Another day in the kitchen...but not cooking.

Doing: ...Cleaning out my pantry, argh! I pulled out a container of cereal this morning, only to firstly, have a huge brown bush 'roach jump out at me (yuk, yuk, yuk!), and then upon opening it, discover weavils. Blerck. Rhonda recommends sticking things like flour in the freezer when you bring it home (actually from memory, she even stores these items in an old chest freezer) to kill off any weavils or moth eggs and the like, but I never have any room :-( I think I'll be making room in future though, as they had made their merry way right through the shelf when I looked closer. I put everything in containers when I get it home from shopping, but they had managed to eat through heavy cardboard containers like the baking powder tin! Fortunately they were only in a couple of items, but I ended up pulling the whole pantry apart and cleaning it all out. Not like it didn't need it anyway, and it's a good excuse to wipe down bottles and actually have a look a the Use By dates on everything and make note of stuff that needs using up. Anyway, it took All. Day. to do it. I'm tiiiiired! But happy. Nothing like a a tidy, organised pantry to make me smile :-)

...Kindly turning down the offer of an enormous bag of cucumbers from the neighbours, LOL.

Making: Well, the ricotta failure yesterday wasn't a complete loss! I strained the whey through a clean cotton cloth over a wire sieve, and left it to drain with a weight on top in the fridge overnight. Ta da! This morning there was something that actually remotely resembled ricotta in the cloth, and it even tasted like ricotta! Yay. I got about 200g I suppose. The mozzarella I made yesterday weighed about 450g (a pound, I think that is), and there was around 2 litres of whey left, which I froze to use in cooking instead of buttermilk. So not too bad for a gallon (3.6L) of organic milk I suppose, although I would have to work out the figures more accurately to see if it is more economical to do it that way. I have read since that using reconstituted powdered milk can also be used succesfully, which would certainly make it all very cheap to make. Regardless of the economics of the process though, I really enjoy the process of making something like cheese myself, and notching up another skill on my belt, so to speak :-)

Dinner: Garden salad. And takeaway fish and chips. *Ahem* Even the best of us crave something salty and fatty sometimes :-/ It's the first takeaway in a few months.

Reading: Strange recipe suggestions on the backs of the food packaging. Does anyone ever actually cook these things?

Contemplating: An ice-cold, refreshing beer. Aussie-brewed, of course.