Cottage Cheese?

The youth didn't drink all the milk we bought for the High Adventure, so it sat in the cooler for a week, then came home with us and got put in the freezer until we could use it ourselves. After thawing, it worked for breakfast for several days before tasting sour, but then we needed to come up with another plan. In the past I've used our soured milk for pancakes or biscuits, but there was an awful lot to use! Someone mentioned that they boiled their sour milk, then chilled it again, and it tasted fine. Since the other option was to pour it down the drain, I figured it was worth experimenting. Once the milk came to a simmer, it curdled! I'm not sure what Pat did with her milk, but since it looked like what I imagined curds and whey to be, I did a bit of research, and discovered that I had inadvertently made cottage cheese!

Strain the curds from the whey, add a bit of fresh cream and salt to taste, and they're ready for the next time you want cottage cheese. Because the finished result reminded me of feta, I sprinkled some on our salad. It was actually pretty good.

Oh, and if you want to make cheese from non-soured milk, stir in some vinegar or lemon juice before heating it. And I'm sure there are uses for the whey (see here or here or here), but it was pretty potent, so I poured that down the sink! However, after looking at these sites (which I didn't look at before pouring the whey down the sink), maybe I'll give some of the options a try - like adding to a smoothie or using in place of the liquid in baked goods or even soaking our dried beans in it.

I used the rest of our homemade cottage/ricotta cheese in Baked Spaghetti; that turned out to be a great decision.