Say cheese!

Wyatt got to visit a dairy cow and he learned to say, “Mooooooo!”

Justin and I decided it was about time to dabble a bit in cheese making so this weekend, we dove right on in. I stopped at a wine maker supply shop on my last trip to Atlanta and picked up some cheese cloth, citric acid, and rennet (a cheese enzyme). We used a simple recipe like the one here. After reading the recipe, we decided we didn’t even need the cheese cloth, but it will be great to have on hand for future use. Since I included the link to the recipe, I’m not putting step by step instructions, just some photos of the process.

Measuring and pouring out the milk

 

Adding the dissolved rennet

 

Cutting the curds

Draining the curds

Now the fun part: Stretch…

 

Stretch….

 

Stretch!

 

VOILA! 30 minutes later and you have fresh mozzarella!

I paid less than $10 for the materials, which will probably make 30-40 batches of cheese. Factor in a gallon of milk when you catch it on sale for $3 and you have great fresh inexpensive cheese. I think the next batch, I might work in some spices and have flavored mozzarella. Basil might be perfect!

Bonus: We made ricotta out of the remaining whey but it didn’t turn out to well, but whey is rich in protein so we poured it into a bowl for our chickens. They loved it!

 

Car Seat Stickers

In the world of a million and one fabulous ideas—err—Pinterest, I happily pin ideas that I just know I will get to one day. Except I never do. There are countless recipes, home décor tips, and printables I tell myself I will definitely do but never quite get the execution part of it done. This is one of the few pins I jumped right on.

I saw a pin with an idea of putting emergency contact stickers on your baby’s car seats and/or carriers. I was immediately intrigued and clicked through to T.E.+baby and downloaded the adorable template. I pasted the JPG file into Microsoft Word and added a text box over the print so I could type all of Wyatt’s information in.

Here’s what I ended up with:

I stuck it on Wy’s carseat yesterday and feel a bit better that if some terrible wreck would knock me out, at least someone would be able to get in touch with our emergency contacts to take care of Wyatt.

Country boy at heart

Justin and I took our little farm boy out in the front yard to play Wednesday night with his tractors and the old fire hydrant Justin turned into a spigot. We also plopped a straw hat from work on him. I think we have a little country backwoods boy on our hands!

    

Wrapping up July

Here is another big glut of pictures from July.

We played hard with friends and family at the park by our house, at Indian Lake in Moultrie, with silly glasses, and new diapers fashioned into hats.

           

Here’s a handy tip: When you’re being sweet and making lemon bars from scratch for your husband and find yourself in need of a juicer, grab a beater from a hand mixer. This worked great!