Even if you haven't bought into the organic lifestyle wholesale (and there's much debate over how accurate/honest the organic label really is), you might be wondering if there's something to it. I mean, even if you're not paranoid about pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and the like,...
Okay, I'll be the first to admit it: my initial kumquat purchase was a total impulse buy. I thought they were quite possibly the cutest fruits I'd ever seen.
Being a child of the South means that I didn't grow up with a wide array of citrus fruits. In fact, I don't think I had...
When you live as far out in the country as we do, one of the ways of making sense of your surroundings is by learning the common names of plants. Redbud, white oak, pokeweed, mountain mint. Evening walks turn into botanical excursions, and you start to notice the change of the seasons by what...
Our basil plants have been the saving grace of our garden this year. Poor, first-year soil? Check. Drought? Check. Heat wave? Check. Rampant insects? Check. This summer has felt like the plagues of Egypt, and yet our basil not only grew, but it prospered mightily. Never wilted, never...
Like many of us, for the longest time I knew of only one celery. It's the one you fill with peanut butter for an after-school snack, the one that has hardly any flavor and serves as a vehicle for dip on crudite platters across the nation. Rain or shine, the ubiquitous, large bunches of this...
Do you ever find a recipe that you really want to try, and you end up not making it because it calls for crème fraîche?
I've been there.
It's gotten easier and easier to find crème fraîche in most supermarkets, but it's still expensive, and calling for it, flippantly, in a recipe...
Now that we've journeyed through homemade butter, ricotta, crème fraîche, buttermilk, mozzarella, and yogurt, I think you're ready for something more challenging and enriching.
Making a wheel--an actual wheel--of cheese feels momentous. It's a whole of something we normally see...
Just like homemade butter or ricotta, homemade mozzarella will change how you view this mild, un-aged cheese.
If you've ever had a mozzarella-tomato salad (also known as insalata carprese) made with really good mozzarella, you know that what they (whoever "they" are) put on pizza...
Have you ever tasted real yogurt?
No stabilizers, artificial (or "natural") flavorings or colors, or additives? Real, whole milk yogurt with live cultures? Some brands of Greek yogurt come close, but just as I've said in my other posts about making dairy products, it's so easy to...
