Mish Mash

This was the view from my window today:



Drippy and wet.

Good thing I had planned to spend the day in the kitchen. I had several food projects planned.

I started by heating and inoculating a couple gallons of milk for cheese. My goal for this cheese is some nice, strong and well-stunk feta. Mmmmm... I love feta.




I am just loving having our own milk-- and plenty of it! I'm finding lots of things to make from it.

I moved on to chopping the apples I had picked up under one of our apple trees yesterday.




Okay, well, first I had to cut out the wormy cores, see?



I bet that when you loaded my page you were thinking, "Boy, I sure hope I get to see a sinkful of wormy apple cores!"

And I'm so glad I could oblige.

Anyway... I mixed the apples with sugar and cinnamon and left that to sit for a while and went on to making up some "confetti kraut"-- saurkraut consisting of one puny little cabbage with some carrots and zucchini for filler and onion and garlic for flavor.




I packed that into a jar and let set it out on the counter to rot for a few days.

I always have all kinds of things rotting on my counters. Throughout this week I've had jars of fermented dilly beans, experimental kohlrabi, and some sweet onion-pepper-dill relish. I just transferred those the the fridge and I'll taste them in a few days to see if they were successes. All that on top of the usual kefir and kombucha and sourdough starter jars, plus some yogurt... Mmmm... Probiotics, anyone?

(Aside: Have I ever mentioned how good a speller I used to be? I had spelling classes through high school and I was an ace. But now? Auto spell check everywhere is ruining my spelling abilities. When I get those red underlines, I'm too lazy to even correct it myself. I just right-click... choose the word I was going for. I just did that with three words in that last paragraph! Pathetic! On that same strain, I also can't handwrite very well anymore. I sit down to write thankyou notes and I get through two of them and it's like runing a marathon. "Whew! I gotta take a rest now! Catch my breath. That pen-and-paper thing is hard work." I can type infinitely, but pick up a pen and I'm so done. That my friends, is reeeeally sad.)

(Another aside: That last one was a really big "aside"...)

From there I got my cheese curds strained and hanging, cooked the whey leftover to get the ricotta and hung that beside the feta. On a rolling pin. On a stool. On the table.

Nothing if not high-tech around here.




...and flipped the feta over in it's cloth so that it'll be a nice round ball.



It has to hang until tomorrow (see "rotting," above), at which point it should be nice and stinky and I will cut it, rest it for a few days in the fridge, and then put it into a salty whey brine to age a while. Yum!

After that I got my apple crisp in the oven and baked.



It's reeeally yummy with vanilla ice cream.

I know because I had some.

It's also really good with some of that ricotta sweetened with maple syrup.

I know because I had some that way, too.

So all of that took up most of the day. And here is my reward:



...just as the sun breaks out and shoots the humidity up to 347%...