The Habitrail

Weird but not wonderful

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:40:01 GMT

The mozzerella cheese turned out to be utterly tasteless and rubbery. I had half a dozen people try it, and they all said the same thing. :-( Back to the drawing board. Although, this one was hard enough, in terms of time and physical exertion, that I don't think I'll be trying it again anytime soon.

The blue cheese is turning visibly blue in patches, so something must be happening.

Mozzerella: dat some weird stuff

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:25:47 GMT

Today I tried making mozzerella cheese.

I warmed 3 liters of milk to 90 F(32 C), added 3 tablespoons of home made yoghurt and 3 tablespoons of store-bought buttermilk, then half a teaspoon of rennet diluted in a quarter cup of cool water. After whisking thoroughly, I let it stand for an hour and got a clean break. I cut the curds and checked the temp. It was still at 90, so I covered the pot, let it sit for 15 minutes, and then poured off the whey and rinsed the curd in a couple liters of cold water. Then I chucked the curd into a strainer, put it into a pot, and left it in the fridge overnight.

Today I let the pot warm up a bit (about two hours), then cut up the curd, which had glooped into a single mass, and put a couple bits of curd into hot (165F/85C) water. After a minute or two it went soft and shiny and I was able to stretch it out, so I put all the curd into a big glass dish and covered it with hot water. The curd goes soft as it warms, and you're able to begin pulling and stretching it, kind of like a rubber band.

This is the weird bit. Cheese is supposed to be, yanno, cheesy. Not plasticy. But this curd becomes plasticy, rubbery, and tough. It stretches when you pull it, then partly contracts back on itself when you let go. To keep it hot enough to stretch, you have to keep the water too hot to put your hands in, so it's a bit of a balancing act, and I did find it quite uncomfortable to work with. The cheese stretches best if it's in the water, but not only was this too hot for my hands, it made a mess because the stuff is quite tough and rubbery, and I kept banging my hands against the dish and sloshing water everywhere.

I started with little chunks and kept adding more chunks until I had it all in one mass, but that turned out to be too big to work with so I cut it in two and alternated, stretching one while the other soaked in the hot water, then swapping. In the end, I think I got it at least halfway right. It seemed to stretch and fold and stretch and fold, and looked like it was doing what it ought. The idea is that it ends up being a whole lot of overlapping very thin layers, like an onion. I left it in two masses -- one I balled up, and the other I made into a braided rope, each weighing around 150 grams -- and dropped them in cold salted water, where it is now sitting (in the fridge). We'll try it later today, with home grown tomatoes and (hopefully) home made bread. My shoulders and upper arms were aching after about forty minutes of playing with it, though, so I think I'll put off making bread dough for an hour or so.

At least this cheese I'll get some instant gratification on and will be able to report back tomorrow as to how it tasted!

The waxed cheddar is still in the fridge looking fine. The blue cheeses I've been turning regularly, and today I took off the cloth wrappings. There's a bit of white mould on the surface, which (so say the recipes) is what is supposed to happen. I'll leave them several more weeks, then try one.

What I've been reading

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:58:51 GMT

"Lost Daughters" by J M Redmann.

Several friends told me to try one of this author's books, and I'm sure glad they did. It's a smooth, easy read, with a very good balance between two storylines. The crazed serial killer mystery is pretty standard but well done; the normal daily life, job, stupid family problems, relationship woes, etc of a private investigator keeps the story grounded and realistic. The dialogue tags drove me nuts (said! What's wrong with said? Said is a perfectly good word!) but other than that it was clean and clear, and I'll be looking for some more of the books in this series.

Cheesy questions

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:29:05 GMT

Why are you supposed to use non-iodised salt in cheesemaking?

Does it make a difference what size granules/flakes the salt is?

If you can use a bit of blue cheese to infect a new blue cheese, can you use a bit of rind from a brie or camembert to start the rind on a new camembert?

How much lipase, exactly, is in the lipase solutions you buy for cheesemaking? None of them seem to have actual units (either in mg or IU).

Cheesemaking II

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:09:09 GMT

This weekend I tried making a blue cheese. I cultured/acidified overnight at room temperature a gallon of milk (about 1/4 fresh and about 3/4 from milk I'd had in the freezer for a few weeks) with 3 tablespoons of yoghurt (homemade) + 3 tablespoons of buttermilk (store-bought, dragged out of the freezer after about 2 years) with four drops of rennet. It's scary to put in such a tiny amount of something into a huge potful of milk, but amazingly, it works.

The next morning, I had a clean break -- the milk had turned into soft white jello. I cut the curd, ladled it into a cloth-lined strainer, and collected the curd. (The whey that drained through I also collected and heated to make ricotta, but I got sod-all and it drained poorly.)

I hung the curds up to drip for the entire day, then took them out, stirred them around until they were little crumbles, and added 1 tsp salt. Then I added a couple of spoonfuls of water containing about 1 tsp blue cheese, which I'd blended in my little whizzy-kitchen-thingy. (The blue cheese was Mainland Blue Vein, from the local grocery store -- the idea is that it contains enough of the live penicillum mould to infect the new cheese). Then I lined two (brand new, just made an hour previously by Dearly Beloved) cheese moulds with cheesecloth, spooned the curds in, and put them in the (brand new, just made two hours previously by Dearly Beloved) cheese press. (Life is good when you have a Dearly Beloved with lots of power tools, including a Super Duper dremel.)

The recipe I was following said "press lightly". How much weight is lightly? Who knows? I took a punt and used two kilos (a little over 4 pounds) overnight. A bit of whey (and the blue-cheese-water, I imagine) squeezed out and went into the overflow tray, and the cheeses sunk in height by about 15%.

This morning I took them out, poked a bunch of holes in the top with a chopstick sterilised in vodka (that's to make airholes for the mould), rubbed them lightly with salt (lightly again! What is lightly!? I used about 1/2 tsp per cheese), wrapped them in cloth, and set them on a plastic rack (test tube rack "borrowed" from work) in a chilly bin (cooler, igloo; also borrowed from work) containing an ice pack and a bowl of water. The thermometer/hygrometer (borrowed from Dearly Beloved's chicken-egg-hatching-incubator) reads 54 F/80% humidity.

Now the plan is to turn them daily (if I remember!), change the cloths if they become wet, keep the temp at around 50 and the humidity at around 70, hope the cheeses get a semi-hard rind and a growth of the mould through the inside, hope nothing goes rank or wrong...and in about two months I'll have blue cheese.

What I've been reading

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:36:42 GMT

Besides N Griffith's latest series (which cannot be praised enough, and against which most other books suffer badly by comparison), I've been reading a bit of a mixed bag.

Malinda Lo's Ash. The prose is clean and simple, the pacing a bit slow (probably suitable for its YA readership), and the storyline entertaining. I liked the lesbian aspect. I really liked the twist of how the "fairy" was presented. I really didn't like the ending: Ash "beats" the fairy -- who we are told did some bad things to Ash's mother though we never actually see him be anything other than helpful and supportive to Ash -- by using his love for her as a weapon to manipulate him.

Charlotte Mendelson's Daughters of Jerusalem. Although all the members of the family in this book are pretty screwed up, they're also believable and surprisingly likeable. The prose is quite lovely, the storyline brilliant, and the ending very fitting -- though I admit to a bit of disappointment that the father's utter self absorption never got so much as a dent, and no one called him on his final action wrt how it would affect his family. Many thanks to whoever on the 50books list recommended it.

Diane and Jacob Anderson-Minshall's Blind Curves. This is a lesbian murder mystery featuring disabled characters which, sadly, I found to be totally unengaging. Slow, pointless, contrived, with no tension and excessive backstory -- I gave up about halfway through.

Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. I liked the voice and the writing, and I found the presentation of life for a Chinese girl in early-20th-century (?) China to be very interesting -- foot binding, arranged marriages, girls paired to contractually be Best Friends Forever in an emotional relationship more intense than marriage. But the protagonist was shallow, willfully ignorant, and banal; had the story been written from the POV of her BFF Snow Flower, I think the book would've been more intense and satisfying.

Nicola Griffith

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:51:16 GMT

Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place, Stay, and Always, are, hands down, the best books I've read in years. The character, while perhaps not someone I'd want to be friends with, is utterly compelling. The thriller/adventure aspects of the books are heart-pumpingly excellent. The lessons and information imparted to the reader wrt women being victimised, self-defense, human physiology, and other stuff is so fascinating that this alone makes it worth reading. But the raw, brutal, naked exposure of the character as she changes and grows and undergoes loss and pain and joy is the most brilliant facet of NG's writing (IMO) -- grief laid bare, jagged and bleeding on the page in such a way that you'll stay up late, call in sick to work, and neglect all your responsibilities so that you can keep reading reading reading till you've devoured all the books.

Wow.

Sale!

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:25:41 GMT

Short story to a Cleis anthology edited by Sacchi Green. I'm totally stoked, in part because I didn't think a present-tense, second-person story would stand a chance. It's my first attempt to write in second person, so I'm really pleased it made the cut.

Also, fifty bucks will buy a lot of cheese wax :-D

waxing lyrical, waxing cheesical #1

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:21:15 GMT

After drying my cheese for four days in the fridge, I waxed it last night.

I may have overdried it, possibly because I think I also over-pressed it. Not a drop of liquid came out of it, as far as I can tell, during the four drying days in the fridge -- I sat it on a paper towel and turned it daily, but the paper towel remained stubbornly dry, and I did see a few small cracks develop in the surface of the cheese. This may or may not prove to be disastrous.

I don't have any proper cheese wax (yet; it's on my list of Things To Purchase), so I did what they say you-can-do-but-ought-not-to-do: melted the wax from around 10 small unscented tea candles with about half an inch of red crayon (which was sufficient to turn the wax a rather virulent pinky-red). Then I painted the wax onto the cheese with a silicon brush, aided by a small ladle. The first coat was thick and bumpy -- the wax wasn't hot enough, I think, which may have an unpleasant side effect of failing to sterilise the cheese surface, so I may have mould or bacteria grow under it :-( I re-heated the wax, got it thinner and hotter, and painted the cheese again, and that coating came out better. I'm learning.

The cheese will now sit in the fridge, where I will check it weekly (more realistically, daily, compulsively) to make sure it's not mouldy underneath the wax (assuming I can see it under that vile pinky-red) and to make sure it's not blowing up with bacterial gases. If I can stand it, I'll wait three months and then taste it. If successful, I anticipate it'll turn out to be a rather mild cheddar.

Next on the list: feta, mozzerella, and blue. I've got a gallon of milk in the freezer, and I should have a half-gallon of fresh by Saturday afternoon, both available for playing with, so if this weekend cooperates I'll give something a try. Probably the mozz.

Rupert is a daddy!

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:33:19 GMT

Last year, about April, we bought a breeding pair of white Chinese silkies: a hen at point of lay (Muffy), and an unrelated rooster a couple of months younger (Rupert). They've turned out to be splendid chooks, all fluffy and poofy with big topknots. We let the hen rear a few chicks from another clutch earlier this year, and she proved to be a very good mother. A few months ago we put Muffy and Rupert together in the back garden and then collected the resultant fertilised eggs. We put 10 into the incubator (built by Dearly Beloved) and 21 days later -- yesterday -- out hatched 10 chicks. They are the epitome of cuteness. Six are now back underneath Muffy being raised by their mum, and the other four are in a brooder box being reared by Dearly Beloved.

Chicks: they're great fun.

Cheesemaking, Part I, initial results

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:29:30 GMT

I took the cheese out of the mould today, trimmed off the bulgy bits, and put it on a plate atop a paper towel to dry (for the next four days). Naturally I tasted the trimmings.

1. Very salty. :-( I used 1 T salt for curds from a gallon of milk, but I reckon half that would be better.
2. Very chewy/squeaky/rubbery. I used more rennet than specified (1 t instead of 1/2 t) because mine expired in 2005 and I was afraid it was half dead. Clearly I should not have done that.
3. Very bland. No taste, really, other than the salt. I don't know if my culture was insufficient, or if it just needs time to age. We'll find out in a few months. I'm not hugely optimistic about this batch. Time to start planning Part II.

The yoghurt I made yesterday turned out fine. Yoghurt is a lot easier than cheese.

Today's 2.5 liters of milk will be devoted to coffee (and more coffee, and more coffee! It's one of those days), bread (white and fruit), a custard (I'm going to try to turn some of the yoghurt into a rhubarb custard yoghurt), and whatever milk is needed for baking whatever I'm going to bake (haven't decided yet) for my weekly Cancer Foundation Fundraiser Bake Sale at work.

Cheesemaking, Attempt #1

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 03:19:28 GMT

My resolve to get out of cattle lasted about two months. I broke down, and a couple of weeks ago we bought a trained house cow (a Jersey), with whose calf we are sharemilking. My Dearly Beloved built me an awesome milking race where we can safely confine the cow and I can comfortably milk her, so each morning now finds me sitting on a block of wood squeezing milk out of Elsie's udder. We don't take much -- around two litres per day. That's milk for our coffee, cereal, and general use, plus yoghurt, plus enough leftovers that today I'm trying cheese-making.

Using yoghurt as a culture, I acidified 1 gallon (3.8 litres) of milk, added rennet, collected the curds, cheddared them (you pile them on a board for about an hour and let some whey drain out, though what this accomplishes I've not yet figured out), salted them, and put them into a hastily-cobbled-together cheese press (also courtesy of my Dearly Beloved). The cheese is now being pressed at an unknown weight (50 lbs of cookbooks atop the press proved far too precarious, so we chickened out and put clamps on it). Meanwhile, I heated the whey to 190F, then collected the resultant ricotta cheese and hung it to drain.

I'm quite curious to see what happens....

In other news, I'm attempting to make a whole baked tandoori chicken tonight. The cockerel in question was half-Chinese Silkie, which is a breed with dark grey to black skin and flesh. Hopefully the tandoori will mask the colour, as I fear the sheer appearance of this bird may be too unappetising for me to handle.

:-(

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:37:06 GMT

Mystery author Dick Francis has died. :-(

in which I am like a pioneer woman with modern appliances

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:28:57 GMT

Today I:

Milked the cow
Baked white bread and fruit bread
Made plum jam (and set the cooktop on fire)

I like doing stuff by hand -- milking the cow, kneading bread dough, etc. Fresh milk and home made bread taste better. So I find this kind of stuff great fun. But, at the same time, if I didn't have my kitchen scales, ceramic cooktop, dishwasher, etc I reckon it'd be a lot less fun.

Hurrah for modern appliances.

R. I. P. Pansy

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:36:45 GMT

Sadly, after five weeks of fighting chronic bloat and microbial infections, our calf Pansy had to be euthanased. She was sweet, valiant, and loving right to the end.

The paddock won't be the same without her. :-(

gritting my teeth

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:04:58 GMT

On a discussion of novel cover lightwashing (Bloomsbury, to be precise) I'm seeing comments like this:

Someone just told ME I am very white and privileged and should think outside my culture. Hmm. I am white. I am NOT privileged.

and

I'm not offended by the wrong skin color on a cover. Maybe I'd feel differently if my skin was a different color, but I like to think not.

and I'm gritting my teeth, biting my tongue, and sitting on my hands. I've restricted myself to saying:

I'm white. I'm aware that this automatically makes me priviliged. I can go into a bookstore and browse the fantasy or romance shelves and find plenty of books with covers featuring people who have my hair colour, eye colour, and skin colour -- because I'm white. If I were Maori or Nigerian or Cherokee, I'd be lucky to find a single book featuring a character like me. The shelves of fiction would be telling me, silently, by omission, that people like me don't exist.

And it's not right.

No, publishers can't change the world. But they can have a social conscience.

Which, if nothing else, proves that the RaceFail discussions have had a strong impact on me. And if on me, then probably too on lots of other people. So thank you all for heightening my awareness of, and hopefully my sensitivity to, racism in fiction, and white privilege, and the need to continue talking about it.

I've been buying as many books as I can by AoC and/or with CoC, and I'm finding them tremendously enjoyable. For a setting junkie like me, being immersed in a new-to-me culture is really a treat.

free book!

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:52:01 GMT

Andi Marquette is giving away a free copy of her latest release, "The Ties That Bind." I really enjoyed her first two books -- one a very well researched white-supremist mystery, and the other a space opera. I'm determined to win this copy of her third book. However, since she's now announced she's got two copies to give away, I can let y'all in on the contest too.

Go to her blog post and leave a comment with your name, and you will go into the drawing: http://lesbianauthors.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/book-giveaway-the-ties-that-bind/

Y'all can fight over the second copy. Just remember, the first one's mine. :-)

Happy 2010!

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:09:55 GMT

May 2010 bring you health, happiness, success, contentment, and joy.

What do you regret most about 2009? What do you most hope for in 2010?

Sadly, my biggest hope for 2010 is to remain employed; my biggest regret for 2009 is that I didn't accomplish even a fraction of what I hoped. But one of my joys of 2009 was reading and thus discovering some new authors -- Nalo Hopkinson's "Skin Folk", Jay Lake's "Green", and Nina Revoyr's "Southland" -- as well as rediscovering authors whose recent works have impressed me -- Jo Walton's "Farthing", and Georgia Beers' "Balance". There are few pleasures that can compare with reading a good story, and I've given myself a lot more time to read for pleasure over the last year. I plan to continue that trend in 2010.

The Harlequin Scam

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:24:59 GMT

I imagine most people have heard about the latest from Harlequin: the new imprint, Harlequin Horizons, which they're calling self-publishing (but is really vanity publishing), and which they say will give authors their dream of being a Harlequin author (but nowhere on the book will appear the word "Harlequin" and Harlequin readers will not be expected to consider buying these books), and which will cost the author anywhere from $600 to $40,000 dollars, and for which even though Harlequin will not invest a penny of its own time or money Harlequin will still retain half of any sales profits.

I have nothing against self-publishing; quite the contrary. It's a great option for many authors and I heartily applaud them; it extends the repetoire of books available to me, the reader, to include the kind of niche-market books I often prefer to read.

I think vanity publishing is a very poor choice for anyone, especially since now there are so many self-publishing service companies available -- yes, you pay Lulu or whoever to do the editing and layout and cover art and ISBN and Amazon stuff when you don't have the expertise to do it yourself, but then it's your imprint and any profits are yours.

Would I mind if TorStar, the parent of Harlequin Enterprises, also owned a Lulu type outfit? Nope. I don't care that they own a newspaper, and for all I know they also own drugstores and tobacco shops and orange juice stands. Would I mind if TorStar owned a scammy vanity press like Dorrance? I don't like the existence of scammers, and I'd dislike TorStar for it, but I wouldn't blame Harlequin.

Do I mind that Harlequin's name and reputation is being plastered all over this new vanity press "Harlequin Horizons", and that authors are being led to believe they can buy HQ author status and that if their book sells well enough they'll get picked up by HQ proper and that it might be worth their while to spend twenty or thirty thousand dollars promoting an unedited piece of crap? Or that they'll get charged five times the actual cost of filing for copyright? Yeah. I've got a big problem with that.

The response in the blogosphere suggests a lot of readers and writers have a problem with it. And that makes me love the writing world. The support and mentoring and pay-it-forward ethics are unmatched in any other biz.

Gaylaxicon

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:53:31 GMT

Gaylaxicon 2009 was last week. Has anyone seen any con reports or lists of the Spectrum winners?

fandom auction

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:09:53 GMT

Over at http://scripts.cgispy.com/auctions/auction.pl?action=all&user=maryd there's an auction going on to raise money for Kim P, a fanfic writer who needs to have surgery to keep from completely losing her vision. Lots of books and other goodies -- including this awesomely cool Kiwi Gift Pack, donated by moi:

http://scripts.cgispy.com/auctions/auction.pl?category=Other_Cool_Items&user=maryd&item=1254629785

C'mon, please! Get some really cool stuff, and help out a fellow writer so she doesn't go blind.

what I've been reading

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:00:02 GMT

Wild Seed, by Octavia Butler: Superb. Brilliantly written, a mix of SF and alternate history; engaging, believable, and with finely drawn parallels to the male/female and white/black power struggles throughout history. One of her finest works, I think. *****

The Icarus Girl, by Helen Oyeyemi: An astonishingly good first novel by a very young writer. The POV changes were sometimes mishandled, and the ending seemed a little weak, but overall a very good read. I look forward to see what she produces next. ****

Farthing, by Jo Walton. I liked this book even more than I expected to. The alternate history aspect was very well presented and believable, the characters vividly drawn, and the change in POV from first-person Lucy to third-person Carmichael was excellently handled. The ending, while sad, was utterly believable. I'll be looking for the rest of this series. *****

Skin Folk, by Nalo Hopkinson. An amazingly varied collection of short stories, but with a strong interconnected theme. All the stories are well written and imaginative, but I particularly appreciated the ones with the unusual, strong dialectic voice: they're not as easy to read, but the vivid atmosphere evoked by the unusual vocabulary and sentence structure had a powerful impact. I'd like to read one of her novels. ****

Footnotes to Sex, by Mia Farlane. This book was not anything like what I expected -- or anything like the back cover copy describes. It's well written: clearly differentiated characters, believable setting, realistic dialogue, well -edited prose, consistent voice. But the characters are tedious and distasteful, the storyline dull and repetetive, and the entire book seems pointless. Not an author I'll be looking for more works from. **

IBARW

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:00:42 GMT

It's International Blog Against Racism Week. (Thanks to jenwrites for alerting me to this.)

I'm listening and reading and trying to learn. Thanks to all the people who post their experiences, their advice, their do's and do-not's. It helps.

I'd appreciate novel recommendations. I'm sadly aware that most of the books on my shelves are by white authors featuring white characters. I'd like to expand my reading, so if anyone can suggest books by AoC and/or with CoC that they've found to be enjoyable reads, I'd be grateful.

Chocolate Cake A La Awesome

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:34:44 GMT

Pre-heat oven to 325 F / 170 C.

Grease and flour a large 10-inch tube-pan/funnel pan/ring tin/bundt pan.

With a mixer on high, cream together in a large mixing bowl:
1 1/2 cups (325 g) butter
2 1/2 cups sugar

Add:
2 teaspoons vanilla

Add, one at a time, on high:
5 eggs

In another bowl, sift together:
2 cups flour
1 cup cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Into a measuring cup, put 1 1/4 cup milk.

With the mixer on low, add some of the flour/cocoa, then some milk, then some flour/cocoa, then some milk, then some flour/cocoa, then some milk, then the last of the flour/cocoa. Mix until well-blended. (Make sure you don't have flour gunked onto the bottom of the bowl.)

Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake 60 - 70 minutes until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. After removing cake from oven, wait about 15 minutes before removing the ring from the cake pan. No need to frost this cake or sift sugar over it; it's rich and moist and just sweet enough on its own.

Corned Beef A La Awesome

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:32:00 GMT

Corned beef (aka corned silverside) can be turned into total awesomeness thusly:

Cook your corned beef as per normal in a pot of water (with potatoes, onions, bay leaves, whatever you fancy).

Mix together 1/2 cup bourbon or brandy, 1 cup brown sugar, 2 tablespoons mustard, and 1/2 cup apple juice or thin applesauce. Preheat oven to 400 F / 200 C.

Remove beef from pot of water and put into a roasting pan, preferably on a rack. Baste with several spoonfuls of the bourbon/apple sauce. Pop beef into oven. Every 5 - 10 minutes for a half-hour period, baste the beef with more sauce. At the end you should have about half the sauce left.

Remove beef from oven, slice, and serve with leftover sauce poured over slices of beef.