Playing with my food

After several weekends in a row of traveling, I'm finally home for a consecutive Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which is leading to a sort of experimental cooking and preserving binge.  Or, as much of one as could be expected without proper equipment or expertise for most of the kinds of kitchen projects I'm trying to do.

There's more to this than a love for cooking (although that might turn out to be a by-product of the experimentation).  The farm where I work has recently had an overflow of seconds, especially partially bug-eaten corn and cucumbers this past week.

Yesterday as I was leaving work, I loaded up a few cucumbers and ears of corn in my backpack.  I turned my back for a second and my two-year-old coworker appeared behind me helpfully toting as many additional cucumbers as he could carry.

"I licked one of them," he announced as he added them to the others.  I didn't have the heart to turn him away, so I adopted them all, even the slimy one.

In addition to the Lawrence-produced bounty, I received a visit from my parents and brother this week, which meant I also received several more ears of corn, hot peppers, cherry and slicing tomatoes, onions, two gallons of milk, a quart of skimmed cream, and a skinned, whole chicken.

I was risking the wrath of my housemates by taking up far more than my share of the fridge.  Something had to be done.

Yesterday my coworkers Colby and Sally came over to help use up some of the produce bounty, but since they work at the farm too, they brought their own orphan cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and onions.  Colby set the agenda for the evening: gazpacho and mozzarella cheese.  We set up a dual kitchen with Colby and Sally on one side of the counter chopping and whuzzing up the produce, while I set up the mozzarella on the stove.

I made things more difficult for myself by suggesting that we do a side-by-side comparison of fresh milk and store-bought milk.  The gazpacho was a great success, and I'll blame the semi-failure of the mozzarella on the over-complication of trying to watch the temperature on two batches at once.

By semi-failure, I mean that what we ended up was some kind of cheese, but it definitely was not mozzarella.  After 20 minutes of waiting for curds to form, it was clear that something was wrong with the store-bought batch.  Colby did a quick google of the problem, and I realized that the aluminum (not stainless steel) pot was probably the issue.   While he was at it he found a recipe for making ricotta from the left-over whey (which I'll come back to later).

Meanwhile, Sally and I scooped the beautiful very-mozzarella-like curds out of the fresh-milk batch.  The curds looked and felt a little like gak, that neon-colored goo we played with in the mid-90s.   ...So this step is partly responsible for turning what should have been a 30-minute-mozzarella into a 90-minute-mozzarella.

The next steps of the recipe called for successive heatings and kneadings of the curds until they became stretchy and smooth.  It was only after the mozzarella failed to become stretchy and smooth that I read the following steps in the recipe, which listed all of the potential ways to screw up the heating and kneading.

We had managed to accomplish several of the pitfalls of curd-kneading: over-heating, over-working, and taking too much time in general.  The recipe didn't offer any suggestions of what to in the case that your cheese does become "hard and unworkable." We divided and snacked on the small chunk of not-mozzarella cheese, and called it a night.

Today I came back to the whey sitting on the back of the stove, and made a super-nice batch of whey ricotta. It went really quickly (aside from the part where I tried to substitute regular cotton fabric for cheesecloth... let's just say I'm going to be buying some cheesecloth if I do this again) and was a super easy recipe.



And then I turned my attention to the failed batch of store-bought-milk mozzarella.  By this point the cultures had done a little bit of work, and I had tiny flecks of curd, which looked a little like the whey ricotta did before I strained it.

So I strained the failed batch too, and voila, now I have two slightly different kinds of... what I'm just going to go ahead and call ricotta.  I also revisited the not-mozzarella ball, which had turned into a sliceable, dry, sharp-tasting, and delicious lump.  I don't have a name for it, but I like it.



My next two projects were the cucumber and corn.  Cucumber salad turned out pretty delicious with a partially improvised recipe based on this one (minus 1/2 c. mayo, plus 1/2 c. yogurt, plus lots of onions, if you must know), although I'm also intrigued by this recipe with chili powder, which I might try when I get more cucumbers next week.



I had planned to can the corn as my first solo canning experience.  I was proud of myself for improvising or hoarding all of the canning supplies I would need, but partially into the process, I realized I was missing one essential piece of equipment.  After searching all over the house for something that could substitute for a rack that keeps the jars off the bottom of the pot, I gave up and decided to just freeze this batch.  (It just occurred to me that I could probably have fashioned something out of wire clothes hangers... shoot, that would have made for a good story).  All's well that ends well: There are four containers of frozen corn, cucumber salad for dinner tonight, a good bit of ricotta-like cheese, and most importantly...

Space for more produce in the fridge!!!

P.S.  I have a confession to make. When I think about the food production and preservation talents that generations of people before me had to perfect, and what a lot of people in other parts of the world still do to feed themselves today, it is frankly embarrassing to me to be writing a blog post about my little forays into food production, like its some big impressive adventure. 
I'd like to get to the point where preserving food isn't something for me to write home about.  I'd like to see us get to the point where growing, processing, and cooking food just... something we all do.