i am not a fan of snow. i realize i am doing that whole year of living positively thing but damn. this snow stuff? not cool.
well played God. well played.
recently read: Looking For Alaska by John Green
imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. you spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that
First of all, I can no longer keep track of time.
I used to have the sort of annoying memory where I could obnoxiously say "No, that was on November 2nd at 2:35 in the afternoon, and you didn't say that, you said this…."
(Oh, and I have to interrupt myself because Julia just came halfway down the stairs to say "remember the store we went to when we got my dress for the father/daughter dance?" and I said "yes…" and she said "did we get leggings?" (she means tights) and I said "well, no, we put them back because you were going to wear sandals and we wanted people to see the nail polish on your toe nails, so we didn't get the leggings." (this was at the beginning of march, by the way. a month ago.) and her face clouded over, she sighed, and rested her sorrowful chin on the bannister. Then she looked at me with tragical eyes and murmered "well I really wanted leggings……" sigh. I have - yet again - been a great disappointment to her. How DOES she go on?)
Anyway, years ago my memory was a frightening and wonderful thing. And probably very annoying to people, too.
And now?
Now my mind is a collander with really, really wide holes. Most stuff wiggles through the holes and runs down the drain these days. I'll think of something and then I turn my head a few inches to look at a kid or a cat or out the window, and just that little bit of motion dislodges the baby thought from its precarious hold on my tiny brain, and the thought slips through one of the many collander holes and disappears. I try to get it back. I put my head back in the position it had been before I turned it and made the thought fall. I try to remember (ha! there is no try…there is only do, or do not. why do I remember the wisdom of Yoda but I can't remember my own thoughts? Maybe because my own thoughts are not chock-full of wisdom?) what I'd been thinking BEFORE the thought came into being, so maybe I can repeat the process and get another identical thought. But…well…I would be a great disappointment to Yoda, I fear.
So there's that.
And so for some reason I've compressed my brief life of cheesemaking into one summer instead of two. I'd been thinking that I started a year ago, when in fact (and if I just checked my own archives, I'd have realized this before now), I started nearly two years ago - June of 2008.
What happened to 2009? I feel like I just skipped right over it or something. I don't know.
But anyway, that's the first thing.
So I've been making cheese (on and off, admittedly) for nearly two years, not just one. Hm. Well, that's interesting. To me. Probably not to anyone else, of course, but whatever - it's my blog and I'll be interested in it if I want to.
Now, back whenever it was that I started making cheese…once I'd made my first batch of mozzarella, using the recipe published by Ricki Carroll in her book Home Cheesemaking, and I'd posted these on my little website here, I thought I should maybe write to Ricki to thank her for writing her book and to invite her to take a look at my silly posts about my cheesemaking experiences. OH - and also, I'd purchased the 30-minute Mozzarella kit, and the rennet that was supposed to come with it was accidentally omitted, and I contacted The New England Cheesemaking Supply Company and they got the rennet to me SUPERFAST, as Alex used to say. So I emailed her to say thank you for the quick service and to let her know about my cheesemaking, and that was that.
For a while.
And then, a few months later, I got an email back! From Ricki! The Cheese Queen herself! I am easily excited! But no (well, yes) I was thrilled that she'd taken the time, in between running her company and giving her cheesemaking workshops and all that, to respond. I was happy, chapter closed.
For a while.
I recently ordered the Basic Hard Cheese Kit, so that this year I can make some cheddar and feta and whatever else Alex might like, because he's not a fan of the soft cheeses I've been making so far. While I was on the NECSC website, I noticed that they'd started a blog somewhere around the end of 2009. Cool. I ordered my kit, and that was it.
For a short while.
At the end of March I got an email from a name I didn't recognize, but the subject was "blogging" and so I figured that it was someone asking me about a recipe or something, which happens from time to time. I opened the email, and nope - I was wrong. The email was from Jeri Case, the woman who writes the blog for NECSC. She's doing a series on "New Cheesemakers" for the blog, and Ricki had given her my email from back whenever it was, and Jeri wanted to know if she could interview me for the New Cheesemakers series. She'd taken a look at my blog, and would it be okay if she included some of my pictures in her post, and would I prefer to be interviewed by phone or email, and she'd also need a picture of me to include in her post.
Well, except for the part about a picture of me, I was very happy about the whole thing, and I took a look at the previous New Cheesemakers in the series, and naturally my many insecurities kicked in, but I fought the raging tide and agreed to do the interview. So the next afternoon, Jeri called and asked questions and I babbled on and tried to sound a bit intelligent, and that was that. I couldn't find a picture of me that I liked (my wedding picture didn't seem appropriate, though at least in those I looked pretty good and my hair was nice), so I had Bill take a few pictures of me and among them I found one that only made me cringe a little bit, so I took a deep breath and sent that to Jeri.
And last night she emailed me to let me know the post was up.
So here's the link, in case (after all this insanity) you want to read it. And check out the other posts in the New Cheesemakers series - I thought it was interesting that among the (so far) four of us interviewed, there are a number of similarities.
So that's the second thing.
Third thing…hmmmmm…well, not a lot of a third thing, but I plan to make a batch or two of hard cheese very soon. The cheddar, for instance, will need to age. And I would like to make feta, mainly because I like to EAT feta, and it would be cool to make my own.
So, well, don't hold your breath, because it certainly won't be happening today, but keep checking back, because I'm getting back into the cheesemaking with a vengeance this spring. With a vengeance!
I'm so ridiculous. And now I have to go pack Alex's lunch and get him to school.
** I'd started typing little snippets of overheard kid stuff a couple years ago…these are the two that still seem worth sharing. **
~~~
"Alex, where's Julia?
"She's under the deck."
"What's she doing under there?"
"Um…she's seeing what she can see."
~~~~~
"They're gonna kiss therechother!" (there-chother) (instead of EACH other)
I made bread today. It just came out of the oven about twenty minutes ago. Made one large braided loaf and two smaller roundish loaves. Nothing fancy, just…bread.
Alex smelled it baking and came upstairs, nose first, wondering when he could have a slice - "still warm, so the butter melts." I promised him a slice soon and went back to leaning on my kitchen work table and staring at the blogs on my Google reader, sort of catching up.
My day started out fine, but then, somewhere in the middle of the morning, I started getting stuffed up and sneezy. I thought it was dust and dry air, but it stayed with me through the afternoon and just wouldn't go away. I started prepping for dinner, picked up the kids at school, made some coffee because I was feeling tired, and so on…and by the time dinner was served a little after five I knew I was coming down with something. My throat is scratchy, on the way to sore. My head has that foggy, murky, stuffed-with-cement feeling, and my temper was WAY shorter than usual. Yuck.
But, I took some Tylenol, made some tea, and I'll go to bed at a reasonable hour and see how I feel tomorrow. Fortunately for me, I made chicken pot pie for dinner, which is SORT OF like chicken soup, only better, in my opinion. It was yummy, although Alex didn't like all that puff pastry crust - the part that sunk into the liquid - or the bits of onion. Oh well, can't please everyone all the time.
He is, however, happy about this bread. In fact, just before I started typing, he told me that it was the best bread EVER. Not just the best bread I'd ever baked, but in the whole entire history of the bread-baking world, it's the best. Ever. And then Julia made a trophy out of Legos and gave it to me. They're pretty damn sweet kids when they want to be.
~~~
Speaking of not pleaseing everyone all the time, last night was one of my biggest failures as a cook. I'll blame it on day-before-coming-down-with-a-cold interference, or something. Or temporary insanity. Or laziness. Or stupidity. In fact, I named the whole mess "Idiot Pie." I know, I should have taken pictures. Sorry, you'll just have to use your imagination.
Let me set the stage first. For some reason, I always have thought that Bill didn't like Shepherd's Pie. So I never made it. Simple as that. It wasn't anything we had on any regular basis when I was a kid (at least not that I remember), and we cook plenty of other good things around here, so I didn't miss it or long for it all these years.
Anyway, somehow, at some point over the past several days, the subject of Shepherd's Pie came up and I learned that Bill did not, in fact, dislike Shepherd's Pie at all. And that, if I made it, he would be very happy to eat it.
Well, then!
But you know what? I don't think I've ever made it. Weird, huh?
Anyway, I thought it would be a good way to use up some of the leftover vegetables from my Dad's birthday dinner. (I don't know if I'd mentioned this at all, but my mom had offered to bring something since I was making the main dish and the dessert, so we agreed that she'd bring a vegetable, probably a green one. She ended up bringing pretty much every vegetable in the grocery store, all cooked and still warm in a large cooler (or, in this case, warmer). Needless to say, we still have 25 tons of vegetables still in the fridge. She just laughed when I suggested she take some home along with the few remaining pasties and a bit of dessert. She laughed. Cackled, really. And snickered. And pointed.
So we've got all these vegetables to use up.
I figured some of them would go nicely in the Shepherd's Pie. So now, about the meat. Well, here's where tradition and I tragically parted ways. Again, I don't know what I was thinking. But here goes. I had a few packages of stew beef in the freezer. I'd used one for the Cornish pasties, and froze the others for some other day. I'd taken one out to thaw…and I decided to use it for the Shepherd's Pie.
I don't know why.
Anyway, I figured I should at least LOOK at a recipe. I knew it would involve mashed potatoes, and that was no problem. I had potatoes, I could make mashed potatoes easily. All set.
I found a nice little recipe and basically proceeded to ruin it. I think I sauteed some onions…browned my stew beef (which I'd cut into smaller pieces…which…in case you're wondering, are NOT the same as ground meat. And, also, lamb is the traditional meat in Shepherd's pie - yeah, Shepherd…watching the Sheep…who give birth to Lambs…who get attacked by wolves…who then put the lamb meat through a meat grinder, dig up some potatoes, and make themselves a lovely pie, laughing at the Shepherd who was looking the other way when the hit went down.) What was I talking about? Oh, yes, chopped up stew beef.
Now, I keep saying "stew beef" instead of just plain ol' "beef" because stew beef is the sort of beef that does best in low temperature, slow cooking methods. Like…well…stew. It is not meant to be cooked quickly like a steak. If you cook it fast, it gets tough. If you cook it slowly, it relaxes and falls apart. Turns out it's not really meant to be used as a substitute for ground lamb in a Shepherd's Pie, SURPRISE, SURPRISE!
So anyway, I softened my onions, quickly browned the beef, poured in some lovely beef stock we'd made a couple of weeks ago (okay, Bill made it, and he said, after this meal, that I now have to ask permission before I use any more of it.), and noticed that it really wasn't a whole LOT of food in that large Le Creuset dutch oven I'd been planning to make this whole thing in.
Hm.
Okay, I've got a smaller vessel…I have a souffle pan thingy that would work. All set.
I made the mashed potatoes while my meat and onions were hanging out in the larger pot, and damn it all to hell, I put too much milk in. So I had slightly wet mashed potatoes. Okay, not slightly. Just plain wet. I kept the flame going under them in a feeble attempt to cook off some of the moisture. It wasn't working.
So I added some ricotta cheese. Because that's the logical thing to do, isn't it? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Anyway, I ladled my beef mixture into the souffle pan. It came to within 3/8 of an inch or so of the rim. Yikes. Next, I carefully spooned my mashed potato slush on top. There was just enough to sort of cover the whole mess, not counting all the little places where it leaked through. I put the souffle pan on a baking sheet and was JUST about to put it in the oven when Bill came into the room and asked "Did you put the vegetables in?"
THE VEGETABLES! OH NO! I RUINED IT!
And meanwhile, Julia was running around wanting attention about something, and Bill had some sort of look on his face that I interpreted as "I can't believe I married this loser chick who doesn't know that Shepherd's Pie is made with ground lamb" but which was probably just simple horror. Naturally I snapped and, waving my arms wildly and babbling incoherently, I evicted them from the kitchen. "Me, too?" Bill asked. "YES!" I shrieked. "I KEEP GETTING DISTRACTED!" So Bill and Julia went downstairs where Alex was watching something about dinosaurs and I angrily scooped potato slush off the top of the toughened-meat casserole. I yanked a bowl out of the fridge, and was about to dump the vegetables in with the meat, but realized it would probably overflow. So I dumped all that back into the dutch oven. But. The surface area was now TOO BIG. So I hastily cooked up more potatoes (good god, will this never end? NO!) and sort of…incorporated them into the mashed potatoes (they weren't soft enough to mash, not quite, but I figured they could finish cooking in the oven), and spread that mess on top of the beef and vegetables. Then, in a last, pathetic attempt to make it all TASTY, I grated some parmesan cheese on top. Sad, isn't it?
I baked it in the oven for who knows how long, took it out, dished it up, and waited for the complements to start pouring in. Bill said "…………….I like the mashed potatoes and the broth part………." Alex asked "Did you follow a recipe?" and I said "Sort of," and Julia thought about that a moment and said " 'Sort of' means no."
And that was that, really.
But.
It is not over.
I will make Shepherd's Pie. And I will make a damn good one. Just wait and see.
And when I do, both my kids AND Bill will FALL OVER THEMSELVES to build Lego trophies in my honor.
So there.
I made bread today. It just came out of the oven about twenty minutes ago. Made one large braided loaf and two smaller roundish loaves. Nothing fancy, just…bread.
Alex smelled it baking and came upstairs, nose first, wondering when he could have a slice - "still warm, so the butter melts." I promised him a slice soon and went back to leaning on my kitchen work table and staring at the blogs on my Google reader, sort of catching up.
My day started out fine, but then, somewhere in the middle of the morning, I started getting stuffed up and sneezy. I thought it was dust and dry air, but it stayed with me through the afternoon and just wouldn't go away. I started prepping for dinner, picked up the kids at school, made some coffee because I was feeling tired, and so on…and by the time dinner was served a little after five I knew I was coming down with something. My throat is scratchy, on the way to sore. My head has that foggy, murky, stuffed-with-cement feeling, and my temper was WAY shorter than usual. Yuck.
But, I took some Tylenol, made some tea, and I'll go to bed at a reasonable hour and see how I feel tomorrow. Fortunately for me, I made chicken pot pie for dinner, which is SORT OF like chicken soup, only better, in my opinion. It was yummy, although Alex didn't like all that puff pastry crust - the part that sunk into the liquid - or the bits of onion. Oh well, can't please everyone all the time.
He is, however, happy about this bread. In fact, just before I started typing, he told me that it was the best bread EVER. Not just the best bread I'd ever baked, but in the whole entire history of the bread-baking world, it's the best. Ever. And then Julia made a trophy out of Legos and gave it to me. They're pretty damn sweet kids when they want to be.
~~~
Speaking of not pleaseing everyone all the time, last night was one of my biggest failures as a cook. I'll blame it on day-before-coming-down-with-a-cold interference, or something. Or temporary insanity. Or laziness. Or stupidity. In fact, I named the whole mess "Idiot Pie." I know, I should have taken pictures. Sorry, you'll just have to use your imagination.
Let me set the stage first. For some reason, I always have thought that Bill didn't like Shepherd's Pie. So I never made it. Simple as that. It wasn't anything we had on any regular basis when I was a kid (at least not that I remember), and we cook plenty of other good things around here, so I didn't miss it or long for it all these years.
Anyway, somehow, at some point over the past several days, the subject of Shepherd's Pie came up and I learned that Bill did not, in fact, dislike Shepherd's Pie at all. And that, if I made it, he would be very happy to eat it.
Well, then!
But you know what? I don't think I've ever made it. Weird, huh?
Anyway, I thought it would be a good way to use up some of the leftover vegetables from my Dad's birthday dinner. (I don't know if I'd mentioned this at all, but my mom had offered to bring something since I was making the main dish and the dessert, so we agreed that she'd bring a vegetable, probably a green one. She ended up bringing pretty much every vegetable in the grocery store, all cooked and still warm in a large cooler (or, in this case, warmer). Needless to say, we still have 25 tons of vegetables still in the fridge. She just laughed when I suggested she take some home along with the few remaining pasties and a bit of dessert. She laughed. Cackled, really. And snickered. And pointed.
So we've got all these vegetables to use up.
I figured some of them would go nicely in the Shepherd's Pie. So now, about the meat. Well, here's where tradition and I tragically parted ways. Again, I don't know what I was thinking. But here goes. I had a few packages of stew beef in the freezer. I'd used one for the Cornish pasties, and froze the others for some other day. I'd taken one out to thaw…and I decided to use it for the Shepherd's Pie.
I don't know why.
Anyway, I figured I should at least LOOK at a recipe. I knew it would involve mashed potatoes, and that was no problem. I had potatoes, I could make mashed potatoes easily. All set.
I found a nice little recipe and basically proceeded to ruin it. I think I sauteed some onions…browned my stew beef (which I'd cut into smaller pieces…which…in case you're wondering, are NOT the same as ground meat. And, also, lamb is the traditional meat in Shepherd's pie - yeah, Shepherd…watching the Sheep…who give birth to Lambs…who get attacked by wolves…who then put the lamb meat through a meat grinder, dig up some potatoes, and make themselves a lovely pie, laughing at the Shepherd who was looking the other way when the hit went down.) What was I talking about? Oh, yes, chopped up stew beef.
Now, I keep saying "stew beef" instead of just plain ol' "beef" because stew beef is the sort of beef that does best in low temperature, slow cooking methods. Like…well…stew. It is not meant to be cooked quickly like a steak. If you cook it fast, it gets tough. If you cook it slowly, it relaxes and falls apart. Turns out it's not really meant to be used as a substitute for ground lamb in a Shepherd's Pie, SURPRISE, SURPRISE!
So anyway, I softened my onions, quickly browned the beef, poured in some lovely beef stock we'd made a couple of weeks ago (okay, Bill made it, and he said, after this meal, that I now have to ask permission before I use any more of it.), and noticed that it really wasn't a whole LOT of food in that large Le Creuset dutch oven I'd been planning to make this whole thing in.
Hm.
Okay, I've got a smaller vessel…I have a souffle pan thingy that would work. All set.
I made the mashed potatoes while my meat and onions were hanging out in the larger pot, and damn it all to hell, I put too much milk in. So I had slightly wet mashed potatoes. Okay, not slightly. Just plain wet. I kept the flame going under them in a feeble attempt to cook off some of the moisture. It wasn't working.
So I added some ricotta cheese. Because that's the logical thing to do, isn't it? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Anyway, I ladled my beef mixture into the souffle pan. It came to within 3/8 of an inch or so of the rim. Yikes. Next, I carefully spooned my mashed potato slush on top. There was just enough to sort of cover the whole mess, not counting all the little places where it leaked through. I put the souffle pan on a baking sheet and was JUST about to put it in the oven when Bill came into the room and asked "Did you put the vegetables in?"
THE VEGETABLES! OH NO! I RUINED IT!
And meanwhile, Julia was running around wanting attention about something, and Bill had some sort of look on his face that I interpreted as "I can't believe I married this loser chick who doesn't know that Shepherd's Pie is made with ground lamb" but which was probably just simple horror. Naturally I snapped and, waving my arms wildly and babbling incoherently, I evicted them from the kitchen. "Me, too?" Bill asked. "YES!" I shrieked. "I KEEP GETTING DISTRACTED!" So Bill and Julia went downstairs where Alex was watching something about dinosaurs and I angrily scooped potato slush off the top of the toughened-meat casserole. I yanked a bowl out of the fridge, and was about to dump the vegetables in with the meat, but realized it would probably overflow. So I dumped all that back into the dutch oven. But. The surface area was now TOO BIG. So I hastily cooked up more potatoes (good god, will this never end? NO!) and sort of…incorporated them into the mashed potatoes (they weren't soft enough to mash, not quite, but I figured they could finish cooking in the oven), and spread that mess on top of the beef and vegetables. Then, in a last, pathetic attempt to make it all TASTY, I grated some parmesan cheese on top. Sad, isn't it?
I baked it in the oven for who knows how long, took it out, dished it up, and waited for the complements to start pouring in. Bill said "…………….I like the mashed potatoes and the broth part………." Alex asked "Did you follow a recipe?" and I said "Sort of," and Julia thought about that a moment and said " 'Sort of' means no."
And that was that, really.
But.
It is not over.
I will make Shepherd's Pie. And I will make a damn good one. Just wait and see.
And when I do, both my kids AND Bill will FALL OVER THEMSELVES to build Lego trophies in my honor.
So there.
