Doing my upside down trick with a bottle of milk!
Jess left home recently and I failed to cancel some of the milk in time. She is a big consumer of full cream milk. I buy the unhomogenised type with the cream on the top. We do also buy semi-skimmed milk, but research a few months back convinced me that full cream milk is healthy and full of goodness, more so than milk with the fat stripped out! She was enjoying it on her porridge and we always had a bit of fun with breaking the cream so that you could actually pour the milk! I discovered a while back that with traditional milk, you can turn the bottle upside down without losing your milk. However, the bottle in the photo above was past its best. I do use the full cream for cooking, and in particular when I am making cheese or white sauce. Today I decided that I really had to do something with the 2 and a bit pints of milk that were about four days past their sell-by date.
I had a funny conversation with Paul. I told him that I was trying to use up some milk, so he suggested rice pudding. I said ‘no that would taste disgusting!’ He was surprised and commented that my cooking is not that bad! I then realised that I had left out the vital information about the milk being out of date! Scones are great made with out of date milk, but I had far too much milk for scones, so I decided to have a go at cheese-making. You can make ricotta or cottage cheese with sour milk (health warning! you don’t want it to be completely rancid! I’d say no more than a week out of date probably).
Colander lined with a jelly bag for straining my cheese
I looked at a couple of recipes and found that the method is really very simple. You just boil the milk, add some lemon juice or vinegar and take it off the heat. You then stir it and it clumps into curds.
As I had really very little cheese, I decided to add some salt and cream to it to make it into cottage cheese, as this also gave me a bit more bulk to my cheese.
My finished cheese is in the picture below. I had so much whey left afterwards that I have decided to use it in my sourdough bread that I am mixing up at the moment. It won’t be ready until Sunday morning though, ie the day after tomorrow. I found all sorts of other ideas for using whey, including making smoothies, putting into cocktails, as a marinade for meat and even for adding to the dog’s breakfast! As we don’t have a dog, I shall not be trying that out. I am really looking forward to eating my home-made cheese on home-made whey sourdough bread on Sunday!
