Jam, knots, braids, HOAs

Yesterday I made a small pot of blueberry jam 

Enough for me for now

And today paneer with chive blossoms, a softer version this time, very good with fruit.

Containers of whey for upcoming carrot and pumpkin soup 

This is really good, so much more flavor than the kind you buy.

I'm returning to my patterned bands as I learn some finishing techniques. Here's one with whipped ends right,replacing the temp knots left, 

and one with braided ends, the latest band off the loom.

There's more to do after the weaving's off the loom. I think next will be the heddle I made with special slots for the pattern threads.

Following on our condo chats and how some people vow never to live in one, a few thoughts.  

I've been a renter, an owner of a freestanding house and owner of an HOA townhouse and an HOA condo apartment. My credentials!

I'm also a single older woman with neither financial nor physical strength to run a free standing house. Contractors are not easy to deal with when there's no man in the picture.  The unnecessary struggle is very real, and exhausting. Also expensive.

That leaves the other choices. Renting puts you at the mercy of a landlord in a state where there are only vague guidelines on rent raises and what's reasonable.  To rent a house exactly like the one I live in is currently $3k a month. Plus utilities. That's more than my income.

One bedroom apartments are currently $1800 monthly plus utilities. Rents have doubled in the last five years 

Then if you want to buy a townhome like mine, they're currently about $550k for two bed two and a half bath, 1200 sq ft footprint.

Condos like my rental are up to $200k.

I bought when prices were lower, the condo, mine only, not joint, I bought at rock bottom because the market was poor at that time. We bought the townhouse from the builder at a desperate price because they wanted to complete the sales and leave the governance.

For a single older woman the trade offs of living with an HOA are: there's a massive inbuilt insurance of the whole development, trash is picked up, snow cleared, including paths and walkways, landscaping is done, mowing, dead trees removed, exterior maintenance and repair is HOA work. 

I'm responsible for the inside of the townhouse. Likewise the condo apartment I rent out.  I couldn't afford the maintenance and repair on a freestanding house,  all of which I'd have to contract out.

So that's why I live where I do, and it's a beautiful place. If you have the strength or partner or finances to live elsewhere, you're very fortunate. It's good to remember you're speaking from an advantaged position.  

But when you don't have those privileges, you make other choices.  I'm happy with mine despite the drawbacks I've been complaining about lately!

Happy day everyone, play the hand you're dealt! It's all good sez Ted and Big Ursy and Pony and Ursula 

 

Say cheese!

So this morning, as I might have guessed, I'm knee-deep in cooking activities, stuff in the oven that I'm timing, milk coming to the boil on top, when Gary shows up, tools ready, to tackle the toilet.

Luckily he got a phone call which kept him long enough to let me finish the activities so I was free to help or watch, as the case may be.

But this is what I was up to before his arrival.

I thought rather than order Misfits dairy, I'd make my own as I used to.  Yogurt, cheese, why not butter? Making your own means you have just the amount you need. So I sent away for butter powder, from the place I buy my milk powder.

Meanwhile, cream cheese, aka paneer.

Here's what you need

Bring the milk almost to boiling like here, right after this picture it rose up and I turned off the heat.

Then pour in lemon juice to sour it and make curds and whey 

You drain through a cloth here I'm using a piece of fine cotton, save the whey for soup, and let the bag of cheese drain until it's cool enough to handle. 

Turn it out,  off the cloth, into the strainer. Now transfer to a container to serve it from.

The whey is going into soup later in the week, with sweet potato, carrots and cashews. When they arrive from Misfits, that is.

I roasted a package of chicken thighs, along with making cheese

with berbere and salt, and that's now done,  cut into useful chunks and in the fridge for fast food.

All's well on the kitchen front.

However the plumbing has encountered complications, involving mopping, shutting off the house water, and another trip to the hardware store.  Also some concerns about the shutoff and if it also needs replacing.

At one point Jackie was summoned from next door to hold something, and before she left we chatted and she did a taste test of the cheese, declared it okay.

So here's the state of play. 

Handsome Son and I postponed our scheduled visit this afternoon, not up for peaceful chatting just now.

Fortunately I have a new sock in progress.

The second of this pair

So, all's moving along. More or less. Or say Jeez!

Paneer 101

Diy cream cheese. I spooned  the last of the whole milk yogurt into a cheesecloth-lined sieve over a bowl, lid on, and left it overnight in the fridge.

And here's how it went this morning, ending in the last of the lentil bread with a spread of cream cheese for breakfast

Nothing wasted. The whey will go into soup.  The crumbs from breakfast lentil bread out for the birds.

Damp and warm this morning. After I tossed out the crumbs, I stood at the window breathing the lilac scent and the smell of damp earth, listening to the birds arguing, and was glad all over again that we chose this house.

Sunday Morning

At this time of year the birds are awake so early, busy nesting a bit late this year, and the songs were deafening so I was up early, serenaded by Carolina wrens, mourning doves, cardinals, and mockingbirds plus a pair of catbirds, all shouting this is MY place, no this is MY place..

So, it was clearly time to make a little something.  The bag of hot chili peppers was still awaiting prep, after I'd used just a couple in the earlier cooking.  

They were so beautiful that I had to take pix, before

 and in process.  In fact I think the picture of the whole peppers should maybe be in Art the Beautiful blog.  The seeds are saved for use over spaghetti sauce, and the main peppers are now cut into strips and the whole lot is in the freezer.

Yesterday I realized how blunt my good knives are and I hate to sharpen, it's the noise I don't like, but I steeled myself, pun intended and did the sharpening, what a contrast with the bluntness before. 

I have a high end sharpening appliance, which I gave to Handsome Partner many years ago, and eventually inherited, since I don't have the steel skills required to do it the manual way.  Nor do I have the back step my mom used to sharpen her knife on, with a few expert swipes back and forth.  I noticed a knife sharpening booth at the farmer's market yesterday, which reminded me it was high time.

Banana bread was also on the to do list, since the bunches were big this week and I wanted to use them a bit faster.  And homemade cheese, paneer, with an experiment of chives.

I found that the flowers are indeed edible, as I thought, and picked a few for the cheese, and snipped their stems, too.  I found that each part of the flower is like a bell.  In fact the structure looks very much like bluebells.  Taste like onion, of course.  Here's the lemon juice waiting for the milk in the foreground to almost boil before I add it to curdle the milk and make the cheese.

So while the banana bread, crushed walnuts added, was baking, I made the cream cheese,  and added the chives on top to the finished cheese, aka paneer.  

 Here it is, with the banana bread cooling in the foreground.


 The paneer is almost too pretty to eat, but I'll force myself. You can put salt, if you like, and some people like to sweeten it as a dessert, but I think onion is good, too.  If you use whole milk you get a lot more cheese, since it's the curds that create the cheese, and duh, whole milk has more.  The whey is now in the freezer ready for soup.

Later on I'll have a snack of figs stuffed with this cheese, left from the great Roasted Sweet Potato caper.  Beside a slice of banana bread. Nice contrasts of sweet and savory. Outside, if the weather decides to warm up that much. I find that soaking the figs in boiling water is pretty good, not as good as ripe figs in season but they aren't in season right now.

I left a helping of the Sweet Potato and Figs dish across the street for my friends to come home to, and they were mad for it.  In fact she came over yesterday and took pix of the Jerusalem book and the recipe, to try out for herself.  While bringing me a little dessert she'd made, pineapple slice with homemade cream cheese on.  That's what reminded me I had the milk for the cheese in the house.

So at this point, the Bite Club has extended its reach to Ontario and the Indian community in this region! who knew..

And she came bearing two huge bags of clothing for freecycling, by previous arrangement, having forced her husband and daughter to start offloading some of their collection of never worn clothes. 

I do the freecycling because it's easier for me and I know the routine. There's one wrap that's going to be mine in there...also by arrangement.  In the summer I usually take a wrap or something with me to other people's houses and buildings, because they're kept so much colder than my own. So I have a little collection.

Meanwhile, the weekend is a good time to offer freecycle items, when people are free to pick up.

And it's still only midmorning where I am.  I think I'll sit down for a minute.  This afternoon, since my group plein air was cancelled, I'm off to do some plein drawing on my own account, once I decide where.  Beautiful bright weather, not too hot for sitting out and drawing, maybe a bit of caran d'ache,  too, I'll see how I feel.

Then a bit of stitching to come later, and a few more Dorset buttons are in the wings waiting to be made, after Ginny H., great stitcher friend, gave me from her late mother AND grandmother's stashes!

Paneer Adventures

My default playtime in the kitchen is with cheese.  Dating all the way back to being a little kid, when we'd all get a tiny bottle of milk from our moms, and walk to school, everyone walked, shaking the little bottle until ta-daaaah! at school or rather after several lesson periods, during which teachers demanded that we Put Away Those Bottles, we had cheese!  one problem was getting it out of the little bottle, but we didn't care.  We had made cheese!

Till now, when I'm doing it a slightly more grownup way, using actual pans and thermometers (not strictly necessary, I just thought I should for once do what the book said) and so on.  Great fun.

And here you see two kinds of paneer, which is an Indian cream cheese:  one on the left made with salt, processed by draining through cheesecloth, one on the right with no salt, processed by draining through a piece of linen.  Both different in texture, oddly enough, since they came from the same batch of whole milk. But both very good.

And here's a book by Claudia Lucero, with all kinds of cheese ideas, and tons of pictures and encouragement and reminders that cheese is an artform, so yours might be different, might even be better. And since this is a lightning swift kind of operation, you can't make it and take pix at once, you can see more or less what happened in the pix from her book.

However, as always, I had to improvise a bit.  The first lot didn't make a lot of curds, but I processed it anyway, and added in salt as it drained, just to make it less bland.  Then I thought, hey, there's still a lot of good stuff in this pot, it's more than just the whey, I'll reheat and rejuice it with lemon juice and see what happens.  

It was just great.  Fabulous curdling, easy to collect curds, great whey left behind.  Good thing I had a second cloth and a second strainer, since they were both straining at once, and being pressed.
The whey is now in the freezer until I use it for soup, which won't be long, because of all the pumpkin in there.

And the second batch has a much firmer texture.  So now I know that it doesn't hurt to reheat and make another batch, as long as there's milk solids still in the pot.

And it's very good to make this in time for afternoon tea, spread, one kind per piece, on homebaked bread, with a spoonful of homemade apple jam on top.  Pot of tea.  Magazine.  Feet propped up on two cats.

Paneer, Pinterest and Perseverance

Locked in battle yesterday over attempting to work with Pinterest.  Very Alice in Wonderland designs there, where you have to do something before you can find out how to do it...I rest my case.  But I did manage to get in, activate my membership, stop unwanted general Pinterest emails, and generally get in gear.

One thing that surprised me, once I was under way, was the people have been merrily pinning from this blog without a by your leave.  Please don't do that, folks!  at least ask.  One good thing, though, the pins I found were all attributed to this blog, the least you can do when you pin.

Anyway, back from high tech, during which I burned a pot because I forgot about it while pursuing Pinterest, and had an avalanche in the freezer shortly after, resulting in frozen stuff in smithereens, hard to tell the containers from the contents, where was I, oh yes.

I had heard my neighbor talk about paneer, so I thought I'd look it up and try it, and, get this, pin the recipe to my board, legally, since it's a big site with Pinterest enabled right on the site. 

And I did make paneer, Indian cheese, very interesting, milder than yogurt cheese, but fun to make.  My Indian friend dropped in during the afternoon and I showed her my results, which she correctly identified as paneer and told me all kinds of interesting stuff to do about it.  So I felt so proud that it had an official seal of approval, or recognition, at least.  

If you go here

you'll find my boards, including on the right my one and only pin to my recipe board. And a huge parade of Dollivers who feel it's high time they were on a world stage.  And the beginnings of uploading artwork, much more to come. Feel free to sign up and follow!  okay, if you don't like to.

And if you look below, you'll see my version of the paneer, not quite as skilled, but certainly very edible, and currently forming part of a nice supper, with fresh farm corn, raw, and tomato.

Nice glass of red wine, too. I shall endeavor not to knock this one all over the place this time.