Cheesy Goodness – Recipes to Rival: February Edition
There are two kinds of food hate. There’s food that you dislike the taste and/or texture of…liver, lima beans, split pea soup. Then there’s the mental-block food hate…or should I say mental-block food “dislike with the passion of a thousand burning suns” (we don’t say “hate” in this house!) For me, this latter category includes bugs (no matter how much chocolate is involved) and cottage cheese.
While I personally haven’t ever met anyone who thinks the first item on that list is strange, I have met many who are surprised at my devout dislike of cottage cheese. I can’t explain it. I just know that the thought of eating it makes me feel violently ill.
When I was little, Mom used to make cottage cheese salad – a mixture of cottage cheese and fruit cocktail. When this so-called “salad” appeared on the dinner table, I immediately started in with the excuses. I wasn’t hungry. I had a big lunch. My stomach hurt. Anything … ANYTHING to avoid cottage cheese! But Mom wasn’t dumb. She saw right through it and always called my bluff. I was eating dinner, including a healthy portion of the dreaded cottage cheese salad and that was that.
Other than that icky concoction, the only thing my enormous cottage cheese dislike affected was lasagna. Mom’s recipe called for cottage cheese. I didn’t (and still don’t) care that you can’t actually taste the cottage cheese. Just like every kind of mental block dislike, the knowledge of its presence made it inedible. Still does.
I was quite old, probably over 18, before I discovered that lasagna could be made with a cheese that wasn’t cottage. Ricotta became my hero. Ricotta made lasagna delicious. I suddenly knew why everyone went cuckoo for lasagna.
So…fast forward to now. The Recipes to Rival challenge for February was a two-parter. #1 – Make my own ricotta cheese and #2 – Use it in a recipe.
Today…Making the ricotta. Tomorrow…the meal.
Here’s the official R2R post for making ricotta. You’ll need 1 gallon of milk and 1 quart of buttermilk. As long as neither one is ultra-pasturized, it should work.
Follow the directions…it takes about 1 – 2 hours, depending on how aggressive you get with the temperature dial on your stove. Mine was done in just under 2 hours. But it was easy time, just stirring occasionally and monitoring the thermometer.
1 gallon of milk and 1 quart of buttermilk yielded about 3 pounds (6 cups) of ricotta.
Tags: recipes to rival
Recipes | greengrassliving | 
February 28, 2009 11:48 am
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