No Freakin' Whey

As an English teacher, few things delight me more than reading. Unfortunately, between To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Othello, et cetera, I am left with little time to read for fun. Starting in April I began making my list of books to read this summer. After spending hours poring over Amazon.com reviews, I made my decisions, placing Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle at the top of my list. I picked the book up at the cute bookstore across the street and packed it up in anticipation of our month-long June Journey. The book arrived at my parent's house before I did so, of course, both of my parents have read it and I still haven't. The book inspired my parents to do all kinds of crazy things (buy local meat, shop at farmer's markets, bake bread), but the most interesting thing they wanted to try was making cheese.
Truthfully, until last week, I had no idea that you could just "make cheese". I thought it was something that came from a factory with mysterious ingredients and expensive equipment. Wrong. It's basically milk with a few chemicals and you can easily make it in your own kitchen. Mom ordered some basic cheesemaking supplies and on Saturday we began our first project, mozzarella.
We began by heating a gallon of non-ultra pasteurized milk and a bit of citric acid to precisely 88 degrees. At that point we added the tiniest sliver of rennet, an enzyme that causes the milk to coagulate and let the mixture sit for 8 long minutes. Then it was time to cut the curd into a grid and then scoop out the curds. Mom mentioned in the previous post that she had the ideal hands for squeezing out the excess whey, so I scooped the curds into a bowl and mom squeezed them out. We later upgraded our technology and scooped the curds onto a splatter screen and pressed the curds into it, causing the excess whey to drip into a bowl. Unfortunately, curds and whey looks an awful lot like baby vomit. Fortunately, it doesn't smell that way and we were soon to the next step, heating and pulling.
To make mozzarella, you heat the curds in the microwave at 35 second increments, and between each heating, you knead and stretch the cheese. It's pretty amazing watching a blob of curds turn into a smooth, shiny ball of delicious mozzarella. During the last kneading you add plenty of salt and then pull the mozzarella like taffy one final time.
The cheese was fantastic. It tasted so fresh and, as with anything you make yourself, we thought it was truly awesome.
Hard cheeses like parmesean take months to age, while the soft cheeses like cream cheese, manchego, and mozzarella can be ready to eat in a matter of hours or days. I probably won't become a full time cheese maker, only eating my own cheese, as I would need a cheese-aging humidor and several hundred dollars' worth of cheese presses. I will, however, definitely be making more mozzarella.

Hands of Time

I have big hands. Vicki and Whitney came over yesterday to help with our first attempt at cheesemaking (more on that later). After the curds and whey separate (didn't know which was which before yesterday), it's time to "use a gentle hand" to press as much of the whey out of the curd as possible. The curd makes the cheese, the whey, well we aren't sure yet, but are considering it a great plant food. We older gals had the perfect hands for the process. We joked about our farm hands, both of us have a heritage of German farming, and were able to do the job perfectly. Our girls have petite, slender, soft, hands. Will they improve with age?

My hands have always been big. I write left-handed with the pen on my ring finger, so I have a large callous there. Rings and long nails make me look like a transvestite. When Curt and I got married, rings seemed silly, so we went with the kick-ass stero instead.

I have blisters from pulling weeds, scars from poor knife skills, burns from too hot mozarella, and crooked little fingers from too many softball catches. As I approach 50, this is something I am becoming comfortable with. I have started noticing broads with big hands. Martha Stewart has strong hands, so does Nigella, and Mario Batali's sous chef on Iron Chef America. I'm starting to like the look.

Recommended products: Burt's Bees Almond Milk Beeswax Hand Creme
Burt's Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Creme

Truckin, Got Joel's Chips Cashed In...

While there may be someone in Texas that wanted a motorcycle more than Joel, it’s a pretty safe bet they don’t live in Grand Prairie. He had been looking and saving and saving and looking for 4 years until last week, when he finally pulled the trigger. It’s a sweet little machine, if you call a 650 little, and when we unloaded it, it was clear that all of our lives had changed. He made the first few short trips around town and his reports made both of parents feel quite a bit younger and maybe even slimmer. But while the first jaunts are exciting because of the newness, an official road trip was needed to achieve official biker/pirate credibility. It couldn’t be a lame-o, 1 hour jaunt to the country store and back either. No, this needed to be a regulation road trip that involved a minimum of 2 gas stops, twisty, windy roads with farm implements, two or three highway jerks with a close call or two and a great, hole in the wall cafe that hasn’t got the transfats memo yet. Luckily Mark knew the route that would surpass all of the requirements.

Mark has two motorcycles which allowed me to tag along and on Saturday morning we got our motors running and headed out on the highway about 7:00am. The air was cool and light as we wheeled out on 1187 skirting the filthy underbelly of Fort Worth. It was the best of guilty pleasures as we watched all of early morning joggers and bicycle riders getting in their workouts before the hot, Texas sun came out in earnest. Our aerobic duties were set on hold as we surrendered to the glory of internal combustion and loud pipes. Life just doesn’t get much better. Pretty soon we were in the country and running down roads most folks never see. The farmers around Stephenville were cutting silage and it stung our necks as it spilled over the side of the big, farm trucks. The organic smells of the fresh hay paired nicely with the dairy farm as we cruised into town for the first gas stop. We met a nice couple on a VTX 1300 from Wichita Falls who were riding to Hico and compared a few cafes and roads. A big gathering of 2-wheel Texans was in the works and was ending up at the “best barbecue joint in Texas” that afternoon. We bookmarked the address for future reference as we had already made our plans for fine dining.

Backroads have always held me in their tractor beams but riding behind my son on his yellow beast gave them an even stronger appeal. Although he was in front, I could feel the smile coming out of his exhaust which sounded happy. We met numerous other riders some slower, some faster and most all willing to wave, except for the Harley gang who seemed to be in their own world. We had one small SUV creep closer to my bumper until he eventually roared around and decided to pass all 5 bikes in our short convoy. The fact that the first two were turning left onto another highway did not deter him and he generously avoided killing both of them by punching in between them and forcing the 2^nd one off the road onto the shoulder. Luckily all five of us remembered how to shoot the bird and let him roar off in the distance with our curses of gut wrenching diarrhea upon his head. That’s just another bonus of being in the country though. In the city sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the dick-weeds, but in the country they stand out like a diamond in a goat’s ass.

After all that excitement we were hungry and tired, and as luck would have it, close to Mary’s in Strawn. Many places claim to have the best burger, steak, catfish, etc., but Mary’s holds the undisputed chicken fried steak crown. From the moment you step on the concrete floors and smell the cigarette smoke in the back room, you know you’ve arrived in culinary heaven. The exact millisecond your bike weary butt hits the naugahyde cushioned chairs, a giant iced tea appears on the formica table top. The waitresses are always the same, one too cute, one too fat and one too pregnant, but all of them sweeter than the pink saccharin packets they give if you ask for them cause everyone knows you use sugar for tea. Once your senses have recovered from their initial overload, you face your only real decisions, small, medium or large and choice of salad dressing which comes conveniently in multicolored squirt bottles. The small was perfect for Mark and I and even Joel remembered the large as being outrageous, so he settled for the medium. 10 minutes later giant cafeteria-beige, plastic platters of breaded, pan fried, round steak, Texas toast and thick cut french fries made their appearance along with a big bowl of gravy. The salad now comes in a tiny relish dish so it doesn’t ruin any of the gravy. Thirty minutes later we stumbled out in the hot sun and saddled up.

The ride home was uneventful in our gluttony induced torpor. We met a Harley rider at a gas station in Weatherford that actually spoke to us metric types and discussed the weather a little. When we pulled back into Mark’s driveway, the odometer was 267 clicks heavier than when we left. Mark and I were both so beaten down we had to drink several glasses of ice-water before we could stand back up. Apparently, Joel wasn’t quite as tired since he roared off to see his friends and show off the new machine. All in all, a damn fine day.