home dairy!

I won a giveaway! For a copy of Ashley English's Home Dairy book, one of the newest titles from her Homemade Living Series! I'll admit to trolling the internet and entering several giveaways for this book, because I really like Ashley's blog and really want to make my own cheese. I likely would have bought it soon enough anyway, but the genius of the giveaway is that now I'm hooked and definitely going to buy the rest of the series. And I'm not sure I've ever won a giveaway before, maybe because I rarely enter them, or maybe because I don't have that kind of luck. So imagine my surprise when Grace from Design*Sponge emailed me for my shipping address. Pure joy. I'm flipping through it as I drink my berry smoothie right now.

This is all to say that you can expect to see some more cheese, butter and yogurt up in this place. My first attempts at buttermaking and yogurt cheesemaking were nothing compared to the dairy-filled glory that is to come. Sorry vegans, this must be upsetting. I told Chris that I was either giving up dairy products or learning to make my own. You can see which road I took.  I did just make a batch of vegan chocolate chip cookies this week, and they were surprisingly delicious, so don't consider me a true enemy yet.

Oh and speaking of cheese, and actually also speaking of freebies enticing me to buy more, here's a little cheese treat idea I completely ripped off from my co-op. They always sample these incredible cheeses and I usually end up buying them. This time I bought every ingredient they were sampling. A delectable Hudson Valley Camembert on a teeny-tiny 1" mini toast with raspberry chutney. They would make the cutest hors d'oeuvres, no?

One time we were watching a show about making mozzarella and the first instruction was to buy some mozzarella and then you did various things to it to produce more. Disappointing, right? Ashley's recipe for mozzarella does not include having to buy the damn cheese yourself, so in my opinion she is off to a good start. Check out her other titles on Canning & Preserving , Keeping Chickens and Keeping Bees. They are like hip, updated versions of Reader's Digest Back to Basics. And no, the giveaway did not require me to gush about the book or even mention it publicly, I'm just that excited.