Look what I made this morning — ricotta cheese! On toast, with a little parsley/basil oil I put up this summer, some salt, some pepper — yum.

My milk delivery is on Tuesdays, so it looks like Wednesdays are becoming Cheese Day. I like to let the gallon jar sit in the fridge overnight so the cream will separate out, but the gallon jar takes up too much room. So Wednesday mornings I skim off the cream (this week I mixed last week’s leftover cream with the leftover Créme Fraiche I made a couple of weeks ago and set it downstairs on my seed-starting heat mat to ferment), and wash and refill my glass refrigerator pitcher. The pitcher holds about a half gallon and is more than enough milk for me for the week.

This was really easy. I sort of kludged together a couple of recipes — Michael Chiarello’s recipe, and the one from the Home Cheese Making book that came with my cheesemaking kit. I had a scant 3 quarts of milk once I’d skimmed off the cream and refilled my refrigerator pitcher (actually, I used last week’s milk for the cheese and refilled my pitcher with new milk). Michael Chiarello’s recpie calls for 1 quart buttermilk to 1 gallon milk. I had 3 quarts milk and 1 pint buttermilk — so I looked at Home CheeseMaking where the recipe called for 1 gallon milk and 1 teaspoon citric acid. I split the difference and added 1/2 teaspoon citric acid dissolved in a little water along with 1/2 teaspoon salt.

Then into a big pot, onto the stove with my handy candy thermometer attached, and we’re off to the races. You just heat the milk slowly to between 175 and 180 degrees at which point the curds separate from the whey — the curds started separating out earlier, so I had to keep stirring to prevent scorching (I might need a heavier pot than my old revere-ware one). When it reached temperature, I set it aside for 10 minutes (one of the recipes I found when I Googled “home made ricotta” suggested this. Another one suggested leaving it for a couple of hours or all day if you were off to work.). After 10 minutes I ladeled the contents of the pot out into a colander lined with cheesecloth, then hung it on the faucet to drain. I also wound up with two quarts of whey. Look at this whey — how could I throw it out?I figure if nothing else I can add it to the dog’s food — although when I Googled “what do do with whey?” I did find some suggestions for using it when cooking beans or pasta, or even in place of the water when making bread. So I put it in the fridge because it just looked too useful to thow out.

Maybe it’s because I get the milk from an actual person, or because as I’ve grown more of my own vegetables and have started getting more of my meat from local sources — whether domestic or wild — that food seems not more valuable in monetary terms, but more — sacred? My milk comes from a real person who milks the cows herself. My vegetables started as seeds in my basement. My meat (well, as much of it as I can muster) either came from a local rancher or from someone I know who hunted, killed, gutted and hauled it back to the truck. None of it seems like mere commodities. None of it seems particularly disposable. Maybe one reason we waste so much food as a culture is that we don’t know our food — it doesn’t come from any identifiable source but from the anonymity of the grocery store.

Or maybe I’m just a little nuts … always a possiblity, particularly when I’m making cheese in my PJs on a Wednesday morning ….

Ever since I bought Pork and Sons last spring, I’ve been wanting to make the Terrine Jacquy — whenever I’ve been in France I’ve been fascinated by the sheer variety of potted terrines — they’re everywhere in a million variations. The last couple of years I’ve been doing food baskets for Christmas presents — trying to share the fruits of my garden and wildcrafted finds like dried morels — so I saw the Terrine Jacquy and thought how cool — those would be great in Christmas baskets –

The original recipe is pretty simple — 5.5 pounds of pork belly, 1.5 pound pork liver, garlic, onions, a couple of eggs, some salt, pepper, piment d’espelette and then a little armangac. I figured I’d make it à la Americaine by substituting moose liver for pork liver, and good bourbon for armangac.

Here’s the moose liver: It was disgusting — not because it was from a moose, but because it was liver. Liver totally freaks me out — the texture is so so so so icky. I hacked the liver into pieces that would fit into the hopper of my meat grinder attachment for the Kitchen Aid. Because the recipe seemed a little sketchy, I used the directions for pate in Michael Ruhlman‘s Charcuterie as a guide. I’d cut the pork belly and pork shoulder into cubes (I didn’t have enough pork belly left over after the pancetta, so I supplemented it with shoulder), had spread them on a half-sheet pan, and stuck them in the freezer while I got prepared. I also froze the meat grinder, and ground everything into the metal mixer bowls set in ice baths like Ruhlman advises.

Here’s the meat grinder in action: I also ground the chopped onions, garlic and the thyme (I added thyme to the recipe because I like it) along with the meat and the liver. The liver coming through the grinder was really gross — here’s a picture of how slimy it was:

Because it was so slimy and gross, I had to have a small restorative glass of wine:
There was a lot of ground meat — two bowls full: The next step was to beat three eggs and mix them with the meat. Unfortunately my camera batteries died at this point — but the liver texture so freaked me out that I had to go find a pair of the little latex gloves I used when painting the house last year because it was clear the only way to mix it was going to be by hand and there was no way I was going to be able to touch the ground liver slime. I got my biggest bowl, and mixed everything together and then packed it into the jars. Because it was, well, ground meat, I thought some pink peppercorns might be a pretty garnish. Here’s a photo of the packed jars: This is where things got tricky — the recipe says to put the jars in a big canning kettle, bring to a boil, and cook on a simmer for three hours. So that’s what I did even though I was a little worried that the pates would “break” — that is, that the meat and the fat would separate, leaving a hard little meatball afloat in the fat and collagen from the pork. But they were in jars, so I figured that level of processing was necessary. The bad news is that the terrines did break — they’re not a nice amalgamated spreadable pate, but rather, a bunch of floating meatballs. The original recipe also says you’re supposed to leave them for several weeks to ripen, but when I consulted my books on canning, they all say that meat needs to be done at a hot pack, and cooked under pressure or it’s at risk for botulism. So, until I decide whether to keep my 20 jars of failed terrine or not, they’re stored in the freezer. I opened one for a taste test, and it tastes pretty good if you sort of smush it all around to make it more pate-like and less meatball-like. We’ll see. I might have to try again if we get an antelope and I have another chunk of liver. I think the next time I’ll do them in water baths like regular pates — especially since I’ll have to freeze them anyhow. But despite being freaked out by liver, it was a fun experiment … and any time I get to use my meat grinder I’m a happy girl.