Cook Again

I'm still monitoring the dogs who have come down with some kind of  intestinal disturbance - a condition that has me following them around trying to collect samples of their poop. Its not too different than usual, actually, except that now I'm tagging it and saving it for later. Still no word about my job and even though I'm technically being compensated, its making me feel a little freaked out about money, like I'm unemployed again. I've decided to add "send out resumes" to my daily to-do list. I'm also trying to figure out what I should be doing with my time. I feel like I should be taking more advantage of this break and also keeping very busy helps to prevent my mind from dwelling too much on how much I don't know about what is going on with my job.

Sam & I have recommitted ourselves to healthier eating which leans heavily on avoiding restaurant meals. So not only are we eating better, we are saving money which is ideal. Since I have some time, I have decided to try and homemake some foods that we would otherwise normally just buy pre-made like bread, cheese and yogurt. Over the weekend I re-visited my old pizza dough recipe and made some pizza crusts to stock the freezer with. Its one of those things I thought I remember being time consuming but in reality actually only takes about 45 minutes of active effort. Most of the time is the waiting for the dough to rise. So frequently I imagine a certain task is particularly difficult and I will put it it off for a while since I assume I will need to devote more time to it. My procrastination actually makes the task seem more difficult and makes me want to do it even less and so it goes until either I do it and discover its not that big of a deal or ignore it until its too late to do at all.

Making the pizza crusts were such a task that once I finally attacked, was way less hassle then I remembered. So I am endeavoring to make more foodstuffs from scratch. Tonight I made some Fettuccine with Prosciuto and Asparagus and substituted fresh whole wheat pasta that I made for the pasta in the recipe and it was awesome. It was actually really easy and fun to make the pasta which I made from bits and pieces of three different recipes. Sam has a wonderful Kitchenaid Stand Mixer plus the appropriate pasta making attachments and it was a breeze. So my confidence is increased and tomorrow I am going to try to make ricotta which I will then put into some lasagna and some other dishes. I've made Paneer before but it has been a while. I never realized that ricotta is traditionally made from the whey left from making harder cheeses. In fact Ricotta actually translates to roughly "cook again" which is something I did not know before seeking out Ricotta recipes.

I recently discovered Bottom-up Food, a blog about really making stuff from scratch and I think I'm going to use their recipe. I actually came across the site when I was trying to figure out what to do with the whey left over from making the Ricotta. I don't think I will use their ricotta recipe though I might do so in the future before I try David Liebowitz' recipe with yogurt. No tomorrow I will be making Ricotta Sicilian-style with butter milk - mostly because I already bought the buttermilk - and then I'm going to try to make some Ciabatta recipe with the whey. Should be pretty awesome.