Better Than Philadelphia

We buy a good bit of Philadelphia Cream Cheese as we enjoy homemade cheesecake.  Cream cheese is expensive, but what isn't?  I don't know why we've never thought of making it.  We make mozzarella and ricotta, so why not give cream cheese a try.  We got out our cheesemaking book and found the recipe.  Looks easy enough.  So we mixed cream and milk according to the recipe below and warmed it to 70 on the stovetop.  Then we added the starter and rennet and set it out for 24 hours.

The rennet causes curds to form.  We spooned the curds into our cheese colander and allowed the whey to drip through for about 12 hours.

Here is the curds when done.

We scooped it all out.  Yes, it has the consistency of cream cheese!

We deposited the cream cheese into a glass container where we'll store it in the fridge.

The glass container weighs one pound.  So the recipe was right on target.  It made 1 pound do cream cheese.

We snacked on some of it and determined it needed a little salt. Once that was added, we put some bagels in the toaster, pulled out some capers, and then I went out to the herb garden and harvested some fennel to put on top.

Sorry Philadelphia, homemade cream cheese is just better!  We'll be making this over and over and over again.

Making Radish Dip

If there is anything easier than growing radishes, I haven't found it.  The trouble with radish growing,  is how many different things can you do with all the radishes you grow?  I mean, they are okay in a salad, but what else can you do with your bumper crop of radishes?  I'll show you in just a minute.

Intermixed with the random assortment of winter weeds is a nice, healthy crop of radishes.  I'll get around to weeding the radish plot later.  They are young and tender - about the size of your thumb.

I ventured out in the misting rain and picked a nice little handful of some of the biggest ones, cleaned them up in the rainwater barrel and fed the radish greens to the cows.  The radishes were brilliant red with white bottoms.

I had plans for these little radishes.  In our 'snack drawer,' I spotted a box of Ritz crackers that Tricia bought and it gave me an idea to make some radish dip.  We love this stuff and haven't found anyone who doesn't.  It is the simplest thing to put together.  You need the following ingredients:

8 ounces cream cheese, softened
6 radishes (I added a couple more since these were small)
4 cloves garlic, peeled
salt and pepper to taste
chili powder (optional)

First thing you want to do is to mince your radishes and garlic in a food processor.  Don't puree it, just mince it up.

Then, simply pour the minced garlic and radishes into a bowl that contains your softened cream cheese and stir with a spoon.  You might think about putting this in the food processor to mix, but don't do it!  We tried that and found that it makes the dip too much of a liquid consistency that we didn't like.  Just stir it all with a spoon, adding salt and pepper to taste and a dash of chili powder, if desired.

Put it in the refrigerator to chill and then bust open a sleeve of Ritz crackers and scoop up some dip with a cracker.  I promise you'll enjoy it!

You may want to ration it, though...

Radish dip disappears quickly.  Fortunately, we have more radishes growing in the garden!

A Delicious, Healthy, Simple Snack

Tricia ordered a case of organic pears from Azure Standard Co-op.  It is the craziest thing because she doesn't like apples.  I think pears and apples are similar.  We made quick work of the first case and then she ordered a second one.  Just the other day IN THIS POST we made some homemade cream cheese.  It was very simple to make.

We use cream cheese to make cheesecake, dips and lo and behold, Tricia found another recipe for a simple, yet healthy and delicious snack.  For starters, take a pear and cut out the seeds and stem.

Then in the blender, she combined mostly homemade cream cheese with a dash or three of goat kefir to make it a thick, liquid consistency.  Then she dunks the cut up pears into the cream cheese/goat kefir concoction to coat the pear.

In a separate container, she has run some of our 2015 pecan crop through a blender to chop the pecans into semi-fine crumbles.  She drags the cream cheese/kefir coated pears through the pecans and the pecans stick nicely to the pear.

And she does likewise for the remaining pieces of the pear, arranging them on a plate for viewing and then snacking.

This simple recipe came from Southern Living Magazine, but Tricia changed it up a little bit.

The sweetness of the pears contrasted against the tanginess of the kefir and smooth cream cheese and flavorful pecans.  Yeah, this recipe is a keeper!

Making Homemade Cream Cheese

We hadn't made cream cheese in quite a while.  Azure Standard, a co-op that we order from, just started carrying Cultures for Health and Tricia decided to order a starter kit to try out the cream cheese to see if it would work for making cheesecake. With Thanksgiving right around the corner, we normally buy a lot of cream cheese from the store to make cheesecake and radish dip and we normally put big dollups of our pepper jelly over a brick of cream cheese.  No sense in buying all that when you can make it yourself with Daisy and Rosie's rich milk/cream.

So here is the kit, complete with instructions and 4 culture packets.  Each packet is to be used with 1 gallon of milk.  Traditional cream cheese is made with 50% cream and 50% whole milk.  For richer cream cheese, use whole cream.  Tricia just used a gallon of whole milk from Daisy.  Her milk is the richest.  Let's do this!

Slowly heat a gallon of milk to 86 degrees.  Don't heat it fast.

Once at 86 degrees, remove from heat and pour in your starter packet.  Mix it in using an up and down motion versus stirring motion.

Cover it and let sit for 12 hours at room temperature.

After 12 hours, scoop all the curds in a colander in a bowl lined with a cotton rag and lift the rag, tying up the corners, allowing the whey to drip from the curds into a bowl placed below it.  Let drip for 12 hours.

Take it down, opening it up to reveal your cheese.

Knead some kosher salt into it.  Tricia found that in using 1 gallon of whole raw milk, it made:

• 1 3/4 pounds of cream cheese or 28 ounces, and 
• 3/4 gallon of whey

Tricia put 10 ounces of homemade cream cheese aside in a bowl as she was going to make a cream cheese icing for my birthday cake.

Here she is mixing cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar.  Once it is mixed, she stirs in chopped up pecans.

And the result is....  Perfection!

Yeah, we won't be buying cream cheese for Thanksgiving baking this year. Homemade cream cheese was, well... THE ICING ON THE CAKE!

Word of the Day

I read an article yesterday about a man who was eulogizing his grandfather who had just passed away at 101 years old.  He was talking about what a remarkable man his grandfather was and recounted a story of how his grandfather always carried a pencil and notepad with him.  One day he was with his grandfather (and his grandfather was 91 years old at the time), he saw him writing something down in his notepad.  He asked him what he was writing down and his grandfather answered, "I heard a word a while ago that I don't know the definition of and I don't want to forget it.  I want to write it down so that I can look it up in the dictionary." "Why?" the grandson asked.  "To improve my vocabulary, of course!" the 91 year old grandfather explained!

Well, The Word of the Day is - Quinquagenarian: One who is 50 years old.  Yep, that's me today. I've never head of that word, but now I know what it means.  As they say, if you stop learnin', you start dying.

Speaking of dying, I was dying to get home to see what my wife made me for my birthday surprise. Wow! Tricia and Benjamin sang Happy Birthday to me and then presented me with a homemade Italian Creme cake with cream cheese icing that she made from the rich cream from Daisy Lou, our Jersey cow.  Tomorrow I may show you how she made the cream cheese.  Then there were some chocolate dipped strawberries...  She saved some of the chocolate to drizzle in our coffee tomorrow morning.  Nice.

But it didn't stop there.  Also on the lineup was a wheel of brie cheese baked in a puff pastry and if that wasn't decadent enough, a new recipe she tried from Southern Living Magazine: Roasted Bacon Pecans.  What's not to love about that?!

Tricia knows that the old adage is true: "The way to a man's heart... is through his stomach!"

In addition to using Daisy's cream to make the cream cheese, she used a lot of pecans from last year's crop of pecans.  We don't have much inventory left, but that's okay as the first pecans of the season have started falling.  We'll have to pick them up before the squirrels get them.  Or maybe we'll just 'thin-out' the squirrels.

I'm going to bed tonight fat and happy!