Dairy Queen

And king, of course. Yesterday we woke up at 6:30, conditioned by a long week of waking before the sun. It will come as no surprise to anyone that we naturally meandered into the kitchen, but we also had a project in mind: somehow, this week ended with about two gallons of milk in the fridge that needed to be used up, pronto. So we decided to try our hands at a little homemade dairy: yogurt and cheese. Specifically paneer, a kind of soft, mild Indian cheese somewhat similar to ricotta. Here's some of what we did.

For the yogurt, first we measured out 3 cups of milk, and poured it into a jar.

We added a little plain yogurt as a starter.

Then we filled our crockpot with water, turned it on to the "Keep Warm" setting, and let the yogurt sit in there for 8 hours.

Voila! It turned out great. Mild, not sour; a little bit runnier than commercial yogurt, but we hear this is inevitable without adding either powdered milk or some other kind of thickener. We'll be doing this more often!

To make paneer, we first brought a saucepan of milk to a boil.

Then we added a few tablespoons of lemon juice to separate the milk into curds and whey.

We poured it through a clean dishcloth, rinsed the cheese until the water ran clear, then wrung it out as much as possible.

To get even more water out, we hung it above the sink for an hour or so.

Then we pressed it into a cake in preparation for making...Mattar Paneer!