I have made some decisions in my life which preclude me from having a lot of people to visit. I worked too hard, had a child too young, and broke a few too many hearts. All of my people whom I would visit tend to still be right here near us.

I moved out at 16 and bounced around quite a bit. I was juggling working to live and school to survive, leaving a place for "home" out of the question. There was a lot of being tired, couch hopping, and living wherever. The first place that would even qualify as a "home" was a 16x9 Skittles-lime-green van. It was the first place I completely owned and could do what I wanted with. It was lived in for almost two years, filled with crazy college adventures and eventually parked in front of my college apartment which was filled with even more crazy, nostalgic adventures.

So here I am now, we're creating our own little home. It isn't an apartment, it isn't a rental, it is our own house to do with as we like and make a peaceful family. Having never really been in such a place, I didn't realize how exhausting it is to go away for over two weeks at a time and visit Jules' people. Before, going away to stay with other people was pretty much the same as being where I lived.

It is odd the things that you find yourself missing. I missed hanging our laundry outside. I missed the quiet of no television. I missed being able to take a long, ridiculously, hot bath. I missed watering the garden late and night and early in the morning. But most of all I missed the cottage cheese.

A while ago we switched over to me making all of our cottage cheese. There are a few food choices we have made that there is just plain no going back. The cottage cheese is one of them. It isn't runny, it is creamy. The taste has the definite tang of cultured product and a distinctive balance to the sweet, crunchy, or savory topping to which you eat it with. Best of all, you feel as though you are really eating something because it has a real substance to it.

When I first began reading up on making cottage cheese, the most important part was the price break. Could it be done economically? One gallon of milk, makes one quart of cottage cheese. Could I have been reading this right?! Only one quart?! We would need to buy like five gallons of milk to make the adequate amount of cottage cheese for the month. That just wouldn't work out.

Then there were more questions. A lot of discussion about enjoying it dry or creamed. What did that mean? Wasn't cottage cheese, cottage cheese? And rennet; so many needed rennet. I didn't know where to buy it, I didn't even know what it was. It was looking a bit like cottage cheese was out of the question. Then I discovered this simple article from Mother Earth News. All it required was a gallon of milk, some cultured buttermilk, and a double boiler. We have all that on a regular basis! This was my kinda recipe.

There was some tweaking involved, but after a couple of times we had our cottage cheese recipe and it was still simple as ever.

Ingredients
1 gallon of milk (whole, skim, 1%, 2%, whatever)
1/2 cup of cultured buttermilk
whipping or heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste

Pour the entire gallon of milk into a pot. Heat the milk till it is approximately 90 degrees (you can hold your finger in it and it feels warm, but not too hot). This is so that the culture can grow rapidly, but not die from being overheated.

Remove the milk from the heat and stir in the cultured buttermilk. It has to be cultured buttermilk not just regular buttermilk or the buttermilk left over from making butter. It is the culture which is important.

Now set it up and don't touch it. Stirring kills the culture once it has started growing. We put ours on top of the refrigerator. Don't worry it won't smell or anything.

Wait until the milk begins to thicken (this is called clabbering). It will become the consistency of custard or pudding. The first time, this is really weird feeling and a bit strange to look at. Waiting for the milk to clabber could take a day or two. If it is warm outside, it will happen sooner. Just check it about ever 6-12 hours or so. You will get a feel for how long it takes in your climate area.
Once it is Jello-Milk (you can literally push on it with your finger and it is spongy), slice a knife through it making 1 inch cubes and pour it into a large metal bowl. Create a double boiler by placing a pot of water on the stove to begin boiling. Once the pot of water is boiling, put the pot of clabbered milk on top. This keeps the milk from direct heat, but allows it to slowly heat up. Cook over low heat until the curds begin to separate. Stir occasionally so that the milk doesn't scald, and the thickened milk doesn't stick to the bottom. Once the curds begin to separate they will float up.


This is the part which is a preference and a learning curve. Once the curds separate you want to continue to cook them. The liquid will begin clear and then turn a yellowish color. The longer you cook your curds, the firmer they become. The curds also gain in tartness as they cook. In our family, we don't like them really firm or really tart. I cook them until they don't yield to gentle pressure. The curds begin to smash together and give a bit, but not crush into goo. They also will smush up to the side of the container and stick there. The best way to test them is to take a curd or two out with your spoon and use your fingers to feel the firmness. Be careful, the curds are really hot.


Once they have cooked for the desired time, you need to strain them for drying. Place a strainer or colander over a large bowl. Line the strainer with a flour sack towel (under 10 dollars for a package of three at the supermarket) and slowly pour the separated curds and whey. You can just put the colander in the sink and line it there, but you won't be able to save the whey. Whey is a great protein source, can be used to make ricotta cheese, or be useful in cooking of sauces, soups, salad dressing, or gravy. We freeze our whey for later use and always have a container in the fridge. I use it instead of milk when we make our bread.

Once the curds are strained, pull up the edges of the towel around the curds and squeeze out any left over moisture. It is helpful to twist the towel around the bundle of curds and wring them out. Hang the towel containing the curds either outside on your clothes line or inside over a sink. This allows the curds to air dry for an extended time before you put them in the fridge. We do ours over the sink due to Guadalupe and her amazing attempts at getting food.

Once the curds have dried overnight (12-18 hours) they are ready for the fridge. We smush ours into a old, glass, mason-style jar and they keep for at least 2 weeks. The dryer they are when they go in the fridge the longer they last. When you are ready to eat them, just pour a little cream over the top and salt/pepper them to taste.

It is so good you won't believe it!

While surfing around and avoiding doing my chores today, I found this:

"And why would I be so insistent that you eat butter? Take a look at the long list of the benefits you receive when you include it in your diet:

1. Butter is rich in the most easily absorbable form of Vitamin A necessary for thyroid and adrenal health.
   
2. Contains lauric acid, important in treating fungal infections and candida.
   
3. Contains lecithin, essential for cholesterol metabolism.
   
4. Contains anti-oxidants that protect against free radical damage.
   
5. Has anti-oxidants that protect against weakening arteries.
   
6. Is a great source of Vitamins E and K.
   
7. Is a very rich source of the vital mineral selenium.
   
8. Saturated fats in butter have strong anti-tumor and anti-cancer properties.
   
9. Butter contains conjugated linoleic acid, which is a potent anti-cancer agent, muscle builder, and immunity booster
   
10. Vitamin D found in butter is essential to absorption of calcium.
    
11. Protects against tooth decay.
    
12. Is your only source of an anti-stiffness factor, which protects against calcification of the joints.
    
13. Anti-stiffness factor in butter also prevents hardening of the arteries, cataracts, and calcification of the pineal gland.
    
14. Is a source of Activator X, which helps your body absorb minerals.
    
15. Is a source of iodine in highly absorbable form.
    
16. May promote fertility in women.
17. Is a source of quick energy, and is not stored in our bodies adipose tissue.
    
18. Cholesterol found in butterfat is essential to children's brain and nervous system development.
    
19. Contains Arachidonic Acid (AA) which plays a role in brain function and is a vital component of cell membranes.
    
20. Protects against gastrointestinal infections in the very young or the elderly."

Information Acquired from: http://www.bodyecology.com/07/07/05/benefits_of_real_butter.php

There is quite a bit more information on the website. However, I know nothing of their diet or products and am not endorsing them in any way. The information was just cool.

For over a month now, sour cream has been created in our household with heavy cream, half and half, and vinegar. This was mainly due to me not being able to locate cultured buttermilk. But ah-ha! it was found late today at Cash and Carry tucked in with the rest of the buttermilk. Those sneaky stockers have been hiding it from me all along!

What is the significance of cultured buttermilk you might ask? Oh, let me tell you! Cultured buttermilk is currently something I'm very excited about! Most buttermilk purchased here in the States has been pasteurized or even ultra pasteurized. Though I am in great debt to old Pastuer there are just somethings that work, and culturing enzymes are one of those. The culture which is spoken of in buttermilk are pro-biotic bacteria which feed off the lactose (milk sugar) turning it into lactic acid. This ferments the milk and causes the milk proteins to thicken. This lactic acid gives buttermilk the incredible added quality of naturally fending off and inhibiting pathogenic bacteria. Yay good bacteria (probiotic); Boo bad bacteria (pathogenic).

This is all well and good, you might be thinking, but why is it important to your life? Using cultured buttermilk, you can add this bacteria into milk or cream and produce a "soured" product. (Don't confuse "soured" with spoiled because it is actually better for your body this way due to the lactose being broken down.) Thus sour cream! Way back when, this is how sour cream was created.

Enter the relevance to your current life: sour cream is no longer created this way. In 1973 the FDA repealed a law which wouldn't allow for imitation products to be placed into our food without appropriate labeling. This meant that anything could be substituted as long as the supposed nutritional content was not altered. Honestly, this was an attempt to reduce fat and lower costs. But, the result has become additives that are now added to milk in order to thicken it instead of probiotic bacteria. Things like hydrogenated oils, carageenan, guar gum, etc are now supplimented giving the sour cream a longer preservative time and a thicker texture for far, far cheaper than cultured product. Also, cultured product can wear out. The bacteria die. This doesn't taint the milk, but it means that the thickening characteristics of the culture are no longer present. That is highly costly on a commercial scale. Guar gum can hold up for quite some time along with carageenan and hydrogenated oil.

Information acquired from In Defense of Food:
An Eaters Manifestoby Micheal Pollen

The problem here is that these additives chemically alter our bodies ability to digest food. Though all are natural products, so is arsenic. Just because something comes from a plant does not mean it is a helpful component to add to your body. Secondly, I'm sure that very, very small does of these products (just like the aspertain which is in NutraSweet) aren't harmful. The problem has become that they are now in EVERYTHING! We are eating far more than we even realize.

So what exactly is the problem? Well hydrogenated oils are transfats. They have been linked to excessive free radicals, which are believed to be cancer causing agents. Carageenan is derived from red algea via alkali and has been shown to coat the inside of the stomach. This dramatically inhibits digestion causing the foods which venture to your intestine to not be properly broken down. Since most of the nutrient absorption from your body occurs in the intestine, when food isn't broken down, you cannot digest the nutrients. Carageenan is such a powerful coating agent it is what airlines use to de-ice the plane's wings. Guar Gum comes from the Guar plant and is basically a ground up grain, much like wheat. Do not be fooled however, Guar Gum is such an effective thickener that when combined with water it can swell in size 20 fold. This swelling is produced by a chemical action in reaction to the water and has been shown to dramatically reduce the ability of the intestines to process cholesterol and triglycerides. Not only that, but it slows glucose absorption as well. In laymans terms, your body consumes more cholesterol, more sugar (glucose), and more fat (triglycerides) because the intestines are processing it so much slower our body can't register that we have had enough. It doesn't block the absorption, it just slows it way, way down. This means the "full" reflex in our body can't kick in when it should because our intestines are still working so hard to break down the nutrients.

I don't know about you, but I would much rather have foods which help aide the digestion and absorption of nutrients into my body, rather than disrupt them. So, sour cream is being created now on top of our refrigerator. The hardest part of this process is leaving it alone. In fact, it doesn't require any work from you what so ever after combining the ingredients together.

Ingredients
1/4 cup of cultured buttermilk
1 cups of heavy cream

Directions
Pour the heavy cream into a mason jar, bowl, eating receptical. Add the cultured buttermilk (regular buttermilk will not work, only cultured). Stir to combine. Now cover it and leave it alone. Don't stir it any more or it will kill the culturing and you will have runny sour cream. Leave it out at room temperature 12-24 hours (basically overnight) or until it gets desirablly thick. Once it is thick enough, you can stir it all you want. Just put it in the fridge (this stops the culturing and thickening) and it will keep for about a week and a half.

If you can't find cultured buttermilk, you can always add plain white vinegar. The only difference in the final product is a slightly vinegary taste and no probiotic bacteria. You can also use Half and Half, Whole milk, 2 percent milk, or any combination there of. Just remember that it is the fat in the milk which makes it thicken. No fat, runny sour cream. Jules like his sour cream to stick to the spoon and make a Shloop sound when it is removed from the container. The only thing more important than the shloop is the loud Pluh sound it makes when it is splatted onto your plate. For this reason, the first couple of batches of sour cream I made were too runny for approval. They tasted great, but no shloop.

When I started reading In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Micheal Pollen points out that our brain is about 60 percent fat; every neuron is protectively sheathed in it; our cell membranes are constructed of fat and require the correct ratio for everything from hormones and glucose to toxins to permeate the walls; vitamins A and E require fat to be absorbed by our intestines; and essentially fat is a necessary part of our bodies ability to function. Somewhere in the obesity epidemic and scientifically modifying food we have forgotten this little fact. When I remembered it, I promptly could careless about how much fat was in our sour cream and the shloop was achieved.
Update: When you put the sour cream in the fridge, it will firm up a bit for those out there who are concerned with their final product. If you don't stir it up, and just eat it off the top, it will stay fairly thick as well. Secondly, the next time you need to make sour cream, use a 1/4 cup of your previous batch and it will turn out even better! This only works if the previous batch still has live culture in it. All that means is you need to use it within about 10 days. However, the awesomeness here is that you can keep creating miraculously FABULOUS sour cream without having to re-purchase the cultured buttermilk! Personally, I find this rather cool. I know....I'm a nerd.

Footnotes:
Carageenan

Filament Disassembly and Loss of Mammary Myoepithelial Cells after Exposure to Carrageenan,
Joanne Tobacman, Cancer Research, 57, 2823-2826, July 15, 1997

Carrageenan-Induced Inclusions in Mammary Mycoepithelial Cells, Joanne Tobacman, MD,
and Katherine Walters, BS, Cancer Detection and Prevention, 25(6): 520-526 (2001)

Consumption of Carrageenan and Other Water-soluble Polymers Used as Food Additives
and Incidence of Mammary Carcinoma, J. K. Tobacman, R. B. Wallace, M. B.
Zimmerman, Medical Hypothesis (2001), 56(5), 589-598

Structural Studies on Carrageenan Derived Oligisaccharides, Guangli Yu, Huashi Guan,
Alexandra Ioanviciu, Sulthan Sikkander, Charuwan Thanawiroon, Joanne Tobacman, Toshihiko
Toida, Robert Linhardt, Carbohydrate Research, 337 (2002) 433-440

Guar Gum

GuarNT Product Information, Tic Gums web-site (http://www.ticgums.com/), April 13, 2005.

Okazaki H et al, Increased incidence rate of colorectal tumors due to the intake of a soluble dietary
fiber in  rat chemical carcinogenesis can be suppressed by substituting partially an insoluble
dietary  fiber for the soluble one., Int J Cancer. 2002 Aug 1;100(4):388-94.

Melnick RL et al, Chronic effects of agar, guar gum, gum arabic,  locust-bean gum, or tara gum
in F344 rats and B6C3F1 mice,  Food Chem Toxicol. 1983  Jun;21(3):305-11.

Trans fats come from vegetable oil which has been hydrogenated, converting unsaturated fatty acids to saturated ones. In processed foods, trans fats replaced solid fats (like butter and vegetable oil) because they are cheaper and preserve foods better. Trans fats however, have unwanted side effects when consumed. They lower the "good" cholesterol and increase the "bad". This switch causes insulin resistance elevating the risk of Type 2 diabetes and contributes to coronary heart disease. In 1999 Harvard researchers estimated that 100,000 deaths annually could be prevented by reducing the consumption of trans-fats. So where are these harmful food additives? All over everywhere! The top offenders are boxed mixes such as cake and brownie mixes, Bisquick, cornbread mix; spreads like shortening, margarine, and butter substitutes; and powdered soup mixes.

The FDA required trans fats to be put onto food labels in January 2006, but a food can be labeled zero trans fats if it contains less than .5 grams of trans fat per serving. So be careful, because this labeling can be deceiving. By eliminating problem products our family has eliminated many of the harmful trans fats from our diet.

When we first started converting our food, we used margarine and Jiffy cornbread mix. They were cheap, good, and worked well. I am now finding out, however, that cheaper isn't always better. So we are now switching over to making our own butter and rendering buttermilk.

Finding diary products cheap enough to be able to justify the switch caused a bit of a problem. However, if you combine the price of buttermilk and the price of a pound of butter, you probably will break about even. In our household buttermilk is a complete frivolity, so breaking even here just wouldn't do. It took some sleuthing, but by using Cash & Carry (a restaurant supply company which allows the public) we were able to purchase whipping cream from a local, farmer owned dairy for less than it would cost to purchase a pound of butter. Not only that, but we can render the buttermilk as well which saved us even more! Score!

Homemade butter is about the simplest thing possible to make. Everyone thinks of a farm lady from the early 1900's with her churn struggling away, but all I used was my mixer. I will say, though, without a mixer, you are gonna need one hell of a bicep! Butter is basically whipping cream which has been over whipped. Due to only being able to purchase ultra-pasturized whipping cream, the process took about 30 minutes total. Here is the run down:

Pour the whipping cream into a bowl and begin to whip it. I used the whisk attachment, and medium speed. After about 15 minutes I had whipped cream.


Depending on your mixer, you may want to let it rest in between the transitions. I stopped and scrapped down the sides before mixing again for10 minutes till the whipped cream started to turn yellow and tasted like butter.

At this point I draped a towel over the top and turned the mixer onto turbo crazy high. After another 10 minutes on uber-high the butter began to break away creating a yellow, clumpy, dripping mixture.

I scrapped down the sides again and began mixing on high once more. At this point it is almost butter so you really need to watch it. In three minutes, the sloshing of the buttermilk could be heard and there was butter!Now, it is hard to accurately quantify how excited I was at this. Alright, I admit it.

I'm a nerd.
Being a nerd, I was also excited to have discovered the awesomest kitchen tool. When I am making butter, I call it my butter squisher (it has other names when I am doing other things with it). In reality I think it is supposed to be used with spaghetti some how, but around here it is a butter squisher, canning strainer, chicken stock divider, and lots of other great stuff.

By making butter, you are essentially separating the fats (the butter) from the liquid (the buttermilk) within the cream from the cow/goat/sheep/other dairy animal. So when it becomes butter, you have the clumpy yellow butter in the bowl sitting in the buttermilk. You need to squish as much buttermilk as you can out of the butter. Enter the butter squisher!

Press the butter to the side of the mixing bowl, clumping it all together into a mass and squeezing out the buttermilk as much as possible.














Once the butter is together in a mass, lift it out of the bowl, wrap the butter in a couple layers of paper towel and physically squeeze it as much as you can with your hands to remove any other excess buttermilk. This not only presses the butter into a ball, but gets a lot of the left over moisture out.
Pour the buttermilk out of the mixing bowl into a jar, bowl, or some other receptacle for later use. (It is amazing in mashed potatoes, pancakes, waffles, biscuits, gravy, muffins, just about anything other than drink. Remember, it is also pasteurized as long as the original whipping cream was pasteurized so no worries there.) You should get about a pint. Every quart of cream is different so it goes up and down a bit, but average of a pint.

Now place the butter ball back into the mixer, and switch attachments to the bread hook. Add a small amount of cold water (about 8 ounces) and beat the butter around again to chop it all up. Essentially you are rinsing all of the last of the buttermilk out.


After a minute of so (when the water looks as though it isn't getting any murkier) smush the butter together into a ball with your hands, wrap it in a couple of layers of paper towel, and squeeze all the water out. You now have butter! One quart of whipping cream yields about a pint of buttermilk and a pint of butter (about a pound). Both last as long as the store varieties when kept in the refrigerator.
The creating of our own dairy products is a new beginning in our household and a definite sign that we aren't turning back from our voluntary simplicity. In fact, as we venture further, the transition back seems even crazier than moving forward.