nic cooks

This is another great beginners cheese as you don’t need any fancy ingredients. Instead of using starter cultures that you have to pre-prepare, it makes the most of cultured products that are readily available at the supermarket – natural yoghurt and cultured butter milk.  Before you buy these products check the list of ingredients to make sure the brand you are buying does in fact contain live cultures.

This cheese was also another opportunity to use my cheese press, and the first cheese that I would consider required ‘proper’ aging.  As mentioned in my initial round up of my cheese making adventures, some cheeses require months of TLC before they can be sampled. Whether that is washing, turning or simply just sitting and maturing, some cheeses can be otherwise engaged for the best part of a year Read more »

I’m a bit hooked on home made ice cream now that I have a plentiful supply of eggs.  It always felt a bit extravagant when I had to buy the eggs, so I only made it once a year for Christmas.  But now I make it whenever the eggs in the fridge reach two dozen and I have no-one to give the surplus supplies to.  This recipe came about as I had a surplus of eggs and a surplus of fig jam that I made recently when I stumbled across some gorgeous new season figs at the Hawkesbury Harvest Farmers Markets, in Castle Hill.  Jennifer at Le Delicieux provided me with the inspiration, with her fig paste recipe.

I was a bit apprehensive as I’ve never made jam before but it really was very easy.  My only comment is, it was very sweet and I tried eating it with cheese, but it just wasn’t savoury enough for me.  I have strict Read more »

I wasn’t going to post a recipe for feta, I’ve had too many disasters and when you Google home cheese making bloggers seem to have this one covered.  I tried a couple of them in the name of cheese making practice and they just didn’t work out for me (I think it was largely my fault, not the fault of the recipes). Then I decided to try one last time with goats milk and sure enough it worked.  Again, I had to adapt the recipes in the books I am using to suit the ingredients I can get hold of, and this is what I came up with… The first cheese I have made that is good enough for the cheese board.  Because of the temperamental nature of cheese making I have now tested this recipe a couple of times, and it has worked, producing a consistently good cheese with the flavour and texture of feta with a touch of goat. Read more »

With all my recent cheese making I always seem to have ricotta in the fridge, so I’m constantly looking for new recipes to try that involve ricotta. Personally I’m more of a savoury girl so I tend to overlook the dessert options. On my quest for new savoury recipes, pasta came up time and time again and I’m always a sucker for fresh pasta.  This recipe is inspired by a foodie friend of mine at the Melbourne based food blog Italy on my Mind. Paola makes amazing homemade pasta and there are plenty of other inspiring Italian dishes on her blog to leave you drooling.

This recipe for agnolotti makes a nice change from ravioli or tortellini and they are actually easier to make, which means they are a good starting point for anyone who hasn’t made fresh pasta before.  Make sure you find good eggs if you are going to make fresh pasta. My pasta is so orange because of the amazing fresh eggs I collect from my yard each day, it really does make a difference. Read more »

It is time to lay my demons to rest. It is time to master the art of macarons.  The theme for this months Sweet Adventures Blog Hop is lemons and I thought that was good enough excuse to get the egg whites out and make some lemon macarons. For those of you who have been hiding under a rock for the past five months the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop is a group of Australian bloggers making desserts once a month based on a theme.  This month it’s the turn of Jennifer from Delicieux to host the blog hop and the theme is lemons.

When I first started writing my food blog and reading other food blogs I got a silly idea in my head that I couldn’t be a ‘real’ food blogger without mastering the art of the macaron.  When I decided this, I had Read more »