epic cheesy success!!!

       i'm not sure which derogatory category i currently fit into, but for now i'm going to go with "nerd." forgive me for being one, but i just removed a three-pound wheel from my little makeshift cheese press and i'm pretty proud/excited/relieved. it's not perfect, but it still looks good. it's salted and wrapped in sterile bandages getting all happy and aged in the fridge, so i won't be able to taste it for another two weeks or so, but then i'll be able to slice it up, wax some of it for longer storage, and break off a hunk for myself. i'll let you know how it is. the pic on the left is my little press, made up of a very large stock pot, a #10 tin can with the ends cut out set atop an inverted glass plate to keep the cheese out of the pressed whey, a sterile "bandage," a mason jar with my mom's home-canned tomatoes (mmm), a box of paraffin for added force (which will later be used for waxing), and my rubber resistance tube. the curds are packed into the bandage and the cut-out ends of the can are placed on top of the curds to keep them in place. the rest is as you can see. the pic on the right is the finished wheel wrapped in a new bandage in front of another stock pot full of the whey. i started with 2.5 gallons -- 20 pounds -- of milk to get roughly 3 pounds of cheese -- the rest becomes whey, which i'll make into ricotta tomorrow (and raviolis on sunday! mmm...). sorry they're just cell-phone quality. i'm not rich enough to have a decent digital camera yet.

           

       what else am i going to do with my friday night, eh?  ah, well... someday i might be lucky enough to be able to write one of those "100 reasons" posts...  anyway, more later. getting sleepy. later taters!

epic cheesy fail...

       hmph. i was so confident in my kitchen abilities. now i'm worried because i usually take these things a little too far and become obsessive about mastering it. it becomes a challenge, you see. i did it with chocolate chip cookies. i used to make the crappiest chocolate chip cookies imaginable. oh, they were horrible. no idea why -- i'd always follow the instructions. then i became frustrated with it and made dozens of batches of the little buggers until i got it right. that was somewhere around early high school or so. now i make some of the best chocolate chip cookies that i've ever had, using the exact same nestle tollhouse recipe. it's silly, but i'm proud of them. we won't talk about chocolate fudge. i can make a mean fudge, but the perfect fudge remains my greatest culinary rival. i suppose that's what makes me a decent cook, though -- that perseverance. but yes, my cheese failed. or i failed my cheese. haha. and i think i know what i did wrong. but my milk ended up clabbering (souring) instead of setting. so i can't even make a ricotta out of it. pfft. two-and-a-half gallons of milk wasted. yes, i'm going to try again tomorrow.

       as i was writing the above paragraph i couldn't help but smile a little. perseverance. that's the answer rowling gave in response to the many requests for writing advice (as many aspiring writers tend to plague their heroes with such questions). that's all she said, just the one word, "persevere." and as i was rambling about my cheese and how i learned to cook, it struck me that failure is how i learn to persevere in my cooking and how i ultimately overcome the culinary obstacles that arise. the truth is, i've never failed at being a writer because i've never really tried. sure, i've written a couple crappy short stories for classes, but when it comes to what i really want to write, my novels, i'm so frightened of failure that i hardly give it a real shot. kind of ironic when in context with my cooking. *sigh* now if only i can get that through my head that failure can be an impetus of success. perhaps i should try to fail. i don't mean that i should sabotage myself -- i just need to give myself the opportunity to learn from my mistakes. because when it comes to it, the greatest failure is to never have tried in the first place. (hmm, that'd be a cool quote, but i bet someone else said it already.)

       ok, it's late. i can't keep doing these late nights. big day tomorrow. have to renew my food handler's permit, give plasma, retry my cheese, and write! take care....