The Happy Housewife

Well, I've not made a good start here, nor have I learned how to add pictures or links. Perhaps I'll be motivated to get myself up to speed by the lamentations of my good friend, Chris, who checks this poor, neglected blog daily - because of my neglect, her online life has included a "Ground Hog Day" of Feb. 18 for the last two months.

I've been reading a lot lately about self-sufficiency and eating locally. While I've only taken baby steps toward that goal, I was quite proud of myself today, though one could say my industriousness was spurred by laziness and justified, at least in part, by self-sufficiency/local motives.

This morning I found myself wanting to make calzones for supper, but I lacked several of the major ingredients, such as pepperoni and ricotta cheese. No problem, right? A quick jaunt to the grocery store and I could proceed. But I run to the grocery store way too often and rarely leave with only the items I intended to buy. OK., I didn't want to go anywhere and I wanted calzones. What to do?

I knew we had some free-range locally purchased sausage in the freezer. That could substitute for the pepperoni. Hmm, I'd recently read that it is easy to make ricotta cheese at home... could it really be? A quick search on Google and I found the simplest-looking recipe:

1 gallon milk
1/4 cup white vinegar

Heat milk slowly to 200 degrees, add vinegar, remove from heat and let sit for several minutes.
Pour contents through cheese cloth-lined strainer and allow to drain. (I didn't have that on hand so just used a really thin cotton kitchen towel)
Gather up ends of cheese cloth and tie together. Hang from kitchen faucet to drain.

The draining is only supposed to take an hour, but my kitchen towel wasn't as porous as cheese cloth, so I had to do some extra squeezing to get the liquid out.

Anyway, it worked like a dream and I had about a pound of ricotta cheese!

We also had several plastic bags of dandelion greens and curly dock my husband and girls had foraged the other night (it's too bitter for a plain salad). I sauteed it in olive oil and garlic with salt and pepper and pureed this in my food processor.

So, along with the mozarella, farm fresh eggs and parmesan already in my fridge, I combined the ricotta, sausage and sauteed greens for the calzone filling.

I don't know when I've been so happy about a kitchen achievement as I was today about my cheese!

Since no dinner is complete without dessert, I made a cherry pie, using locally-grown cherries I pitted and froze last summer.

To round out the meal, I had an English cucumber in the fridge - add oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, salt and pepper to the sliced up cucumber and there's a crunchy, delicious side dish. I cut up a red pepper and a yellow pepper and those will go on the table on a platter.

So, while most of my day was spent reading for pleasure, I put together this somewhat local meal with ingredients I had on hand.

Hey, it's a start!