Cottaging

Making cheese is fun, but it doesn't really work well with a low fat diet. Similarly, making beer is fun but doesn't really work well with a low calorie low alcohol diet. For the last few months I've tried flipping diets depending on what I'm going to consume next, but the sad reality is that this doesn't really work. Shocking, no?

In light of this I looked up some healthy cheeses. It turns out cottage cheese is a very healthy alternative to regular cheese, made from skimmed milk instead of full cream. There are actually a couple of types of cottage cheese - long-set small curd cheese and short-set large curd cheese. Long-set cheese is made by heating skimmed milk up to close to boiling point, curdling the milk with vinegar or lime juice and letting the milk slowly set over four or five hours (incidentally if you then press the curds you make paneer). Short-set cheese is made by using rennet (and in some recipes a starter) to help thicken the cheese, and so the curds set quicker and the curds are larger.

Being the impatient type with a freezer full of rennet short-set cheese looked the way to go, so I knocked up a batch of cottage cheese on Sunday. It was surprising how well the curds formed - I always thought it was the fats that formed the basis of the curd but it looks to be more based on the proteins in the milk - the fat just adds the flavour.

This is the cheese after the curds were cut and then cooked - you can see why cottage cheese is also known as 'popcorn cheese'.

The cottage cheese you buy is normally mixed with other things to give a lumpy sauce, and having sampled this I'm not surprised as it was pretty rubbery & tasteless. Fortunately the cottage cheese wasn't the end goal - I'd also read about a style of cheese called 'hoop cheese' or 'farmers cheese', which is pressed cottage cheese. This seemed perfect - a kind of hard cheddar-ish cheese but with virtually no fat. So I pressed my cheese curds - possibly a little too enthusiastically it seems. 

After a few days in a container in the fridge a rind of sorts was starting to form, but essentially I'd managed to produce a disk of something resembling a large hockey puck, and tasting much the same. More experimentation is required! Or preferably, more exercise and better cheese.....

Resolution Run

The run this morning was the 'Resolution Run', a 5.5km or 11km fun run. We both went for the 5.5km event - me to run, Liz to walk - and once we both recovered from the early start we enjoyed it. Although in some ways the start wasn't early enough - the temperature must have been hitting 30 degrees at 7.30am! I managed to come in with an elapsed time of 29 minutes dead, which I was pretty happy about

Liz also did well and battled a sore toe to come in just under the hour.

It was a very good natured event, although some of the roadies coming the other way who were confronted with over a thousand weaving runners weren't so impressed. It was also strange at the end because there was no queue at the coffee cart - not what I'm used to with cycling events! Now to recover from the dehydration headache - maybe I should have skipped a couple of those beers last night.....

Early start

7am on a Sunday and we're in the city, along with 1400 other people gathered for a fun run. Not sure where the fun is going to come from :)

Does home-made cheese pay it's own whey?

The economics of homebrew are fairly obvious. The govt gouges a huge chunk of tax from brewers (far more than for small wine manufacturers) and by making your own you avoid that tax burden. An initial outlay of $80 gets you a brew kit with all the gear you need to make 20litres of reasonable beer - so a cost of $4 /litre or a just over a dollar a stubbie. After a few kit brews you can graduate to partial-mash brewing and make pretty much the beer you want to drink for at most $60. My last brew gave me 23 litres of 6.5% bitter that tasted better than most mainstream domestic beers - definitely cost effective.

Cheesemaking is different because of the lack of tax. The major cost is that of the milk, and that depends on what milk you buy. The best for cheesemaking is non-homogenised whole-cream milk, which means the cream hasn't been mixed in with the milk (it's 'milk like you used to get in bottles with cream on top'). Note it's still pasteurised, because unlike healthy offerings like cigarettes, high-sugar foods and caffeine-laden energy drinks it is illegal to sell raw milk in Australia. It's hard to get nonhomogenised milk that isn't organic (and hence expensive), but you can use homogenised milk and a dose of calcium chloride to keep the cost down.

I made halloumi the other day with 4 litres of homogenised milk and 2 litres of goats milk - so total cost of around $12 ($8 of it the goats milk). That gave me almost 700g of halloumi (the redness in the top disc is due to diced chilli mixed into the cheese)

and almost 100g of ricotta. That's pretty much breaking even given the price of halloumi in the supermarkets, but of course there's also the satisfaction of knowing it's home-made. If I hadn't used the goats milk it would have been significantly cheaper, but I guess you have to pay a premium for the great taste of goat.....

Back at work

I say - anyone for tennis?

It's the week of the BrisbaneInternational Tennis Tournament this week, and as the tennis centre is only a couple of km away we thought we'd nip down and check it out today.

There are two ticketing options. One gives you access to a nominated seat in the Pat Rafter Arena, where the famous people play ($50). The other is a 'ground ticket', which gives you access to all of the other courts so you can watch games by lower seeded players and also if you're lucky catch the stars warming up ($15). Not being massive tennis fans, we decided to take ground tickets.

The main problem was the sun - most of the viewing areas were outdoors, so when the sun came out it quickly became painful.

 The courts had shade cloths at their corners, so people ended up forming a chevron out of the sun, all peering over each others shoulders to figure out who was playing (as in the bottom right below)

 Although the urge to wear silly hats was still overwhelming to some

We still got to see a few famous players, notably British player Andy Murray (in true UK tabloid style, he is British until he loses a match and then he strangely becomes Scottish)

 We also saw a game between Zapp and Andreev, although we're still not quite sure who was who

  

 and in the ladies tournament, King vs Czing

I've never been to a tennis tournament before so it was interesting to see the routines and social niceties that take place (SIT DOWN IN FRONT!). For instance the main arena only allowed people in and out during breaks in play, so there was always a queue of people standing outside the doors with drinks watching the game on the TVabove the door.

 It was an interesting day, although we both got pretty battered by the sun and were happy to leave in the mid-afternoon. But there were still people outside the gates wishing they were inside



Happy New Year!