Adventures of a healthy-ish pseudo-foodie

Best cracker topping ever. Also good with a fresh blackberry on the cheese. Like my post about  making mozzarella and ricotta cheeses , I'm not going to go into much detail about methods here. I used a kit from Ricki's, and whatever kit you buy will have instructions. But I guarantee you those instructions will be easy and well worth your time. Goat cheese is made by the same process as ricotta cheese. Heat milk, dump in a tablet of cultures, and strain over cheesecloth for a little while. It's incredibly easy. And it tastes SO much better than store-bought goat cheese. Fresh, creamy, crumbly. Amazing. I bought the goat milk at Trader Joe's (pasteurized is fine, just not "ultra-pasteurized"). In the end, the homemade goat cheese was marginally cheaper than buying Trader Joe's goat cheese, which is already pretty cheap. My next goal is to locate a farm where I can get cheaper goat milk to make this really cost-effective. Highly reco...

This looks like pizza dough, but it's homemade mozzarella cheese. As a kid, I was obsessed with craft-making kits. As a grown-up, I have the same feeling about cheese-making kits. And so my darling husband got me these for my birthday. He did this because he is thoughtful and knows me well, and also because I sent him the Amazon links a few weeks ago. I should have worn a crown like the girl on the box. And so I spent a fair portion of my 33rd birthday concocting mozzarella and ricotta cheese in the kitchen. (I'll save the goat cheese kit for another day. There's only so much cheese we can eat around here.) I won't outline all of the instructions here, because they're long, and there are plenty of good guides on the internet.  But, I will summarize as follows: 1) Homemade cheese is delicious. 2) It's extremely satisfying to turn a gallon of milk into something as cool as mozzarella or ricotta cheese. 3) Ricotta cheese is ridiculously...

Cream cheese? No - something much better. This story starts last Christmas Eve, when my pseudo-step-brother-in-law Anthony brought some mysterious Lebanese "garlic sauce" to contribute to the fondue feast. It was the consistency of cream cheese but it had so much garlic that it kind of hurt to eat it, creating this pleasantly warm burn as it went down. I loved it. We devoured the stuff and garlic emanated from our pores for about 3 days afterwards.  A few days ago, I got a craving for this stuff. Since it came from a Lebanese deli in Portland, I was left googling recipes. I'd had a suspicion that the "sauce" was yogurt cheese, and sure enough, I found some recipes for Garlic Labneh (yogurt cheese) that fit the description.  There are many fancy variations on this recipe on the internet. I decided to start simple: mix lots of grated garlic and a little bit of salt into some yogurt, strain it overnight, and eat. It was so good that I don't see a...