Adventures in Real Food

Weird happenings in my kitchen today

Today I made yogurt cheese! The claim on all these health food websites is that yogurt cheese is very similar in taste and texture to cream cheese. Unlike cream cheese, it's full of probiotics. It can take the place of cream cheese in any recipe as long as it doesn't need to be melted. And it's super simple to make: pour a container of yogurt into a piece of cheesecloth (or a cotton kitchen towel, if you're like me and have no idea where to buy cheesecloth), suspend it over a container, and let the liquid whey drain out. I hung up the ends of the ends of the towel in order to keep the bottom out of the whey. I plan to make veggie and fruit dips from the yogurt cheese, but I'm hanging on to the whey, too. It's good for added protein in smoothies and many other recipes

It only took a few hours for a 32-ounce container of plain Dannon yogurt to drain. It made almost 2 cups of yogurt cheese and a little over 12 ounces of whey. I had some of the yogurt cheese with celery. It's really good! It does indeed taste like cream cheese, albeit a bit tangier. I can't wait to see if it passes the kid taste test.

This little real food experiment went much better than the one I attempted yesterday: making my own chicken stock. I buy cartons of chicken broth or stock regularly, but it never occurred to me how much more economical and healthful it would be to make my own. The directions I followed to make the stock stated to let it cook for up to 24 hours in order to extract the most nutrients from the chicken bones. I brought the leftover carcass from a roasted chicken to a boil, cleared the area of anything remotely flammable, and set the burner on my stove to its lowest setting overnight. (I figure it's no more dangerous than leaving a crock pot on while I'm gone during the day.) When I woke up this morning, the pot wasn't so much as simmering! I stuck my meat thermometer in there and it barely registered 140 degrees. Salmonella city! Into the trash it went. Such a disappointment, but I plan to try again tomorrow.