Gluten-Free Thai Chicken Soup

I recently started researching more gluten-free recipes to share with you. I came across this one from All Recipes. I haven’t ever really tasted Thai food before, so I was a bit skeptical as to the taste of this soup. It is out of this world!! If you are looking for something different to make, be sure and try this one!

(Recipe reprinted from All Recipes with permission)

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From Econobusters.

Paneer and Whey Drink

Steps In Making Cheese

Paneer was my next step in cheese making. Paneer is like a pressed ricotta cheese. If you’re new to cheese making, as I am, it is best to start small and work your way up.

I started with yogurt cheese made in a crock pot. If yogurt sounds intimidating, try this reader tip to get you started:

“Simply boil a cup of milk, and then let cool to room temperature. Stir in a tablespoon of yogurt, let sit (don’t move the cup) and voila, the next morning you have yogurt!”

After yogurt, I moved to ricotta cheese, which involves heating the milk, then adding something like vinegar to curdle the cheese.

So now it is time for paneer, which is like ricotta, but it is pressed, which gives me practice for the hard cheeses.

Instructions:

1) Heat a half gallon or gallon of milk to a low boil

2) Add 3 tablespoons of vinegar, lemon juice or lime juice per half gallon. (I used lime juice.)

3) When you see the milk curds, separating from yellowish liquid, the whey, take it off the heat.

4) Line a colander with a cheesecloth or thin fabric. Put it in something like a pot to collect the whey.

4a) Optional: add in spices. I added some cajun seasoning and an Italian spice blend. Paneer is from India, so I am all over the place with this cheese.

5) Set up a press, wrap cheese in cloth and press until firm, about two hours. It won’t be firm like a block of cheddar, but it will be more firm than cream cheese.

There are lots of ways to make a press, but for the one pound of cheese I made, I found two plates to be just right. Next time, I may put the bottom plate upside down and put it in a pan to catch any excess whey. I might have gone overboard with the books, but I wanted to be sure.

My cheese cracked because I kept playing with it during the pressing stage. I’ll know better next time!

Paneer is a cheese that doesn’t melt, like ricotta. We’ve used it on quesadillas, in place of the cream cheese, broken up in our eggs, like an omelet, and smushed on plain tortillas. It is not something we will have to have on hand all the time, but I think it will have a place in our menu from time to time.

Whey Drink

Saving the whey and using is effectively is what makes or breaks the future of cheese making for me. One gallon of milk makes one pound of cheese… and three quarts of whey. Some of that whey can be used in lacto-fermenting, but if I’m going to be making most of our cheese, we are going to have more whey than I know what to do with. Paneer whey isn’t bitter like yogurt whey, and I read somewhere that the whey of hard cheeses is almost sweet.

So, I made whey limeade. I used lime juice as the medium to make the milk curdle. To make limeaid, I added more lime juice and some stevia and chilled the drink. It has most of the nutritional value of milk and is loaded with protein. It tastes like limeade. I think there are probably a lot of drinks that could be made with whey and I’ll let you know which we like best.

Next up: making mozzarella!

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From Under $1000 Per Month.

Meet Therese, Our Pet Kefir

Months ago, I posted about my soda recipe to break my husband’s soda addiction. Since then, we have bought water kefir grains. Water kefir grains are small masses of bacteria and yeast that ferment sugars. Although we call our kefir Therese, she is actually a community of many organisms.

When we first got Therese we had to rehydrate her in sugar water for a few days, then she was ready to get to work. Every day or two, Dan pours out the fizzy fermented sugar water. He then fills her jar back up with water and feeds her a few more tablespoons of sugar.

The sugar water she has fermented he then turns into a soda-like beverage. For something like sprite, he adds some lemon juice and lime juice. For cream soda, he just adds vanilla. For a cola-like beverage, he adds vanilla, cinnamon and lime juice.

You can also make fruit sodas by allowing the kefir to ferment juice instead of sugar water. There’s a free eBook with kefir recipes from Cultures for Health. It has mostly milk kefir recipes, but it has some water kefir recipes toward the end that use fruit juice.

When I found the free eBook, I excitedly told my husband about all the kefir recipes: lemonade kefir and cherry kefir and grape kefir. He asked, “Did they have Mountain Dew kefir, or Dr. Pepper kefir?” No, they didn’t, but if anyone has any suggestions on how I can make our kefir taste something like Mountain Dew, that would make my husband very happy, and in turn make me happy, too.

Kefir is not only a nourishing soda alternative, it is a money saver. We paid about $20 for our kefir grains from Amazon, but as long as we keep feeding them, the community will not die. The sugar we feed them costs less than the tonic water we used to use for Dan’s soda. Pets generally are not frugal, but there are useful pets, like our kefir, Therese, who save us money.

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From Under $1000 Per Month.