John & Dena

The Impatient Cheesery - Mozzarella Edition!

After our delightful - and delicious - success in making goat cheese, we decided to try making one of our favorite cheeses - Mozzarella! Our instruction guide warned us that it was a bit trickier than goat cheese, so we prepared ourselves for the challenge!

The first step was to dissolve the rennet tablet in water. Rennet is an enzyme used to make cheese, although it is not necessary for making goat cheese.

Here are our supplies for making mozzarella.

We poured the milk into our “double boiler” and started heating it up to 90 degrees.

Then we added citric acid and the dissolved rennet tablet to the milk, and we continued heating the milk.

Lots of stirring…

GIANT curds begin to form within about 10 seconds of adding the rennet!

We scooped the curds from the large bowl into a smaller bowl so we could drain the whey. The instructions suggest that we save our whey to feed to our chickens, but we opted out..

Once we had drained the whey, we had to fold the curds over themselves over and over, to help the cheese firm up.

We took half of the curds and decided to add in some herbs to season the cheese.

The Cheeser himself, kneading the cheese!

Stretching the mozzarella to firm it up was our favorite part!

Our finished log’o’cheese!

The sliced cheese on crackers!

Overall, this cheese was ever easier than the goat cheese (mostly because the curds happened so quickly and easily, and we didn’t have to use cheesecloth) and even more DELICIOUS!! Yay, cheese!!

Screen Printing at the Hyde Park Art Center!

On Friday night, we took advantage of the unseasonably warm February weather (it was 50 degrees!!) and walked across the street to the Hyde Park Art Center for an event called Prints and Pints. There were drinks and a DJ in the open art galleries, and we got to participate in a free screen printing class! The staff had provided several prints for us to use, as well as free t-shirts and large sheets of cardstock. After a quick demo, they set us free in the workroom to print whatever we wanted!

The staff helped us learn the technique, which was so cool!

The extremely popular dog image.

The artiste at work!

Last minute heart print before the next class came in!

Our finished products - the shirt and the print!

Dose Market - Chicago

Today we explored the Dose Market at the River East Art Center. The market features local food, fashion, and art vendors, and the venue is an elegant gallery setting. Though it was a bit pricey ($10 per person to enter, plus $6 parking) it was fun to walk around, peruse the items for sale, take advantage of free samples at almost every food booth, and drink a delicious cup of pour-over coffee!

The best station at the market (besides the cheese vendor) was a table full of art supplies where you could make your own Valentine’s day card! They had “muses” on hand to help us come up with a concept for our cards, and then we were separated from each other (the muses mandated the separation so that our cards would be a surprise come Tuesday) and we crafted away for about 20 minutes. They had so many papers and supplies in different textures, colors, and concepts - SO fun!!