What Noisy Cats Are We

Yesterday afternoon, I finally got around to getting the stuff together to make mozzarella.  I have been researching on the Internet, and had made a very basic cheese a few weeks ago.  Now I was ready to tackle fresh mozzarella.  We buy it a couple times a week for food, so I figured why not try.  It looked pretty easy.

After work yesterday, I drove over to the Modern Homebrew Emporium, which is just up Mass. Ave. from Porters Square.  They sold me the basic mozzarella cheesemaking kit from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company.  The kit cost about $25, and it had all the supplies to make 30 batches of cheese.  In hindsight, I should have just purchased the rennet and citrix acid, and spent less than half of what I did.  I have all the other supplies.  I drove home, and was so excited that I tore open the kit probably before I had set my keys down.  Gwen and I started making the cheese immediately.

You can find the steps to do this in many places on the Internet.  Additionally, the kit came with the basic instructions.  Here’s a link to someone else’s instructions that show basically what I did: http://www.instructables.com/id/Great-Mozzarella-Cheese/.

Basically it involves:
- heat up a gallon of whole milk in a thick bottomed pot until it hits 90 degrees
- stir the whole time while heating
- take it off the heat
- add the Citric Acid, which has been dissolved in 1/4 cup of non tap water (chlorine in tap water is bad for it)
- let sit for five minutes until a ‘clean break’ forms
- cut the clean break with a knife, then put it back on the heat
- heat to 105 degrees (Fahrenheit) while still stirring
- remove from heat again, let sit for 5 minutes
- strain out the whey
- heat in microwave for 1 minute
- add salt
- strain out the whey again
- heat in microwave for 30sec, or until it reaches 135 degrees
- stretch out the cheese until it’s stringy and shiny
- chill in ice water

That is more or less how easy it is.  Again, instructions can be found in many places, and there are many ways to do this.

The one thing I messed up was storage.  We stored it in water and the water sorta killed the cheese in the fridge overnight.  I think we were supposed to use some sort of brine solution.  I’ll work on this.  The first batch last night (before the storage step) came out GREAT!  Tasted exactly like the fresh mozzarella that you would buy in the store.  I was very proud of us.  The subequent ones that we stored overnight did not fare well due to the above mentioned mistakes.  I’ll work on this.

We have all the supplies (save for the milk – need more of that an would love to get my hands on some buffalo milk), so we will try again and keep working on the recipe and process until we find one that works perfect for us.  It felt good to succeed at something that I thought would be damn near impossible.

The picture doesn’t do it justice, and we will post some how-to pics later on, but THIS is what good fresh mozarella looks like.  Tasted great, too!

First off, a warning that plant disease is hitting the Northeast U.S. pretty hard this year.  It’s apparently the same blight that caused the Irish potato famine.  Be on the lookout.  Here’s a link to an article from Boston.Com on the subject: http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2009/07/plant_disease_h.html.

This year, I went at gardening without any major plans, and did things haphazardly.  Even though the landlord gave us permission to dig up a part of the lawn to create a real garden, and that would be nice to do with a raised bed and stuff, I didn’t have a roto tiller or clear any of the grass off last Fall, so I gave up on that idea early on.  Instead, I opted for some container gardening.  It’s a type of gardening that has taken off in the past couple of years, especially in urban areas like Boston.  Apartment dwellers everywhere have gotten into the trend.  I thought it would be worth a try at Chez Cushman this year as well.

I bought a variety of vegetable plants at a couple different stores, as well as started some from seed.  Gwen purchased a little pumpkin seed kit from Lowe’s and started that as well.  I have a patio tomato in a large pot in the yard, a ’straight eight’ cucumber, some green beans, corn, and a bunch of herbs.  We also have a Topsy Turvy tomato plant that’s hung on a branch of a dead tree in the yard that’s doing absolutely great.  I think it was all that June rain that helped the little guys along.

So far the plants are all showing fruit, save for the pumpkin plant.  We have actually eaten two green beans from that plant already.  I have neglected to transplant the corn and a couple others and really should get to that soon.  Next year this will be a much more organized project.

For starting from nothing this year, and kind of just playing around to get a feel for the stuff, I am rather proud of the progress made so far.  This is something I have always wanted to do, and when I own a house, there will be a substantial gardening effort made.

Oh, and I’d purchased a random Concord Grape vine at Home Depot at the beginning of the 2008 growing season, fully intending to put it in the ground.  I never got to it, and had just discarded the whole thing into the yard last year.  It sat out all winter, and in the spring, while cleaning some stuff up, I just tossed the presumably dead vine into a 5 gallon bucket, which subsequently filled up with water during some rains.  Lo and behold a couple of weeks ago I looked at the thing and there were leaves growing on it!  Hearty freaking plant.  It is now in a pot, still growing, and maybe we’ll see some grapes come off it in a year or two.

Here are a few pics:

Topsy Turvy (upside down tomato plant):

Bad angle of patio tomato plant.  Very hearty and compact:

Another bad angle of the cucumber plant:

Gwen wants to pickle these guys once they have fully grown:

Honestly, I didn’t think they were that relevant anymore.  The new media/web 2.0 people have to realize that things are constantly evolving, and building a company around something like MySpace is a bad strategy for longevity.  I’m not quite the demographic for the site anymore, but to the best of my knowledge, the main reason to go there is to look at bands’ pages.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/technology/companies/17myspace.html?hpw

This is awesome:  http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/guest-column-like-water-for-money/

I have an iMac G5. It’s a couple of years old. The logic board died as a result of a known Apple defect. Apple actually covered this defect by an extended warranty: http://www.apple.com/au/support/imac/repairextensionprogram/. Of course, I am 5-6 months beyond this warranty. I would understand if it’s a warranty from other things, but this is a well known defect that they will not cover. An issue that is their fault, not that of the end user.

There are some online petitions regarding this issue, and I’m too lazy to post links to them. Apple: if you created a bad product you should fix it, even if it’s just a few months after the warranty is up. It’s good business. Was I asking for something for nothing? In a way, yes. Was it a reasonable request? Absolutely.

Will I recommend an iMac to anyone anytime soon? Absolutely not. I like the longevity of Apple products, and obviously this particular one was not made to last, or even to be fixed if it does last.

I get a daily e-mail from Get Rich Slowly – in my opinion the best personal finance blog out there and something I’m sure I have mentioned in my blog multiple times. Today it contained a guest post with some very basic, very simple tips to help you consume less. These are pretty much no brainers, so I figured I would just provide a link to the article here:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/04/22/saving-money-and-the-environment-where-green-and-frugal-meet/

Auto Tuning from Casey D on Vimeo.

Chances are, you think that you are a good driver.  We all do.  I think I’m a great driver.  But in reality, a lot of us are really BAD drivers.  I was reading another blog earlier and stumbled upon this post: http://punaro.com/2008/01/derek/bad-driving-is-no-mystery/.  The author points out some really bad highway passing faux-pas.

I drive in the city mainly.  My commute is a quick 3.5 mile drive from Boston to Cambridge.  How long do you think my morning or evening drive takes?  Anywhere from 25 minutes to an hour.  It’s a waste.  Traffic is horrible.  People have no clue how to drive, or give the right of way to pedestrians or bikers, or even other cars.  At a four way stop, you frequently get honked at for following the rules and going one-car-then-the-other-car-then-the-next after stopping.  If I actually apply my brakes at Green St. where the bus station is, I get honked at.  Nevermind that there is a STOP SIGN there!

What makes it worse here is the pedestrians.  You don’t get too many of that on the roads of Western New York.  There is so much animosity between the walkers of Central Square and the drivers that everyone thinks that they are in the right.  People crossing the street think NOTHING of just walking out across without looking at the car  baring down on them at 25 miles per hour.  It’s my duty to stop because they can’t be bothered to wait a second.  Of course I always hear the ‘I have the right of way – I’m a pedestrian in a crosswalk!’.  Well, if you are not in the crosswalk when I’m heading into it, and you step into it, you do NOT have the right of way!

But I’m ranting.  I’m frustrated wtih driving in Boston often.  I enjoy driving.  I love it.  I am not an angry driver, and I often let people in when I don’t have to (to the dismay of Gwen sometimes – she says I’m too nice).  I miss my old drives from Kenosha, WI to Libertyville, IL every morning.  I will be happier when my drive to work is less stop and go-y, and more just enjoy the road and the silence and the day-y.

Apparently I’m completely out of shape.  On Sunday, during a weekend trip to get out of the city and relax, we found an old bowling alley along Rt. 1 in Maine.   Candlepin only (so weird you MA people…).  Anyway, we had a great time, and played two games.  I bowled a, well, a wicked low score.  Still, it was totally worth it.

The problem happened when I woke up the next day.  Muscles that I apparently rarely use were hurting badly.  That was Monday.  Tuesday, I could barely move.  Walking hurt.  It was hilariously painful.  Guess it’s time to get back to the gym, as I don’t ever want to be hurting like that again.

If you are local and need a place to do car repairs and maintainence and do not want to get ripped off, check out Meineke in Brighton.  I’m not the only one that thinks that they do a pretty good job.  Link to my Yelp review.