Make your own: cheese!

I hedged a little in my last post, but it turns out paneer really *is* easy to make!

I brought one quart of whole milk to a boil

Removed it from heat and added about 3T of lemon juice (from one smallish lemon)

Poured the mixture through a piece of cheesecloth

Let it drain (and squeezed and twisted it some to get more whey out)

Patted it into a rectangle and put some weight on top

And now I have a (small) brick of cheese (and almost a quart of whey…wonder what I’ll do with that….)

Good thing it’s not this easy to make Camembert.

Small food: Nancy’s Yogurt is available in a store near you

One of the first things I remember eating (or drinking, actually) from the natural foods store was peach-flavored Nancy’s kefir. This must have been in the early eighties, but I can still remember exactly what the carton looked like. Fast-forward to 1995 and I’m in the natural foods store near my NYU dorm on 3rd Avenue telling the proprietor he should really carry Nancy’s yogurt. He was friendly enough, but explained that it probably wasn’t distributed on the East Coast. Sad days. Now I’ve been back in the west for almost ten years and take my Nancy’s access for granted, but I just ran across this 2003 Seattle Times article about Nancy’s Yogurt’s expansion to East Coast markets. Hello, my East Coast friends. This yogurt comes highly recommended.

Though something with a nationwide distribution might not seem like “small food,” Nancy’s is still an independently-owned company that uses local milk and fruit to make real yogurt filled with lots of live cultures instead of sugar and gelatin. I usually buy the plain, lowfat variety and then sweeten it up with a little drizzle of honey, spoonful of jam, or a sprinkle of raw sugar. Sometimes I add cinnamon, fruit, and/or toasted nuts, but I really like the taste of the yogurt as-is. I keep a tub in the refrigerator at work, and if I haven’t eaten yogurt for breakfast, I frequently have it for lunch.

If you haven’t already spotted Nancy’s in a store near you, you can check out their store finder to see where it might turn up. This is good stuff.

(Whenever I write about products I always feel the need to point out that I’m not connected with the company in any way, and this post is not sponsored or paid or otherwise motivated by anything other than my personal experience with the product. In other words, yes I do just love this yogurt that much.)