Maybe this will become a cheese blog

First batch of goat's cheese turned out very well--not too different from Middle Eastern yogurt cheese, actually. Which, though not quite what I was expecting, is also delicious.

I'm now considering ways of building a cheese press. A very simple one of stacks of bricks is an option, but I think a little unwieldy. How many bricks would you need to get fifty pounds of pressure? Probably more than you'd want to stack up on the small, uneven surface of a wheel of cheddar. Thoughts from the mechanically inclined?

By the way, Rebecca, this post is totally for you. :)

Cheese!

Recent Purchases:

Ricki Carroll, Home Cheese Making, 3rd edition.

Vegetable rennet, 10 tablets

Citric acid, 2 oz.

Cheese salt, 2 lbs.

Calcium Chloride, 1 small vial

Mild Calf Lipase powder, 1 small jar

Cheese Cloth, 1

Organic Whole Milk, 1 gallon

Recent Products:

Tasty fresh mozzarella cheese.

I love the fact that our kitchen is turning into a bacteria/yeast/fermentation factory, what with all the beer, bread, and now, cheese!

The Namesake is in the Details

I stood at the kitchen sink, water flowing over my hands and pooling in the dirty dishes. Vague, vaguely beleagured feeling that I should be writing. Anything. But—nothing to write. No sense of direction. No idea how to fix the novel about Liza, Simon, and Robin; no idea where to take it. It doesn’t seem to have a plot. I don’t think I can write a novel without a plot. A novel about “life.” I don’t care enough about details; I don’t have an eye for them, a facility for describing them.

But what’s a facility for description? In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, no one detail JUMPS. But together, there’s this feeling of fullness, of life overflowing out over the page such that you can’t stop reading—you know these people, their daily lives, too well to stop reading. Though there’s no plot, exactly, just a story of an immigrant Bengali family living in Massachusetts, you always want to know: and what next? How did these people live out their lives? What did they do? What became of their son Gogol? What kind of life did he go on to live? The very best blogs take on some of that unstoppable dailiness (personal, this-is-my-life blogs, I mean, not political or issue-oriented ones). It’s the same quality present in a Tolstoy novel, in spades. The utterly ordinary becomes compulsively readable, though there are no magic devices, no amulets, no murders, no suspects, no machine driving the plot.

How do you find that story? How do you trust it (and yourself) enough to believe that it could be readable? Because breaking, or abandoning, the machines seems like too much of a leap.

And it probably is. I mean, Tolstoy, right?

Right.