Pasteurization, Pasteurizaaation (a la Carly Simon)

 One of the few things we still buy from the grocery store is dairy. I'm interested in changing that, but it's a little bit of a hassle at present. We got our milk from Miller Farms in La Costa, TX. It's a bit of a drive, but there are several groups that do local milk coops. Raw milk is legal in Texas and these folks are licensed for sale.

A couple of thoughts on raw milk: many people advocate drinking raw milk as is, unpasteurized. I'm not down with that. Call it paranoia if you like, but a safe milk supply was a huge stride in public health. I'm rather unwilling to give my family unpasteurized milk unless I milked the cow myself. Since that's not happening, we are only using the milk after being pasteurized or cooked in some way.  I'm not a food safety nut, but I have a healthy respect for the germs that used to take people out on a regular basis. Plus, all my epidemiology classes used food borne illness outbreaks as our sample data. It makes you aware.

Making yogurt

We made the most fabulous yogurt from this milk. Admittedly, I usually make our yogurt from 1% milk and this was seriously whole milk, but the yogurt had a cream layer on top like the fancy organic brands. Oui la la. The way I make yogurt requires heating it to close to 180 degrees anyway, so we didn't need to pasteurize it ahead of time.

Cream top yogurt

Rigged double boiler

 With all the kitchen equipment I have (yogurt maker anyone?) you'd think I would have a double boiler but I don't. This is what I've been using to make yogurt - our big cast iron dutch oven with a smaller pot inside and a cookie cutter jammed between the two handles.

 It works. To pasteurize, you either heat the milk to 150 for 30 minutes or 165 for 15 seconds. I can't ever hit the temperature quite right so I overshoot and it ends up at 165 for much longer than 15 seconds. Milk boils at 174 degrees so you have to watch it pretty closely and use a double boiler to help ward off scalding.

After you heat it all the way, you need to cool it down quickly. I put the whole pot in a sink full of ice. Notice that I use a thermometer this whole time. You are aiming to get it down to 40 degrees quickly, but that doesn't usually happen until I stick it in the fridge. Tasty, tasty. And local goodness.

We're Eating: Canned goods???

Since we've been traveling there has been far less cooking than normal. But the farm share waits for no person and we have a backlog of farm share veggies. This week, we not only have our farm share but we also have my parents. We are buried by abundance! 

Like people of yore when faced with a ton of seasonal produce threatening to go bad, we're planning a canning party this weekend. Luckily, my grandmother had a huge garden and consequently was a big time canner. She was mostly out of the canning business by the time I was born so I never got to see her in action, but the volume of jars she had is pretty impressive. My people are not a people who live a simplified clutter free life of sparse belongings. We have generations worth of stuff crammed in attics and closets. Normally this annoys me, but in this case it paid off big time. My Mom saved all my Granmothers canning stuff for the last 10 years and I just pulled some of it out of the attic this afternoon.

Not only are there several more boxes of glass jars in the attic, but she also had a humongous pressure canner for low acid foods. My errand for the rest of the week is to take the pressure gauge down to the ag extension office and get them to test it for safety.

My Mom also saved the Ball Blue Book for canning. Right now, we're focused on the cucumber crisis in our midst and planning pickles. This book is loaded with lots of good recipes and I can see some peach butter in our future while the peaches are still in season. Onward!

Sunday Cake: Gluten Free Baking

This weekend was my little bro's birthday. Our birthdays are 6 days (plus a few years) apart so this is heavy cake baking time in my family. My little bro has celiac so he can't have any form of wheat gluten. He was diagnosed quite a long while ago before there were decent mixes available for baked goods. We've all tried gluten free baking with various degrees of success. A notable failure on my part was the gluten free biscuit incident of 2004. I thought the phrase "biscuits you could chip a tooth on" was an example of hyperbole. Not so, my friends. These biscuits were stuck so throughly to the pan that I had to throw the pan away. Steel wool didn't even work.

My brother is pretty laid back and really doesn't ask that we make a fuss and try to bake for him. But if there is one day a year to make a fuss it's on your birthday.

So this year I made him a vanilla lemon layer cake with lemon curd filling, whip cream icing, and blueberries. I also made homemade vanilla bean ice cream. It was, to toot my own horn, very tasty.

As Mr. J chanted all weekend, "Happy Birthday Uncle David!"

We're Eating: Road Trip Food

We've written about our road trip here already, but what we didn't include was the elaborate planning that went into getting ready to take a toddler on a multi-day car bound adventure. I was a little worried about the food situation. We eat vegetarian and most of the road food available for vegetarians is some form of a deep fried potato or some form of cheese. Not so healthy. 

Instead of hunting around the gas stations for the least worst option, we just decided to make a bunch of stuff to bring. For the road trip, I made:

• Non-garlicy hummus
• Homemade white bread
• Two large loaves of banana nut bread
• Homemade granola bars
• Fresh fruit 
• Nuts

The hummus is from our own standard recipe that I just eye ball. The banana bread was actually from a recipe from a Martha Stewart cookbook that called for buttermilk instead of sour cream like the recipe I linked to above. Also, I accidentally left the granola bars in the oven for an extra 30 minutes with no harm done. 

Believe it or not, this held us all the way through the 5 day road trip with some main meals supplemented at restaurants.  The banana bread and the granola bars were the big stars. And Mr. J managed to get through the whole road trip without a single french fry!

Sunday Cake: Yogurt Cake with Blueberries

I baked lots of stuff this weekend which I'll write up eventually, but I didn't get around to making a cake because I was tired of cooking by Sunday.

So today, I made the yogurt cake from Smitten Kitchen with the following modifications:

-we only had 3/4 C of plain yogurt so I made up the rest with plain ricotta cheese from the farmer's market 

-subbed lemons for lime

-subbed blueberries for blackberries

All in all a success. But Monday was a welcome party for new faculty so I'm bringing it on Tuesday.

This is my own version of How to Win Friends and Influence People.....with baked goods.

Kitchen Chemistry

Success! I've had mixed results in the past with both bread baking and making yoghurt. But... the kitchen gods appear to be smiling on me lately. I've had successful batches of both in the past week.

We tried out the Bread in 5 Minutes a day thing this weekend and both loaves have been beautiful and yummy.

Essentially, you make a huge batch of really wet

dough, let it rise once and then stick it in the fridge. When you're ready to bake, pull off a chunk of the dough, let it rise and throw it in the oven on an oven stone with a pan of water for steam. The basic dough recipe can be turned into a variety of different types of bread. I tried the basic white bread recipe this time, but next time I'll try one of the whole wheat versions.

The first loaf was a bit misshapen since I didn't put enough cornmeal on the pizza meal and it

stuck, but I googled around found suggestions to start the bread on parchment paper and then slide it off the parchment paper halfway through

baking. It worked perfectly. No stressing about cornmeal and sticking and a great crust. It also has the big, fancy holes in it like real bakery bread.

The second experiment was another try at making yoghurt. The keys: store bought starter,

non-fat milk powder, and cooking the milk over a lower heat. The first few batches were either too thin or too thick a la the Three Bears. The non-fat milk powder helps it thicken up and the

store bought starter made sure it actually cultured. It looks pretty good! Now, I'm working on figuring out how to flavor it for Chuck. We also have a yoghurt incubator that I bought before we got married and I've now moved away and back to Texas. Chuck mocked me about my unused but deeply loved yoghurt maker. So now I'm going to use the darn thing until I can make most of the yoghurt we eat.