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.

Make your own: teriyaki sauce

While I am not a big fan of sweet stuff on my meat, Jeff loves it. Barbecue sauce, maple syrup, honey, jam–you name it and he’s probably tried to broil it on a chicken breast or grill it on a pork chop.

If we don’t have dinner planned yet (hey, it happens) Jeff will inevitably suggest “chickie-rice,” his name for the chicken, rice, and teriyaki sauce combo you can pick up from any bento place. While we had made this dish at home before with purchased teriyaki sauce, it never occurred to me that the sauce itself was incredibly simple to make until we finished off the seemingly-bottomless bottle of it in our fridge.

Teriyaki Sauce from Recipezaar

1/4 soy sauce
1 T. grated ginger
3 T. brown sugar
1 clove garlic, minced
2 T. cornstarch

Combine everything but the cornstarch in a small saucepan with 1 c. water. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Stir the cornstarch into 1/4 c. cold water and whisk into sauce, cooking until thickened.

The recipe makes two cups of teriyaki sauce. You can adjust the sugar, ginger, etc. to taste, and thin the sauce out with more water or soy sauce if you need to. Now you can spend the $4 you would have spent on the sauce on something else!

(A note about fresh ginger: I think I have mentioned this before, but I keep ginger in my freezer in a ziploc bag. It’s really easy to peel a section and grate it with my microplane grater when it’s frozen, and this means I always have it on hand.)

Make your own: Jam on a whim

I’ve made plenty of jam (even blue-ribbon jam in my 4-H days) but I had never made it without pectin until this month. I’m rarely happy with commercially produced jams, blackberry in particular, but I didn’t want the hassle of making and storing a full batch of jam.  I decided to try making a small batch without pectin figuring that the worst case scenario would be blackberry sauce.

I cooked together over medium heat:

5 c. frozen blackberries (picked this summer)
3 c. sugar (might try less next time)

And once the berries and sugar melted I added one tiny quartered apple, gleaned from a neighbor’s tree. I hoped this might add enough natural pectin to make the jam gel. Turns out this probably was unnecessary, but it didn’t hurt.

I just cooked the mixture until a cooled drip of the mixture was obviously jam-textured.  Now we have about 1.5 pints of yummy blackberry jam for just the cost of the sugar!

If you’d like more official advice on making jam without pectin this flyer from the University of Georgia Extension Office has some recipes for jams and jellies made without added pectin.

Make your own: vinaigrette

One of the things I really cut back on when I implemented our grocery budget was salad dressing. I used to have at least five varieties on hand at all times: something creamy, some kind of vinaigrette, something that goes with Mexican food, something that goes with Asian food…. You get the idea.

For awhile I could cut back because we already had so much in the fridge, but as we used up our favorites one by one I started to miss the variety we had before.  I’d never been very happy with my own dressings in the past, but I was inspired to keep trying so we could have more options with out buying more bottles of dressing. Finally somewhere I saw this rule: use two parts oil to one part acid.

Now I know I can easily whip up enough dressing for one night of salad.  I can tailor the ingredients to whatever we are having for dinner, so we might have lime-cilantro dressing with Mexican food, or wasabi dressing made with rice wine vinegar with Asian food.  A little yogurt, mayonnaise, or dijon mustard keeps the oil & acid from separating, and garlic, salt, and pepper make almost any dressing better. You could even add maple syrup or honey if you’re a fan of sweet dressings.

Make your own: microwave popcorn

Commercial microwave popcorn is kind of gross. I’ll eat it, don’t get me wrong, but I hate to be the person who stinks up the entire hallway at work. I’m also a little grossed out by diacetyl. I know many popcorn manufacturers are planning to remove the chemical now that a consumer has been harmed by it (no matter that people who work in microwave popcorn factories have been falling ill for years,) but why not just make your own (relatively?) chemical-free microwave popcorn? It’s easy.

What you need:
1/3 c. popcorn kernels (about 3 oz.)
paper lunch sack
microwave

Pour the kernels in the bag and fold the top down several times to close it. Set the bag in the microwave (not on its side, but standing up) and heat it for about as long as you would a regular bag of microwave popcorn. Stay close and pay attention to the popping at first so you’re not the person who stinks up the microwave by *burning* your popcorn. You can put less corn in the bag for a smaller serving–you’ll just need to nuke it for a shorter time.

Toss a little butter and salt in the bag before popping if you want, or add your fixings afterwards.

I have no idea where I learned this trick–I’ve known about it for at least 10 years–so I can’t give anyone credit.