Another great cheese recipe

Yesterday I decided to break into my home made Brie cheese. I wrapped it in about 4 sheets of Phyllo dough (8 carbs per sheet...so I didn't eat the crust) and baked it for about 20 minutes at 350 until the pastry was beginning to brown. I used sliced apples and scooped up melty cheese and it was just heavenly!

Today, I took my other Brie to work (I always share with the guys at work! They really appreciate cheese). I cut the top rind off the cheese, and made a sauce using about 3 or 4 Tablespoons of DaVinci B-52 Syrup, and imitation honey, with a teaspoon of cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove mixture, and about 1/2 cup of thin sliced almonds poured over the top, wrapped in aluminum foil, and baked in the office toaster oven at 350 for about 15 minutes. Once again, I provided sliced apples for scooping it up, and everyone was wowed.

I LOVE LOW CARB.

Not low carb, but its my life

Today, on the way home, I saw a hawk struggling along, trying to fly carrying a big ol' black bird. All I could think was, HOW LUCKY AM I??? I get to see things nobody else ever gets to see. Another day, I saw hawk flying over my farm, carrying a snake and landing in the trees. I have actually awakened to find a deer in my bedroom. I doubt anybody else has done that! (long story, the guard dogs adopted her, she now guards right alongside them). I have seen a Great Dane laying on the floor of my kitchen with tiny 4 day old chicks hopping all over his great big head.
I have watched groundhogs play tag, seen mating squirrels, and have a dachshund that has helped me round up escaped baby rabbits (and never hurt any of them). The typical farm stuff is pretty neat, but the things that just happen without anyone expecting it are just fantastic.

I feel sorry for anybody that never lived in the country, because they just never have really lived.

May you enjoy all the things around you.
Syd

Holy Goat Milk Batman!

Her name is Chaos; I couldn't resist her.
I needed another Dairy Goat like I needed a hole in the head, but she was so beautiful!
She has turned into a pretty decent milker for a young little girlie. Unfortunately, she had her babies in late JULY! That means she will be milking all winter, in fact, my other goats will deliver their babies before I manage to get her dried out. I'm going to try to get her bred before the end of December, so I don't have to milk all next winter, too! But I am getting really tired of milk....I've been at it since last March, and it is looking like I'll be milking until at least next September.

I finally broke down and ordered a cheese press so I could get some of this milk under control. I can use 2 gallons at a time to make hard cheese now, so that gets rid of larger quantities of milk at one time than I have been used to. I have made cheddar and gouda (2 pound cheeses) and I am getting really excited about trying them (in FEBRUARY). Anyway, tune in in February to see if the cheeses thrived and turned out edible.

People don't realize that cheese is full of living organisms and such things that kind of make it into a live thing in and of itself. It has to be treated gently, and given just the right amount of humidity and optimal temperatures to mature into a good tasting cheese. Otherwise it will just rot. Cheese is similar to beer and wine in that respect. Feed and care for it and it will reward you. I hope.

Other than cheesemaking, I have been making lotion and soap about as fast as I can. I have shows almost every other weekend until Christmas. I love making and selling soap, I love hearing my customers tell me how much they love using it, but like milking, it can really get old.

I am ready to do something different for a while, so in a couple of months you will probably be reading about how I am tired of making sausages (my next scheduled endeavor), and how my freezer is full of sausages, and I'm tired of eating sausages, but for some reason, I just can't sit around and do whatever it is that normal people do to pass their time. I MUST be making something. Maybe I should take up woodworking...at least I could end up with some new furniture!

Syd

Bah, Bah, Barilla...

I understand wanting to justify your product, and encouraging people to purchase it, but Barilla has ignored common sense on their website. While Dreamfields Pasta actually tests for the glycogenic effect of their product, Barilla relies only on tired, old, outdated, and proven to be untrue saws from the high carb, low fat, myths to promote what actually might be a reasonably low glycemic product.
I was reading their page about the "Dangers of Low Carb Diets", and managing to just laugh off their outdated statements, then I came upon this one; "Foods high in fat can increase energy intake (calories) because they are more energy dense, not as “bulky,” and taste good, leaving eaters desiring more and making it easy to over-consume them."

GIVE ME A BREAK!

I guess the perfect diet tastes so bad you don't want to eat anything, right? That's essentially what they are saying. They are ignoring that satiety occurs way earlier when eating high fat (tasty) foods than when eating low fat (sugar full) foods, resulting in a much lower overall calorie consumption.

Until Barilla enters the 21st century and learns to appeal to us long time low-carbers by recognizing that their high fiber product might, just possibly, appeal to low-carbers, if they would only do some real-time blood sugar effect testing to give us some real statistics on the glucose effects of their products, I will not even experiment with their pastas and I recommend that other low-carbers stay far away, and continue to use Dreamfields. In fact, I think I will go to the Dreamfield site right now and thank them for being so pro lowcarb!

Sydne

Brownies...YUM!

I just made Carbquick brownies. I used the recipe on the Carbquick site using 4 eggs, less than a cup of Carbquick and Ghiardelli's Unsweetened Baking Chocolate and Hersheys Bittersweet Chocolate Chips (the recipe called for just "semi-sweet chips" but the Hersheys had way fewer carbs so I used them. My gosh they are absolutely delicious even though they are about twice as expensive.

The brownies were probably the best low carb brownies I've had, but next time I am cutting the chocolate down at least half! These are almost too chocolatty, if that's possible!

I love them, DH loves them, and I'll definitely make them again!

Looking forward to Labor Day Weekend (BBQ day!)
Cheers!

Diabetes strikes home

I thought since my husband has learned to cook for me, read labels, and generally be highly carb conscious about what I allow to be consumed at home, that his overall sugar and starch consumption would be low enough that he would never have any health problems. Of course it seems this subject falls in the same category of "I'm just in deep denial" that I discovered I perferred to use to keep from facing lots of other unpleasant subjects.

Yes, this week we discovered that he is, indeed, diabetic. Not a whole lot diabetic; not so bad the doctor recommeded insulin diabetic, but still with high enough blood sugar to be considered diabetic. To his credit, he did tell the doctor that he wanted to try to manage it with diet and exercise and the doctor agreed to let him do it.

Well, he has had several years now that he has practiced 'stealth carb consumption'. He has been pretty good at it, too. There are several things that he considers necessary to make life worth living. I think the main one is his coffee on the weekends. He only drinks it on the weekends, and I have nothing against coffee. The problem is he HAS to have Irish Cream and Kahlua in his coffee. OK, great! He learned several years ago to make his own Irish Cream and his own Kahlua. The Kahlua is made with instant coffee, cheap vodka, and simple syrup that I convinced him to make with Splenda instead of sugar. One problem kind of solved. But the Irish cream is made with bourbon, raw egg, chocolate syrup (he will happily sub sf syrup), and here is the real problem...a can of sweetened condensed milk! HOLY COW, I'll bet no low carber even bothered to look up the carb count on sweetened condensed milk. 23g per 2 Tablespoons. Nutritional information seems like an oxymoron when you say in conjunction with a product that is made of whole milk and sugar, period! I'll try to come up with a substitute, but it isn't going to be easy. I know that Irish Cream Davinci's Syrup won't satisfy him.

Even though he knows I'm right, he still has that wishful attitude that he won't have to watch his diet forever. I've told him its a lifestyle change, not a diet, and eventually he won't think about eating fries, corn on the cob, and hamburger buns again (which, BTW, he rarely does in front of me). He argues that when he gets down to 200 pounds it won't be a problem anymore. Somehow, he has connected diabetes with weighing 250 pounds, not with having disfunctional sugar metabolism. He has 2 college degrees and isn't stupid! But he is a man, and if I nag him he'll just remain in stealth carb eating mode and not educate himself. So, my mouth is shut. My Atkins books are laying in plain sight, and I don't know what else to do. I know that he mainly eats the bad stuff when he isn't around me, and I can't be around him all the time.

The holidays are going to be rough. His mother is a wonderful cookie, cake, and pie baker. That's her special talent and she is his supplier on the holidays...I'm not making any iced sugar cookies or making fudge and Mississippi Mud Pie, but she has them sitting all over the house in literal bucketfuls. I have her partially trained to have a few things around made with Splenda so I don't sit around and bitch quite so bad about being surrounded with poison, are they trying to kill me or what? Not too long ago I actually yelled at her for buying LOW FAT some kind of crap, and pulled a regular version of it out of her refrigerator and showed her the carb count and amount of sugar was exactly 19 times higher in the low fat version. I was mortified that I yelled at my MIL, but I may have finally made some headway in keeping her from trying to feed me low fat stuff ("I got those for you, they're low fat"). Maybe I can get her convinced that flour and sugar should be eliminated from her house, too, now that her son's life depends on it. Yeah, that's it, I'll accuse her of trying to kill him instead of me for awhile.

Anyway, anybody reading this is welcome to offer suggestions. I'm doing all I can think of to convince him that Low Carb is the only way to handle this disease, and correct his HDL/Triglyceride ratio at the same time (it's bad, too, of course).

Do it yourself cheese!

Milk isn't exactly low carb, so I don't drink it. But I get almost 2 gallons of fresh milk everyday, and with the new price of milk being at or above $4 per gallon at the stores, I figure my dairy goats are getting more valuable by the minute!

I don't drink milk, but I use it to make my own cheese. That's low carb :-)

I also use it to make soap, and lotion.

Anyone interested in making homemade cheese is in for a treat. It's SO EASY.

You don't have to have a goat or cow. You could milk your sheep, or mare, or water buffalo...just kidding. You could go buy that $4/gallon milk from Wally World.

Instructions:

Carefully warm a gallon of milk to 195 degrees (for cows milk). Add 1/2 cup of vinegar or lemon juice to the hot milk. You will see curds separate from the whey (which will be kind of neon green-looking). Line a collandar or large sieve with a clean, old, well worn pillowcase, sheet, or piece of cheesecloth. Pour the curds and whey through the cloth and let drain for a while. You can hang the curds by tying the 4 corners of the cloth in a loose knot and dangle from a cabinet handle with a bowl underneath to catch whey, or from your kitchen faucet. Let drain for 3 to 12 hours depending on how dry you want your cheese.

Dump the curds into a large bowl, for a savory cheese, season with salt, and herbs such as onion powder, garlic powder, Italian herbs, dill, or pepper. For a desert cheese or fruit spread, put the curds into the food processor with a few strawberries and some Stevia, or some SF jam, or DaVinci syrup, and process until it is smooth and creamy (you might want to add some cream).

Put it into a tightly sealed container in your refrigerator and use within the next week or two. These cheeses also freeze well. The savory cheese is awesome in Italian dishes like lasagna. You can also use this type of cheese in anything you would use tofu in (it doesn't melt or get stringy).

Everyone I work with looks forward to me bringing in my fresh cheeses and dishes made with them for our snack days.

Let me know how your cheese turns out :-)

Sid