I love to try new recipes here because if I don't, I'll easily get tired of the food we have available. Last month I tried my hand at making mozzarella from powdered milk since we don't have access to fresh milk. We can only buy long life milk or powdered milk in the stores. Those of you who have read our Fruitfulness Newsletter may have been wondering how the mozzarella would turn out. (If you don't subscribe to our ministry blog at www.heartsforharvest.com, you may have missed our annual newsletter called Fruitfulness. Click the link to read it here: Fruitfulness Newsletter 2011.) Here are some photos of my first attempt at homemade mozzarella made from powdered milk...
Left photo: I carefully followed all of the instructions-even used my handy dandy thermometer to get the mozzarella heated to just the right temperature!
Right photo: The finished product...it ended up more like ricotta cheese, so I made lasagna instead of pizza!
While trying to find ways to use my sourdough starter, I stumbled upon a recipe for Sourdough Potato bread. It turned out to be pretty good...sorry, we ate it up before I thought about taking photos of it. But, I did take some photos of the Sourdough English muffins that I've made for breakfast the past 2 mornings. This morning, I even added some cinnamon and Craisins to the dough! Yum!
Last week, Tyren decided to buy some beef from the market. This isn't the kind of beef you're used to. It was very fresh beef. Here, when you buy meat from the market, you buy it by the kilo (~2.2 lbs.) and it's just all cut up into unidentified chunks of meat, fat and bones. I decided to try to make it stretch for a few meals, so I added some of it to a pot of beans which lasted two meals. Then I used the rest of it in another new recipe which I altered slightly. My recipe was inspired by an Amish recipe for Chicken Stoltfuz which is a chicken stew served over a pie crust baked crisp like crackers. Instead of chicken stew, I made a beef stew and baked up some of my homemade pie crust until it was crisp like crackers. It was pretty good! My kids loved the pie crust baked like crackers and have been asking me to make it again as a snack. That meal also lasted for two meals. (Whenever we eat meat, which is not as often as I'd like :), I try to use it in ways that will last for more than one meal.)
The last new recipe idea I tried recently was Eggplant Parmesan-without the cheese, using my homemade breadcrumbs. Tyren found one huge eggplant in the market and that one eggplant served us with Eggplant Parmesan sans cheese for 2 meals!
Oh, I almost forgot about my homemade vanilla! Last year, a visitor gave us a gift of real vanilla beans from Madagascar! I looked online to see what I needed to do to make my own vanilla extract, and to my surprise, found out I would probably need to make a trip to the local bar. Well, being a missionary, that wouldn't look very well here. Fortunately, I was able to purchase a bottle of vodka from a grocery store in Blantyre on one of our trips to Malawi late last year. Last week, I dropped the vanilla beans into the vodka bottle and 3 months from now, we will have our own homemade vanilla. It's as easy as that!
Well, until next blog...
God bless!
Tiffany
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