Yesterday I made my own cheese. This is my review I posted onto AirBNB about it:
I planned on detailing Klara’s Albanian family recipe here but then thought, “No! It’s a family recipe! You don’t just slap that up on the internet like some sort of solution to how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. You protect the secret!”
So while I’ll post a few photos here I don’t think it’ll give away TOO much. I will say it’s a very easy recipe in that even a World’s Worst Cook such as yours truly can maybe… maybe!… do it when I get home.
Klara is a lawyer from Albania, her mother Albanian and her father Greek. Her hudband Jimmy is a Greek, his mother from Greece, his father from Albania. They met on Valentine’s Day by chance. Klara and a few of her friends were all single and decided to go to dinner together. There were three of them. They showed up at the restaurant they’d made a reservation at and were turned away because the maître d said they were only serving “couples” menus and couldn’t possibly serve THREE people… or even one couple and (gasp) a single person! They same thing happened at the next two restaurants they tried. Klara hadn’t eaten all day, looking to indulge in a decadent dinner and she was getting super hungry. One of her friends said she had a friend in town who was visiting and he was single so they could have a foursome and maybe get served that way. She called him up and enter Jimmy. With four people, they could get a two-couples table. While her friends were super into Jimmy, Klara had no time for any of it except to, as she said, stuff her face with food as she was starving. So while the girls flirted with Jimmy and he flirted back, Jimmy says he couldn’t stop looking at Klara. By night’s end, he had asked only her for her phone number. For the next week, he met her to coffee, for dinner, for drinks. The friends were jealous and Klara waved them off saying no way was she serious about this guy – on top of it all he was looking to move to Germany and she had to finish her studies. But after a week, Jimmy faked an injury and asked her if she had any eucalyptus oil to run into his shoulder, a homeopathic solution (is this what the kids call “essential oils”). Klara said of course she did and as he fumbled with the oil she finally sighed heavily and rubbed it into his shoulder for him. That’s when she decided, “well… maybe he’s not SO terrible….” And they’ve been together since.
They were a lovely couple and when she first pitched a class on cheese, her husband and her mom back in Albania thought she was crazy. But it’s been surprisingly popular. Klara thought everybody knew how to make cheese. The one drawback is that Jimmy is very often running out to the store to buy more and more cases of milk (spoiler alert – one of the ingredients is milk! But that’s all you get out of me – name, rank, and milk is ONE ingredient in making your own cheese). As we chatted over wine, cheese, and homemade bread (which Klara also gave me the recipe for), the only hiccup in the fun was when I mentioned how sometimes I feel like apologizing to the world for our current political mess. Klara was pro-Trump and anti-immigration and Jimmy was outraged. I tried to defuse the situation and change the subject but it was the one tiny crack in an otherwise blissfully fun two hours. Thanks again, Trump. Sigh.
Anyhoo, Klara innovated on her grandmother’s recipe… which became her mother’s recipe… which became her recipe… and now is MY recipe. She infused the cheeses with flavorings – the sage and thyme ones were particularly great. I tried something potentially bonkers – blueberry and walnuts because I felt like I had experienced her great thyme cheese (which with a bit of olive oil — man, oh, man. That’s the cheese!). Amongst her apothecary jars she had green peppers, paprika, various other spices/seasonings… and she also suggested I could even mix in some red wine to give it a hint of something else. In any case, this is what my cheese looked like after hardening overnight:
I feel like there will soon be a new internet meme: “Stand back… I’m going to Cheese!”
Five stars for the people. My cheese? Icarusian. But I think the next one will be better. And there will be a next one. Oh, yes. There will be more cheese.