayed. They're so great!

 

We did some other fun things, too, like hang out with people from my church, watch Wives and Daughters, make pesto lasagna, go to Green Bluff, and more, but the pictures above are a good representation. I'm so thankful for Ruth's visit!

 

I hope you're getting to spend some lovely time with family and friends this summer!

A Visit With Mom and Dad

My parents drove into town Wednesday, July 10 and stayed until Monday, July 15. I was able to take half of Thursday and all of Friday off work, which was great! This is my first summer working full time, and I'm telling you, it can be rough at times. :) Whitworth's Annual Institute of Ministry was also happening the Wednesday and Thursday my parents were in town. The evening worship services are free and open to the public, so my parents and I enjoyed two wonderful worship services. The preacher, Carolyn Gordon, was fantastic! I can't wait until the podcasts are up on the Whitworth website, so I can listen to her sermons from Monday and Tuesday evenings, too. If you get a chance, listen to them. You'll be challenged, encouraged, and amused.

Wednesday and Thursday, my parents and I did some fun things, like hosted an ice cream social with some of my parents' friends from college, enjoyed ice cream at Doyle's Ice Cream Parlor where my mom and her friend used to take boys in college and make them drink a monster shake (which they still have!), and enjoyed an enchilada dinner with three of my housemates. My mom calls this the ice cream vacation because we had ice cream every day. Part of this is because I'm making good use of my new ice cream maker. The other part is that all three of us just really, really love ice cream!

On Friday, we embarked on our big day trip to Canada. We've all been to Canada a number of times, but not since I've been in Spokane. The drive up there is a mere three hours through some gorgeous countryside. We left at 7:30 AM on Friday morning, and our first stop was to eat muffins and look at the Pend Orielle river at an overlook. Our second stop was at Sweet Creek Falls, which turned out to be this beautiful, Columbia-River-Gorge-like waterfall:

 

Our crossing into Canada was easy and quick. About 10 minutes into Canada, I burst into laughter. Like tears-rolling-down-my-face laughter. It was all because of my dad's behavior with the Canadian border guard. He made us look so suspicious! My dad took my laughter graciously. Here's the grand Canadian flag:

 

Our end destination was the city of Nelson, British Columbia. The picture below is just a tiny view of the mountains and beauty surrounding Nelson. We started off at the Visitor Center where we had the pleasure of talking with a delightful young woman who's a student in Geography at "U Vic" (University of Victoria). She gave us some great advice. With her help, we had lunch at a beautiful little park, walked along the waterfront, got milkshakes, and visited an eclectic coffeeshop. My dad decided to hike to Pulpit Rock across the bridge you see in the background in the photo. While he hiked, my mom and I sat in the park at the waterfront. She read, I wrote in my journal, and we both people watched. It was a great spot to observe families. The main center of town has some major hippie influence, so it was nice to see a different side of the city. Being in a different country made me think about nationality. There didn't seem to be any difference between the people we were observing and us except that they say "Eh" and prounouce "ou" differently. Does nationality even matter? I didn't come to any conclusions, but it's interesting to think about.

We left Nelson around 4:30 or 5 and decided to take a little detour to Crawford State Park back in Washington. We drove 12 miles to get there only to find that the park was closed. Fortunately, we serendipitously turned off onto a side road and found a lovely campground by a river that had big picnic tables. We had great food (old favorites like chicken salad and pasta salad) and enjoyed sitting in the peaceful campground. Here's the pasta salad:

 

They might hate this picture, but I think it's hilarious. :) We were feeling pretty tired on the road back and went to sleep practically right after getting home around 9 PM.

On the road out to Crawford State Park, we saw three beaver dams in the water. It was awesome! We didn't see any beavers, but I guessed it was because they were inside their dams eating toast and kippers (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe anyone?).

On Saturday, we met my friend Margy at Petit Chat bakery. It was delightful to talk with Margy and enjoy pastries together. After that, we drove up to Green Bluff to (as you can see) pick cherries! We picked exactly enough pie cherries for a batch of sour cherry jam. The picture below is my mom showing my housemate Pam and me how to pit cherries with a paper clip. So easy! We also picked Rainier and Bing cherries, all from Cherry Hill Orchard, whose owners go to my church. After Cherry Hill, we walked around Eleven Acres Farm and chatted with the farmer and enjoyed the new microbrewery at another farm. It was lovely to be relaxed at Green Bluff. I'm usually on a mission and fail to enjoy the process of picking food that farmers have so carefully cultivated.

 

On Saturday afternoon, we had some down time and then enjoyed raspberry lemonade with Dottie, my college mentor and friend. Saturday evening we enjoyed a steak dinner with broccoli, watermelon, and this delicious orzo "risotto" from one of Mark Bittman's cookbooks. My coworker mentioned a couple weeks ago that she broiled steak and loved how it turned out. My dad loves steak, so I used the last $20 of my June grocery budget to buy two quality New York strip steaks from Egger's. We were not disappointed. The broiling method worked wonderfully and the meal was delicious. 

 

On Sunday, we had a big waffle breakfast with cherry compote, went to church, hung out in the afternoon, and went up to church again for a concert and hot dog dinner. Oh yeah, and we also cleaned the ice that had been building up in my chest freezer. That was quite the process! In the end, it was pretty easy, but I was so glad my mom and dad helped me out. I would never have had the gumption to clean it on my own. Everything's all neat and tidy in the freezer now and is being filled as we speak with fresh raspberries. 

 

On Sunday night, I brought out all the leftovers from all our meals and found that we each had enough left for meals for another week. It was such a pleasure to make meals for my parents. Foolishly, every meal I made for them except two were new recipes. It could be unfortunate that every new recipe I tried worked out splendidly. :) I discovered soba noodles and liked them so much, I'm going to make another soda noodle dish tonight with zucchini, cabbage, and green onions (from my garden!).

 

After breakfast together on Monday morning, my parents drove back to Portland, and I drove to work. It was a lovely weekend together. I'm so grateful for my parents' companionship.