Save money: make it yourself, the queso fresco edition

To continue the theme of "making stuff", I want to disabuse you of the notion that mozzarella is the easiest cheese to make at home. It is, in fact, not. Easiest cheese? Queso Fresco.

Do you know what I love about the internet? The fact that you can type something like, "how to make queso fresco" into your computer and it will return results. God, I love google.

Anyway, I am not going to pretend that I did anything other than simply type in "how to make queso fresco", and then followed the instructions, but I am going to share my experience following those instructions with you here.

As I said in a previous post, D and I are attempting to live off my SNAP benefits. One of the struggles with this is the fact that I love cheese. Like, love to eat cheese on top of everything, or love to eat just slices of cheese and pretend that that is a balanced meal. This becomes a problem when cheese costs upwards of $6 a pound, and you are out of SNAP benefits and you still have two weeks left in the month. I had found a lovely recipe on how to make saag paneer on the gluten free girls website (seriously, who doesn't love her?), and that was fairly easy (seriously). This put the notion into my head that making queso fresco to sprinkle on our tacos (which are our go-to, end-of-the-month meals) might be equally easy.

How easy, you ask? So easy.

Lets talk about making cheese for a second. Confession: I don't really get it. How in the hell are they taking milk and making glorious cheddary goodness? Couldn't tell you. Science, I assume. To make mozzarella, the "easiest of cheeses" (lies!), you have to purchase rennet off the internet. Who even knows what that is?!? I for sures do not.

So yes, paneer and queso fresco. Here is what you do. Ready? Because it's gonna be crazy.

Boil milk.

Add acid (for paneer it's lemon juice, for queso fresco, it's vinegar).

stir so you are gathering curds together.

pour through a cheese cloth.

let it drain.

You've got cheese.

Seriously. It's that easy. Queso fresco is supposed to be a salty cheese so I suggest you add a bunch of salt to the milk before you boil it. Also, I have used however much milk I had left in the gallon, or however much fit in the pot, with no regard to measurement and it's turned out perfectly every time. Just add your acid until you see curds forming. For 8 cups of milk, they suggest at least 1/4 cup of lemon juice or three tablespoons of vinegar. I added about 1 tablespoon of salt to the queso fresco, but would suggest using more if you try it.

And you should. TRY IT!

Save money: make it yourself

This year, while doing AmeriCorps, I have had the wonderful experience of qualifying for federal benefits in the form of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, or Food Stamps. Federal benefits, in general, are confusing. Qualifying for them is confusing and the paper work is confusing and the actual tangible benefits to the user are often so small as to make the whole thing not really seem worth it. Some little old ladies only get $28 a month after having to fax something like 30 pieces of paper, from bank statements, to rent bills, to medical expenses. It becomes rather daunting.

Now, I realize that some people have issues with federal benefits. I don't want to get into that at all on this blog. To see why SNAP is a good thing for a struggling economy, go read this article.

What I do want to talk about is how D and I have been striving to live off my food stamp allotment for the last couple of months. We cheat, in that we go out to eat, but for the most part we are trying to use up all the food we have in new and creative ways and to save ourselves as much money as possible.

I am awarded $200 every month, and it hits my account on the 13th. Which means, as of right now, the fridge is looking pretty empty. And yes, we did go to the store to buy a gallon of milk yesterday with money that didn't come off of the Lone Star Card, and yes, we did go out to lunch today, and yes, we are going to a friends house for dinner tonight, but mostly, I think we're doing pretty well.

One of my new pet projects has been making my own tortilla chips. Corn tortillas are hellacheap and can be bought 90 at a time and frozen. I know tortilla chips aren't that expensive, but I firmly believe that home made, fresh, baked instead of fried, tortilla chips are just an all around better idea than buying a bag at the store. And they have to be cheaper. They just have to be.

Here is how I make them:

I line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and preheat the oven to about 350. You might want to make this not as hot, since my chips always turn out a little browner than D likes. Maybe 300?

Then I put a little olive oil in a bowl with some salt. You can add other spices if you like. One gluten free cook book that I own suggested some lime juice and cumin. Those were pretty tasty too. Yesterday I just tossed some garlic salt in with the oil.

Then I tear up my tortillas. If you have kitchen scissors, I'm sure this will be super easy, but I don't and they tear so easily that I don't even worry about it.

Then, using a basting brush thingy, coat them in oil and cook for about 10 - 15 minutes. You might want to turn them half way through, you might not.

Obviously, my recipe is not exact. I think I actually suck at recipes, but I like to try stuff myself.

Make your own salsa

You really should.

D and I eat a lot of chips and salsa. Like, a real lot. And I am constantly trying to find ways to make things cheaper/making things myself. I once briefly worked in a restaurant that made their own fresh salsa and squirreled away their recipe for use in my daily life. It's totally easy. You can do it too.

All you need is:

Vinegar (regular white, though apple cider might work too.)

Tomatoes (fresh, canned, whole, diced, whole, whatever.)

Cilantro

Jalapeno (or two if you like it spicy)

Garlic

Onions

Spices

And a blender.

We use Spike brand spices because that is what they used in the restaurant I worked in. Also, Spike has like a 37 ingredient list on the back, all of which are amazing, and none of which I have in my every day spice cabinet. Plus, it tastes awesome.

We usually make an entire blender full. We use one bunch of cilantro, two smallish white onions, four or five cloves of garlic (because we like it!), one seeded jalapeno (because I don't like it), two small cans of whole tomatoes, and one large can of diced tomatoes (this ratio changes depending on what we have/remember to buy), a healthy dollop of vinegar, and a nice big sprinkle of Spike. Ta-da! Salsa! Then we freeze half of it to be eaten later (usually later this week, if we're honest).

I was trying to calculate how much this costs us, but I'm not very good at this whole "math" stuff. Jalapeno, 3 cents. Cilantro, 24 cents. Cans of tomatoes, buck fifty. Onions . . . a dollar? Garlic, nothing? A couple of cents? How much does a garlic clove cost? Spike is pricey, about 4 dollars, but you're only using a little at a time, so it doesn't really effect the thriftiness of this recipe. I'm going to say under $3. And it makes a ton. Plus, its super good.

Oh my goodness, blogs are too much work. Half of the time I am convinced that I am wildly clever and quirky and every passing thought I have is hilarious and worth publishing for the world to see. The other half of the time I think that no matter what I do it will be less polished than 99% of the internet and anyone who wants to know anything about me can just Google things like, "lack of time management", "yellow", "sleep deficiency", "spider solitaire", and "do it (cut your hair, make your own (clothes, lotion, smoothies, laundry detergent)) yourself" and come up with a reasonable approximation of me. Good luck with that.

Otherwise, it is Spring and I am spending a large portion of my waking life trying to be healthy. For serious. Just when I think that I have kind of gotten a handle on something, something else crops up and I think, yeah, that probably is because I've been sick for X amount of years (the X might be a million), and my body is crapping out on me in any and every fashion available to it. It is kind of awesome. But not really.

Yesterday my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew came to visit. They live about an hour north of me and rarely have time off or choose to leave their circle and life and home. I felt totally honored that they would choose to spend a day off with me.

I love this little man.

This is a busy month at work, with special events every weekend (not the least of which is Holy Week), and I feel busy. D's brother gets married in Little Rock, Arkansas this weekend so we will be driving there on Friday. I hope we get to hit up the Bill Clinton Museum. That would be amazing.

Also, we went to see both Hanna and Arthur this weekend and both were awesome. Way to go movies! AND, we finally are going to go see Jane Eyre on Thursday night when we drive up to Dallas. I am so excited I feel the need to write in bold.

In other news, since the passing of Brian Jacques I felt the need to read the Redwall books. I never read them as a child and our library helpfully carries all of them. I am loving these books. They are fabulous. They are deep, and gritty, wonderfully funny, full of community and hard work, accepting of all kinds, sizes, and types of animals. So worth reading. Especially if you are a seven year old boy.

Buh. The end!

Friday's are sauce days?

I think I need some structure to help me post things in a blog. I feel a certain responsibility to this here blog, and sometimes I feel guilty for neglecting it. Which is ridiculous. If there is anything in my life I don't need it is internet guilt.
Regardless, I have been thinking about blog structure, and by that I mean a set schedule of some kind, which would make the refracted bits of me that are blog entries a bit more manageable. I have no intentions of developing a blog that will make me money or become my day job or anything like that, but I would like it to serve some purpose other being my own pretend world. I will continue to give this thought.

I read the wonderful postings at Nourished Kitchen. Today she posted this recipe for preserved lemon and mint allioli. What the what? This sounds amazing, never mind that I have no idea what an allioli is, let alone a preserved lemon. Turns out it is a sauce. Of some kind. Probably. (See the lovely photo from her website?)

I can't tell you how many times in the last couple of years I have bemoaned my inability to make sauces. It usually sounds something like, "Man, I wish I was French!", and usually has something to do with the fact that it is my turn to make dinner again and all I have is rice/lentils/quinoa and I can't think of anything to go with them and then I panic just make soup. So. One of my goals for my future life is to learn how to make sauces from scratch. Drew likes sauces to a kind of ridiculous degree. It has spawned fights. Really, I should make him learn how to make sauces. That will be the next step.
So! I need your help! I have a list of three or maybe four sauces that I think I can tackle right off the bat, but would love, love some slightly more exotic ones. I'm not certain about that allioli just yet. We'll tackle the issue with preserved lemons first and then maybe we will see.
List:
Mayo
Peanut sauce
Salsa varieties
yellow curry

What else?

Lotion attempt #1

Work was, hilariously, delayed yesterday. We opened late and left early. Why? Because it was cold. Pretty cold. Not even very cold. In the 20's cold.

Living in Texas is unique for so many reasons.

Well, I made body moisturizer per my previous intentions.
Here are my handwritten instructions. My internet at home is spotty at best, and I felt it was safer to have the instructions readily available.

Bethel found my bee's wax, which had been stored on the top of Jen's fridge for the last almost year. Apparently Kris rescued it for me when we all moved out of stillwater farms, and that is where it ended up. A giant block of bee's wax
I am so grateful for all the free things I get in my life. If you stop and think about it, so many things are just gifts. Like the jar's salsa comes in. I know, technically, that isn't free because you are paying for it, but really, all I wanted was salsa and what I got was this awesome jar.
Also, this blender was a gift from my sister, who is in Asia.

I added my oatmeal powder to the water. I know it looks kind of gross, but it seemed to work fine and was completely dissolved.

I chose to use coconut oil for this experiment because a) I had it and b) it is super good for your skin.
I think this may have been a mistake.

I don't have any pictures of the finished product because I haven't quite finished it. I stupidly, didn't think about the fact that coconut oil is solid at room temperature and only oily at warmer temperatures. The body lotion that I ended up with has the consistency of a crayon unless I sit it in front of the space heater for a few minutes. Then it is pretty much just coconut oil again.

Oops. I will try again.
Things I learned:

• Wax is hard to get off of dishes and dangerous to put down the sink. This was stressful for me.
• My blender, though wonderfully free, isn't that great. Varying speeds preferred.
• add extra wax to be on the safe side. It will never ever thicken into anything resembling lotion if you don't put in enough wax.
  

So. A little bit of research into substitute oils will be done and another try will be had. After all, I have five pounds of bee's wax to use up.

homemade is well-made

I have been notified that my camera is shipped! Hurray!

I wandered into some very cool things the other day. Firstly, I found this blog which I find sometimes very silly and sometimes wuuuuuunderfully helpful. The most wonderful of the wonderful finds was this post on making your own body lotion. Amazing. I have adult eczema which, I assure you, is a pain in the ass, and I spend just all of my money on expensive lotions and moisturizers. To have the ability to make them myself?! And for an extremely cheap amount of money!? Glory be. Also, I recently acquired a lotion specifically meant for eczema treatment, meaning it is 1% colloidal oatmeal. This particular lotion is upwards of $13 for 8 oz. That is ridiculous. So I found this: how to make your own oatmeal bath (on babyparenting.com, obviously, because that is who has eczema. Babies.). This teaches you how to make colloidal oatmeal in your blender which you can then (I imagine) easily add to your homemade moisturizer.

I will let you know how this goes. Or, maybe I won't and you will just receive a surprise gift of homemade moisturizer in your mailbox.

Also, through some friends blogs, I found this gem of a gluten-free blog. Flat bread recipe looks amazing, though I'm not sure my hand-me-down blender is entirely up for the job.

In other news, I got my hair cut. At the mall. I have been needing a hair cut for months now. About five, I'd say. Maybe eight (how long ago did you move, Haley?). I cut it myself (see something in a previous post about self hair cuttery), with minimal success (I mean, it was shorter) but have recently been craving a real, stylized, posh sort of hairs on my head. D and I have a friend who works in the mall. His girlfriend also works in the mall and cuts hair. Well. Plus, since she is a friend (or friend of a friend) she made it so that I can actually afford getting my hair cut at the mall. And, I like it. A lot.

Do it yourownself, dammit.

Hi. Again.

So I spend a lot of my internet time looking at DIY wedding sites. It is a hobby of mine which I have indulged in for years. I also like to read the wedding magazines in B&N whenever I find myself there.

I love this one.

I really like weddings. Really really. I will go to almost any wedding if I can snag an invitation. I'm not entirely sure of my motives for the wedding loving. The obvious is probably true; that I am a wedding-craving girl-loony. I hope that there is more to it than that. I like to think that I am incredibly crafty and that plumbing the depths of the wild world web will help me to perfect my craft.
Confession: I am not actually crafty.
I'm not sure what I am exactly, but it isn't crafty. I think I am more . . . spontaneous. Or dauntless. Whatever word means recklessly optimistic. Like cutting my own hair, or turning some clothing into other clothing. I'm 100% certain I can do it, regardless of the end product. Hair grows, you know. Always. I have bins full of half completed attempts at turning pants into skirts. Does this stop me from starting another pant/skirt transformation? No. No it does not.

However, true crafts thwart me. Case in point: damn paper cranes. Oh sure, they are crane-like, completed and replete across the back of my printer, but are they crisp and clean looking? Would you want them anywhere where some-other actually had to look that them? No. No, most definitely not. Of course, I am using recycled printer paper from my recycle drawer. I like to think that origami paper would slide into its corners in a much more graceful manner. Don't you think?

Regardless, weddings. Weddings are wonderful. I was glad to learn that Drew likes weddings too. We're actually totally snobby. We sit and critique choices in music, food, colors, flowers, blah blah blah. Which is a little bit hilarious, if you think about it. We are unmarried and snide. I think we would make a wonderful wedding planning team. We are eclectic and strange. So, I guess, if our wedding should ever roll around, you all should strive to be there. Because it will be awesome. I will make thousands of paper cranes, just promise not to look at them too closely.

This is my favorite new thing on www.soyoureengayged.com. Click it. I think I would get married just so I could get a nice letter from Obama. That might be an understatement. I might sell my kidneys for a nice letter from Obama. You know how that goes.


EDIT: I mentioned my "crafting" tendencies to Drew, namely the skirt/pants/skirt/pants cycle, and his response was, "Isn't that one of the clear definitions of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again but expecting the outcome to change?"
So. Yeah.