GOT MILK?

Feeding children is expensive, too expensive to be wasting food and throwing it away.  Yet thousands of dollars a year are wasted by families when they throw away food in the trash. Thousands of dollars by thousands of families equates to millions of dollars of money thrown in the garbage.

I honed my Catholic guilt at the heels of my mother. Some meals that she prepared for dinner were just not to my liking. I can’t count the number of times she would tell me about the poor children who had no food to eat and how appreciative I should be that I had food on the table. I may have retorted one time (and only one time) that not even the poor children would want dinner that night. I didn’t have to eat dinner that night! Instead, I was banished to my room for the remainder of the night until the next morning. I needed to learn the lesson of going to bed hungry.

Now a mother myself, uneaten food goes into the freezer. If not in the freezer, I’ve been known to transform one meal into another so that it changes in appearance and in taste. Beef stew makes a wonderful beef and vegetable soup. Pork chops transform into pork fried rice.

Sometimes it’s not a meal but an ingredient that needs a “new look".  Leftover stuffing cleverly works well into meatloaf or meatballs as your bread ingredient. Before you think food is actually ready for the trash, look at it again. Feeding a family can be expensive but creativity can fill an empty stomach.

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s tip: Milk souring in the refrigerator? Before it does, or if it does, find recipes online to make buttermilk and freeze it. Use it for pancakes and waffles. Take a gallon of milk that is discounted at the grocery store and buy it for homemade ricotta cheese. Stuff shells, lasagna roll-ups or use it in lasagna. Freeze unused milk in one-cup servings for recipes later on such as instant pudding, bread pudding, rice pudding, oatmeal, cream of something soup, etc. Containers of milk can be frozen. When you see a sale, store one in the freezer. Milk is as expensive as a gallon of gas, don’t let a drop of it go to waste!

                                                            Home made ricotta

              Ordinary white vinegar and any type of milk will yield excellent results.

                             Prepare a strainer with cheesecloth over a bowl.....

 

Heat milk over medium heat but not to a boil

                                    Add a cup of vinegar if using a full gallon of milk.
                                         Use 1/2 cup vinegar for lesser quantity.
                        Watch the mixture curdle and separate into curds and whey.

                  Cover with a clean towel and let it stand for a couple of hours.

Strain your mixture through the cheesecloth so that the cheese remains in the strainer and your whey goes into the bowl. Transfer your cheese into a clean bowl.

 

Then transfer your homemade ricotta cheese into a storage container, cover and refrigerate for use in a day or two. If not, store in freezer.

 

Save the liquid whey. Google "uses for whey liquid" on the internet and you will find how to incorporate that into recipes too!