I’m graduating. Until now, I’ve only made soft cheeses. I’m about to graduate to making hard cheese. It’s a big step. Like venturing into any unfamiliar new cooking method, it’s intimidating. Granted, most people have never made any kind of cheese from scratch, not even dead-easy ones like panir. (Though, perhaps everyone should!) That puts [...]
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 [...]