Garden Late Summer

Our two best vegetables by far were the tomatoes and peppers, which all went crazy. The tomato plants eventually grew out the top of the bird netting

 We had to stake up the pepper plants because they grew so many branches that all had heavy peppers

 Sweet potato vines expanded all over.  Unfortunately the zucchini and squash plants in the back were decimated by squash bugs and rotted.

 We put up two different grape vines on the arbor we built over the entrance to the garden.

 We finally got the fence painted too

Weekend Update

Yesterday, J pulled out a container of frozen tomato sauce that I had put up over the summer. I decided to make ricotta and mozzarella cheeses and make baked ziti for dinner.

I had made mozzarella a few times before and it was good, but kind of plain. I decided to go to a local dairy and get some raw milk to use for the mozzarella and just used store bought milk for the ricotta.

Ricotta is pretty easy. Just add citric acid to the milk - it starts to curdle almost instantly.

Then heat and you have ricotta.

Drain off the whey

And - TA DA! You have ricotta. I drained out all the whey so I'm left with a very dry ricotta.

For the Mozzarella - Take your milk.

Add your citric acid.

Heat and add rennet (sorry for the blurry pic)

Cut the curd and heat again.

It should not be this gooey. I will need to adjust the recipe going forward with the raw milk.

But it still turned out a decent mozzarella. Definitely a LOT more flavor with the raw milk as opposed to store bought milk. (There is a picture missing of me stretching the curd)

Yummm. There is nothing like fresh tomato sauce in the middle of winter! Can't wait for summer to get here...

Baked ziti. The only things not homemade are the sausage and pasta noodles. J asked if the plan of eating fresh foods is going to include homemade pasta. After we clean out the pantry - it probably will!