My Tuesday Twister posts are my weekly round-up of what’s going on in my kitchen and our lives, as it pertains to food. So here we go – I’ll catch you up on what’s twisting in the kitchen this week!
- goat cheese feta on salad
- villi yogurt with fruit
- chocolate kefir smoothie
- Arabic meatballs
- working on ranch style dressing
- Feta Cheese Testing – We tasted the feta cheese from the first recipe I tried (from Fias Co Farm). Boy, was it ever good! Oh, my! You know what, though? Next time, I’ll use about half the amount of calf lipase because it turned out to be a strong feta, even after just aging 1 month. Well, strong to me, anyway! Perhaps a cheese connoisseur would really know whether my cheese was strong or not. All I know was the flavor could not be beat, but was a bit on the strong side, for me.
- Villi Yogurt – I’ve started getting a rhythm together for making villi yogurt (see my Resources page for sources). The neat thing about this yogurt is that it cultures at room temperature. It is thinner than commercial yogurt, but we’ve adjusted because we realize that industrial foods should not set the standard for our taste buds – real food should! We’ve enjoyed having it with fruit each morning, especially local cherries. It requires a little more effort to make the yogurt with raw milk, because you must create a pure starter each time, so as not to overcome the yogurt bacteria with the bacteria in the milk. Once I got my head around this, it wasn’t so hard to work in to my routine.
- Arabic Meatballs – Jeff and I have been eating alot of our favorite meatballs while the kids are gone! What makes them special is not only that they’re so simple to make, but they include a bit of refreshing mint. Yumm, yumm! One batch of them lasts a few days when we eat two or three per meal, along with our favorite sprouted spelt biscuits, a salad, and chevre.
- Chocolate Kefir Smoothie – We have this every night. I’m not kidding. Every night. They’re so good, and they’re so good for us. I’ll be sharing the recipe tomorrow as part of Real Food Wednesdays, so watch out for it!
- Creamy Dressing – I’m still working on a good ranch-style creamy dressing. The one last night was pretty good! As soon as I perfect it, I’ll be sharing it. I haven’t gotten it right yet, I think, because I need parsley and have been out for awhile!
So, that’s it for me – what’s twisting in your kitchen? I would love to hear!




















Take the guesswork out of what to fix, what to buy and what to prepare. This week:
Class materials compiled into easy downloads:
Our turning point in the great search for a healthy ranch-style dressing was dried chives. Everyone ate the first 10,000 or so batches I turned out but no one loved any of them. Hubby and I were getting accustomed to the “creamy dressing” (we couldn’t call it ranch because it didn’t taste like ranch) but the kids were really resistant. Then I found a recipe that called for dried chives and I bought some (they could easily be grown and dried at home, saving that money and those preservatives that are probably in there somewhere). That was the ticket for us. Now no one minds not having salad in restaurants any more because we have “good ranch” at home. Hooray!! It may be worth a shot in your search.
We also prefer mayo and sour cream as the base, but yogurt works fine in place of the sour cream.
.-= Lindsey in AL´s last blog post… Pregnant much? (volume 2) =-.
Lindsey – thanks! What a great tip! I’ll try to get some this week!
The chocolate kefir sounds delicious!
I just have one word. YUM!
Okay, more than one word. I have tried your Arabic Meatball recipe, we love them!!
Everything looks so good! Sounds like you weren’t having too much trouble cooking for two.
I’m going to cook one of our homegrown chickens tomorrow or Thursday.
.-= Marg´s last blog post… Chicken =-.
I wanted to thank you for saying “but we’ve adjusted because we realize that industrial foods should not set the standard for our taste buds – real food should!” because I never thought of it that way, but it’s so true.
.-= Marg´s last blog post… Chicken =-.