I blog here about my cheese-making escapades from time to time, but I don’t often post recipes. That’s because making cheese, while not always difficult, usually requires special ingredients that are only available by mail-order. There are, however, a few fresh cheeses that you can make at home using things you already have. Yogurt cheese [...]
I’ve mentioned Ricki Carroll (the “Cheese Queen”) and her New England Cheesemaking Supply Company a number of times on this blog. She wrote the book (literally) on cheesemaking, and I order most of my cheese supplies from her company. I was pretty excited to see that New England Cheesemaking has started a blog, and that [...]
Pasta is delightfully flexible and tasty – it’s easy to prepare an elegant dish in just a few minutes, and it goes with almost anything. This week the Washington Post had a nice article reminding us all about why we love pasta so much, and all the myriad things you can do with it. I’ve [...]
This week, I feel like I’m going into hibernation. I’m quite certain that it’s a result of standing outside in front of the Capitol in below-freezing weather for over 8 hours on Inauguration Day – a fabulous, totally. Since then, I’ve thawed out and mostly recovered, but all week I’ve been craving heavy, cheesy meals, [...]
A couple months ago, I wrote about my attempts to make burrata, an artisan Italian cheese that is delicious and nearly impossible to find in stores. It’s a close cousin of mozzarella, with an outer shell of cheese surrounding a sweet, rich filling of mozzarella curds and cream. I first heard about it in the [...]
This post is overdue, but late nights and thunderstorms have made it hard to blog this week. But, while my actualy cooking last weekend was lackluster, I had two little projects that I’m especially proud of. Exhibit 1: Ice cream sandwich with fresh, homemade chocolate chip cookies (from the classic Toll House recipe) and organic [...]
Three cooking adventures came out of this weekend: My first attempt at making yogurt! I’ve been planning to do this for a while, and finally got to it since we had an abundance of milk. It’s surprisingly easy. I used my favorite farmer’s market yogurt as a starter. I love foods that live forever: yogurt [...]
If you’ve had problems accessing Hands-Free Cooking over the past few days, those problems will soon be resolved, hopefully for good. After too many mysterious issues with my server (aka, the 6-year-old laptop in my closet), I’ve decided to migrate to a real web host. I’m finding that choosing a host is an overwhelming task, [...]
I’ve been a lazy blogger recently; between some computer updates, conferences at work, and visiting family, I haven’t had much time or creative juice to post. I have been cooking, though, and tonight is something of a special case. It’s a weeknight, I got home around 6:30, left for the grocery store after 7, and [...]
I woke up this morning hearing the surprisingly loud drum of rain against the windows. Not exactly weather that makes me want to leap out of bed and run to the market, but eventually I dragged myself out of bed for a much needed farmer’s market and grocery store run. I lucked out, and the [...]