We no longer subscribe to our old produce CSA, but we’ve held onto the dairy share, meaning I get 1 gallon of milk and 1 pint of yogurt from local, grass-fed cows each week.  Sometimes the toddler isn’t feeling like drinking milk, or I go a stretch without consuming breakfast before rushing out the door, in which case we have extra dairy at the end of the week.  Yesterday’s mission was to make good use of the backlog.

Project No. 1: Strawberry frozen yogurt
Objective: use up 1 pint yogurt, 1 pint strawberries (that I didn’t need when making jam)

I always feel a vague sense of guilt when I own a piece of kitchen equipment that I rarely use, so this experiment had the added benefit of justifying the existence of my ice cream maker.  I went with David Lebovitz’s recipe, which is pretty much always a good idea when it comes to all things dessert.  Add some sugar and lemon juice to my fridge foraging and now I have something to serve for this weekend’s play dates with absurdly little effort on my part.  Yippee!

Project No 2: Mozzarella
Objective: use up 1 gallon of whole milk

I’ve been on an Ashley English kick, so I bought some cheese making supplies per her Home Dairy book.  Since the mozzarella recipe took the least amount of time, and dude, who doesn’t love fresh mozz, I decided that was an ideal way to try my hand at cheese for the very first time.

Everything seemed to go fine at first, but once I spooned out my curd, Will could tell something was wrong.  They weren’t sticking to each other at all.  Ashley mentions to be sure that your milk is not ultra pasturized when making mozz, something I assumed would not be a problem since my milk was local.  But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that our supplier is so small that they may not have the best control over the pasturization process and could likely err on the side of over vs. under pasturizing.  That or I could have absolutely screwed something else up, but based on the looks of things, I’m tempted to blame the milk.

So yeah, cheese making was a big fail (although I’m sure the pigs loved having whey for breakfast this morning).  Next time I’ll try cottage cheese or something less sensitive.