Milly & Lexi

And they say cats and dogs can't get along... Milly is my friend's 9 week old walker hound pointer mix and just about the cutest thing around. Lexi kitty is approximately 2.5 months old. They absolutely love each other. The proof of this is how they play with toys together and follow each other around constantly. I apologize that the video clip below is so short but it's the best I can do with my new video camera as I'm still learning the ropes.

White Babcock Peach Jam

I made 12 jars of White Babcock Peach jam last night. I started by boiling and shocking 7 pounds of peaches to get the skins off. I was reluctant to skin them because I knew their skins would add a delicate, beautiful blush to the jam but peach jam made with skin on peaches has hairy chewy bits to deal with.

Anyhow, I think it tastes marvelous! The peaches came from my parent's trees. They have three fruiting peach trees with branches so loaded with fruit, they're actually breaking off.

Tonight is bread baking night. I'll be baking a few loaves for us to eat over the next week or so. I usually do a honey whole wheat and then a savory loaf with cheese and herbs. Bread is stupid expensive and loaded with unnecessary ingredients. Baking my own loaves costs around $1.50 per loaf give or take a few cents, using the highest quality natural ingredients I can get my hands on.

And Then...

Here's the creme fraiche hanging to drain at room temperature for 8 hours. This hanging process naturally thickens it and also develops the tang and slightly nutty flavor associated with French creme fraiche. In the middle picture I am showing the thickness of the creme fraiche after it's initial 12 hour ripening period. The culture has set the heavy cream and it now has the consistency of a thick whipped cream. Pictured last is the extra thick organic yogurt I made. And let me tell you, I will never buy yogurt again. This yogurt was so good it made me suspicious. It was so damn creamy and thick. When I compared it to some of the more "top of the line" yogurts out there, it won hands down. Best of all, it's organic and it's ingredient list is only two words long.

So you want to know what I did with all this dairy heaven? Well, first off I need to ask you if you've ever heard of PinkBerry? If not I'll just tell you they're the latest craze in frozen dairy goodness. I've had their stuff and it's good but what I made with this yogurt was great. After allowing the yogurt's tartness to mature, I added it to my ice cream maker. When it was just about frozen, I added about 2 cups worth of a mixture of blueberries cooked down with honey. This super sweet mixture swirled in to the yogurt and balanced beautifully with the creamy tartness. Needless to say, my kids went bananas for the stuff and the two quarts were finished over the weekend. So my total ingredient list went like this: Organic Whole Milk, Organic blueberries, Wild Honey. PinkBerry, eat your heart out. Now on to the fate of the quart of creme friache. We had company for dinner last night and I made a Nectarine Upside Down Cake with lightly Sweetened Whipped Creme Fraiche. It was rather delectable and consumed within seconds so there's no picture unfortunately.

The Wonderful World of Natrually Fermented Dairy Products

Hello all, sorry I've been too busy to post here lately but here's a snap shot of one of my many cheese/fermented dairy related projects. Both of these will sit for 12 hours. The yogurt at 116 F. and the Creme Fraiche at ambient room temperature.

In the bowl pictured at top, is a quart of organic Creme Fraiche fermenting at 87.1 F after having added the bacterial starter. Creme fraiche is an amazingly decadent treat not unlike sour cream except twice as rich and creamy with about half the tang/acid. It's super versatile and can used in many applications both savory and sweet, especially where French desserts are concerned. For a measly 8 oz. container of non-organic creme fraiche, you can expect to pay around $3.50-$4.00 at the supermarket. This batch is 24 oz. which breaks down to a cost of a little over $1.50 per 8 oz. portion or at total of $4.50 for the quart.

I'm also making two quarts of homemade, organic, extra thick, tangy Bulgarian style yogurt in my yogurt maker. Making yogurt in this fashion costs less approximately $1.15 per quart for a product that is FAR superior in flavor and composition to any store bought yogurt product you can find. Plus, the starter culter I'm using as Lactobacillus casei and Bifidus along with acidphillous which are all extremely beneficial probiotics.

A Natural Progression

As we move through Summer more of the late season crops are beginning to make their appearance. In order from top to bottom are baby White Ghost Pumpkins, California Wonder Bell Peppers, Red Bliss and Yukon GOld potatoes in blossom, and Jason half asleep holding an armful of squash I picked yesterday. My squash plants which include Eight Ball, Italian Zucchini, and Yellow Crook Neck are totally out of control. I cannot even shove enough squash down my neighbor's throats to get rid of it all. In my never ending search for recipes to utilize this over abundance, I found a nice casserole, not unlike a lasagna that uses long, wide, thin strips of zucchini in place of noodles. I think I'll give it a shot and hopefully my family won't run screaming in horror from the table at the sight of yet another zucchini dish for dinner.

Good Times, Peeps and Eats...

Tony and his entire family drove from Sacramento to our house on Friday. His twin boys are seven and our boys are six and eight respectively so there was a gaggle of similarly aged boys running a muck and having a blast. With four bedrooms a queen futon and a queen sofa bed, we're always equipped to have over night company so we invited them to stay the night, which they did. Their little girl Hannah is amazingly cute! She has blond curly hair and the sweetest smile. I really enjoyed hanging out with them. We also invited some other friends over to play board games and of course MTG Friday evening. Mauricio and I made carne asada, guacamole, tortillas, salsa and salad from lettuce and tomatoes in my garden. We served the tacos with a wheel of my latest cheese which we crumbled over the tacos. It has a flavor not unlike Queso Cotija, a white slightly salty, crumbly Mexican cheese. We also made a giant pot of rice and black beans.

Saturday after Tony and family left to go back up to Sac., we went with different friends to a party. We ate the most heavenly smoked ribs and grilled chicken at Derek and Arlee's house. Derek is a pit master and makes the meanest slow smoked ribs around. Furthermore, all of our kids are similarly aged and had a great time playing together.

Sunday I took the kids to the library and then we all went swimming at the club for the majority of the afternoon. After that, I baked five loaves of zucchini bread to help use up all of the zucchini we have growing. I simply can't keep up with the production capacity of my two plants. My guinea pigs who once LOVED zucchini are now turning up their noses when I throw zuke rounds in to their food dishes. I think we are on the brink of zucchini overload... I had to make rice krispy treats for my kids as they refused to eat another bite of zucchini bread. I had made the loaves to take to my parent's house for dessert . I managed to off load three of the five loaves in this way.

The Quintessential Neighborhood Salumeria...

deli, cafe or whatever you choose to call it. Mauricio and I have found ourselves on more than one occasion laying in bed together, late at night fantasizing about opening a perfect little neighborhood eatery. Since we both work in the food industry, opening our own specialty food store together would be a natural progression and an extension of what we already do for a living. Mauricio is a meat man with over 15 years of professional butchering and sausage making under his belt. He's a manager, certified and credentialed every which way to Sunday to manage a meat and sausage shop. As for my role, if you know me or if you've even slightly been paying attention to this blog, you know what my culinary skill set is.

So here's the synopsis, the shop/cafe/deli would be small but with enough seating for maybe 30 people including both indoor and outdoor seating if possible. Everything would be house made fresh and natural/organic with an emphasis on local, sustainable ingredients. We would offer a small constantly evolving menu for sit down eating and a large array of already prepared gourmet deli type foods such as salads, sandwiches, soups, specialty breads and pastries. Mauricio would make fresh and smoked meats, sausages, briskets, rotisserie chickens, salumi and other forms of meaty goodness. I would make cheeses, fresh pastas, pastries casseroles, pickles and other deli type offerings. We would cater for both small and large gatherings. But at the end of the day the focus would be on fresh, simple, high quality ingredients prepared lovingly without the use of shortcuts, at affordable prices. Mauricio and I both believe that eating well need not be expensive.

El Queso Es Muy Sabroso!

Although the cheese I made can mature up to 60 days, it can also be eaten fresh too. Mauricio and I tried a bit last night and it was really good. It's a firm cheese with a consistency not unlike feta. It has a delicate flavor which will become more pronounced over time. We tried it crumbled over fresh, ripe heirloom tomatoes straight from my garden. We sliced Purple Aunt Ginny tomatoes, sprinkled them with a tiny bit of sea salt and a healthy dose of fresh cracked pepper. Over this went fresh julienned basil also from the garden and a healthy drizzle with a nice fruity extra virgin olive oil. Fantastico!

Haloumi - Part Two

So here's the cheese after a total of an hour and a half in the press. It spent one hour being pressed at 30 pounds pressure and then a half hour at maximum press of 50 pounds. The next step was to cut it in to three smaller wheels about 3 inches tall each. After that it was put back in to the whey to cook at a higher temp. of 176 degrees for one hour. This served to further firm the curds and expel any whey still left in the curds. I rubbed it with salt after it came out of the whey bath and it will age in a brine for up to 60 days to develop a complex flavor. This is a good warm weather cheese to make because it doesn't need a super cool aging temp. and it doesn't melt so it's a prime candidate to grill or pan fry. From start to finish, this cheese took around 7 hours to make including non-active time. It's one of the simpler cheeses. Some take a full day or two of micro managing and then months of aging and turning.

Making Haloumi - Part One

I'm in the process of making two pounds of Haloumi Cheese. This is a picture journal of the process. The pictures show various stages of cheese making from the curd setting to draining and packing of curds in the cheese press. Jason is drinking a warm glass of whey right after I drained the curd from it. Whey is actually very tasty and nutritious. I always save and find additional uses for whey leftover from the cheese making process. The top picture is of my rennet and a digital thermometer needed to keep precise track of temperatures during the process. The nexdt one down shows the milk ripening with a Mesophilic culture that I inoculated it with. The culture will help to give it its' specific flavor and character. I will post pictures of the second half of the process which will include what the cheese looks like out of the press, the brining process and more.

Babies

Baby San Marzano Plum Tomatoes, baby Japanese Eggplants, baby Thompson Seedless Grapes, my baby holding baby Chantenay Carrots, baby Italian Purple Globe Artichoke Plant and my new Mason Bee box.

Baby Watermelons!!!

Baby ice box watermelons growing in the front raised bed. The kids planted three of these in way less space than is required so I'm not sure what the outcome will be but if all goes better than expected, we'll definitely have a bunch of baby watermelons to enjoy come August.

The Never Ending List...

I am bracing myself going in to the next few activity laden weeks of Summer. We purchased Michael a guitar and he will begin taking lessons from a very good friend of Mauricio's who's in a band and is a guitar phenom. Michael has been hounding us to take lessons for about a year now but I didn't feel he was ready until now. So over the summer, he will begin to learn from Don who has graciously offered to teach him gratis.

This Friday afternoon and evening we are going to the Berkeley Marina for the festival and the fireworks show they put on later in the evening. The following morning, we are going on our farm field trip, to a birthday party right afterwards and then to the Alameda County Fair to see Los Lobos play in concert - doh! I don't even know how this is all going to play out but KRICKEY there's a lot sandwiched in to just one day! Sunday is looking safer and saner, thank god! Then we have Michael's birthday looming, a couple of B-B-Q's at a friend's houses, camping at the end of the month, Lego Land in the beginning of August, Mendocino at the end of August, more birthday parties sandwiched in between it all - and then school starts again... aaaaahhhh.