Drunken Pears, aka, Pears in Port Wine

 This was a wonderful recipe I took to my book club this fall. Our pear tree was loaded this year, so much so that we were giving away pears by the bag-full. Sadly, Fannie only has a few pear recipes. But this one was very good. Would definitely make it over and over!

Ingredients:

• About 1 lb. pears, peeled, cored and sliced in quarters horizontally. I was using drops, so mine weren't perfect quarters, but large chunks. 
• 1/2 c. water
• 2 tbsp sugar
• pinch of lemon rind, or dash of lemon juice
• Port wine/red wine

Instructions:

1. In a sauce pan, combine water and sugar and bring just to a boil
2. Add pears, cover and cook until tender but still firm
3. Place pears in a serving dish (I used my 8x8 pyrex bc I was transporting it to book club. A pie pan would work, too)
4. Pour wine over pears and let sit for at least 1 hr. Fannie calls for port wine, but I didn't have any, so just used a sweet red someone had given us that we had opened and not finished. 

It turned out great! Everyone loved it, even my mom, who doesn't drink wine. The pears really absorbed the flavor and were such a pretty color, too. It looked as good as it tasted. Now if only I can find my camera with the pictures on it...

Homemade Cream Cheese

A while back, I found a recipe for making your own cream cheese (on Pinterest, of course). I pinned it, and a while later, found it forgotten like so many other pins. I read the recipe and it sounded really easy. So I went to my local natural foods store, where they told me they didn't sell rennet and that they didn't know of anywhere locally that sold it. WHA???

So, I gave up on it for a while. Then, a friend of mine brought some homemade cheese to a party. Weirdly enough, when I asked where she got her cultures, she said she got them at the brewing store. So, I went to the brewing store and amid all the beer-making tools, found rennet and cheese cultures. I got some and then got busy with canning. Finally, over Labor Day Weekend, I had enough time to make the cheese. At that point, I'd had an 8 oz. container of heavy cream floating around the fridge for over a month!

When I got around to making it, I couldn't believe I'd put it off so long. It is beyond simple. I thought it was going to be really expensive, and therefore something I'd only make once, but in the end, it ended up making so much more cream cheese than I thought, so it wasn't even expensive.

For a cost breakdown I got:
1 gallon of organic milk for about $8.
1 cup of organic cream for $2.
1 packet buttermilk culture for $1.
1 bottle of rennet for $8, but since I only used 3 drops, that's about, I don't know, a nickel.

So the total for what I used was $11.05

I got:
3 8 oz. packets organic cream cheese
1 quart buttermilk
1.5 quarts of whey for cooking
1 quart milk left for everyday use

Not bad, if you ask me!

For this, you will need:
butter muslin or fine muslin--I couldn't find anything called butter muslin, so I just bought some muslin with a tight weave and the lady at the fabric counter said she made cheese and it would work. It was just called original muslin, I think, or maybe fine muslin.

1/2 gallon whole milk, at room temperature (pasteurized but not ultrapasteurized)
1 c. heavy cream, at room temperature (pasteurized but not ultrapasteurized, if you can find it. I could only find ultrapasteurized organic cream, so I had to use that, and it worked fine).
3 drops rennet
3 tbsp. buttermilk
salt to taste

Opening the cloth...and here it is!

 So, pour your half gallon of milk and your cream into a large bowl and stir it. Let it sit until it's at room temperature--I think ours was about 75 or 78 when we decided to go ahead.

Add your buttermilk and stir until well mixed, maybe 30 seconds.

Add 3 drops of rennet and stir gently for 1 minute.

Cover the bowl and let it sit for 24 hours undisturbed.

At this point, it will look about like yogurt.

Dampen your cheese cloth (butter muslin) ahead of time, or when you're ready for it. Then lay it over a colander with the center of the cloth in the colander basin.

Gently spoon the yogurt-like mixture into cheese cloth and secure the ends and tie so it hangs in a bag. 

Hang it from a sturdy cabinet door handle or somewhere it can hang undisturbed for another 24 hours. We used a steamer basket instead of a colander, with the steamer pan under the basket. Then we just hung it over the steamer for 24 hours (NOT ON THE STOVE). That way, it could drip into the bowl but nothing else got into the whey, like fruit flies or other critters.

After 24 hours, unwrap your baby cream cheese! It will be soft and pliable. It was a bit sour tasting until we stirred in the salt, and then it tasted just like store cream cheese. The texture is a bit different since it doesn't have gelatin added. It's super creamy and delicious. And so simple--just set it up and leave it and voila, organic cream cheese!

Make sure you put the whey that dripped out into the fridge, too. You can use it in bread or pancakes or soup in place of stock.

Poached Eggs

I made these on a busy morning when I realized we only had one egg. So I cooked it up quickly and ate it atop a sliced tomato from our garden.

For this recipe, you will need:

• eggs (however many  you want)
• vinegar (I used apple cider, since that's what I had--1/2 tsp. per egg)
• a bit of salt (about 1/8 tsp. per egg)
• Large sliced tomato (optional)

The egg stuck to the bottom a bit so I had to coax it away.

Directions:

1. Fill a skillet or saucepan with a few inches of water.
2. Add the vinegar to help the egg coagulate.
3. Heat the water until it simmers.
4. Break each egg into a saucer, slide one by one into the water.
5. Add salt.
6. Spoon water over eggs for 3 minutes until set OR turn off heat, cover, and let sit for 5 mins.
7. Remove one by one with a slotted spoon.
8. Set each egg on a large slice of tomato and top with salt or seasoning salt (I use Tony Chachery's)

Okay, so I completely overcooked this one because somehow I missed the OR part of the time for the recipe. So I heated the egg for 3 minutes, then covered and let it sit for 5 minutes more. The yolk was completely solid instead of nice and runny how poached eggs should be. However, I will definitely try these again, since I've always wanted to know how to poach an egg and it turns out it's incredibly simple.

Baked Ham

My sister raised pigs a while back, and she'd given us a ham that needed to be used. I probably should have saved this for a party or something, but I was curious to try my hand at a ham, which I'd never cooked. Huge pieces of meat are always daunting, because I never know how to cook them. But my husband likes ham, so I figured he could always eat the leftovers on sandwiches.

Fanny Farmer's baked ham recipe follows.


Put ham in shallow baking dish, fat side up.
Bake at 325 until 150 degrees when tested with a meat thermometer (my meat thermometer said 175, so I cooked it long enough to get it to 175, since I'm paranoid about eating pork anyway).
To glaze, cut skin off and score the fat in a diamond pattern and glaze.
Put whole cloves in each diamond.
Bake at 400 for 30 minutes.
Baste several times while cooking.
Remove from oven and let sit at least 15 mins before serving.

This recipe was tough, since I had a big piece of a pig that was cured as ham. I didn't have the cone-shaped thing that I've seen in stores. I've never actually eaten a real ham before. So I wasn't sure how to do it with a rectangular piece of ham. But I followed directions as best as I could. My ham did not have a skin, nor did it have a 'fat side.' So I just put it in a pan.

I did not turn oven to 400, because I somehow missed that in the directions. I left it on 350 for about 2-2.5 hrs, glazing about halfway through.

Glaze recipe:
Mix 1 c. brown sugar
1/4 c. honey, maple syrup, cider, vinegar, or pineapple or orange juice.
Ground or fresh mustard

I used 1/4 c. honey, 1/4 c. apple cider vinegar, and 1 tsp. ground mustard. I didn't want all that sugar on it, esp. since I was planning to use the leftovers. I also wanted pineapple with the ham, so I stuck a few pineapple rings on it after glazing it. There is a basting sauce recipe, too, but I just basted with the juices in the pan from the meat and the glaze that had run off into the pan, since it was much the same as the basting sauce recipe and I think the recipe must have been for a much bigger ham than our slab of meat.

Optional basting sauce:
Mix 1 c. brown sugar
1 tsp. ground mustard
1/2 c. vinegar
OR
1 c. honey
1 c. orange juice

It turned out very good, actually. It took forever to cook, and heated up the house A LOT, so I wouldn't make this again in summer. I just didn't know if it would keep until the holiday season, and we are never at home on Christmas anyway. But it would be much better to heat up the house by baking for 3 hours in the winter!

Look at all that yummy fat.

Anyway, all in all it was good and hammy. I wish I'd had a big heaping pile of vegetables to eat with it instead of just extra pineapple rings, but hey, we can't all be perfect! Maybe next time.

Look for more ham recipes, which I'm sure I'll make when my husband gets tired of eating 2 lbs. of leftover ham!