Ok, there’s really just one secret:  making your own cheese is incredibly easy.  It’s also fast, and quite fun.  Newly-minted cheese expert that I am, I can tell you that cheese (your basic mozzarella, anyway) seems to be to be more science than art.  Add the right ingredients, in the right order, at the right temperature, and:  Tada!  Deliciousness.  Okay, maybe I should have said it is more like magic.

At any rate, I received my magical cheese-making kit as a wedding gift, and like the grateful bride that I am, I busted it out before the ink on the thank you note was dry.  Thirty minutes later, I had cheese.  Delicious, delicious cheese, for which I could take all the credit.

My kit came from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company and I was guided through the process by the charmingly-illustrated Ricki, “The Cheese Queen,” who believes in me and thinks I am capable of great things.  (Ricki and her buxom-lipped cow friend are very good with the positive reinforcement.)  I made Ricki’s 30-minute Mozzarella, and I am so pleased with myself I could just explode.

Ricki’s 30 Minute Mozzarella

rennet tablets

Ingredients

• 1 gallon milk (pasteurized, but NOT ultra-pasteurized, as Ricki is quick to point out)
• 1 1/4 cup cool water
• 1 1/2 teaspoon citric acid (mine came with the kit, but you can buy it all over the place, including on Amazon.com!)
• 1/4 rennet tablet (or 1/4 tsp. liquid.  This also included in kit, and available wherever you buy fine cheesemaking supplies)
• 1 tsp. cheese salt (how this differs from normal salt is beyond me, but hey!  Another one for the collection!)

Equipment

• 1 gallon stainless steel pot or any non-aluminum or non-cast iron pot (I was almost scuppered by this requirement until my attorney pointed out that our new dutch oven counts as enamel.  Science is so fussy!)
• dairy thermometer
• colander
• slotted spoon
• long knife

Directions

Dissove 1/4 rennet tablet into 1/4 cup of cool, chlorine-free water.  Stir and set aside.  Mix 1 1/2 teaspoons citric acid into 1 cup cool water until dissolved.  Pour one gallon of milk into your pot and stir vigorously while adding the citric acid solution.  Heat the milk to 90 degrees while stirring.  Make some funny faces while trying to figure out how to stir, measure temperature, and read the next direction, all at the same time.  (This is the hardest part.)

Remove the pot from the burner and slowly stir in the rennet solution with an up and down motion for approximately 30 seconds.  Be careful not to spill too much!

Cover the pot and leave itundisturbed for 5 minutes.  No peeking!

Check the curd.  It should look like custard, with a clear separation between the curd and the whey.  If the curd is too soft or the whey is milky, let set for a few more minutes.  I’ll level with you and let you know that my custard was a little spongy, even after an extra couple of minutes to meditate on itself, and everything turned out fine.

Cut the curd in a grid-like pattern, once set of passes with the knife straight down, and then two more on more of a diagonal, in order to ensure a bunch of little evenly-sized cubes, all the way down.  My spongy curd was not too cooperative with this part, but again, fine.

Put the pot back on the stove and heat to 110 degrees F while slowly moving the curds around with your spoon.  Take off the burner and continue slowly stirring for 2-5 minutes.  Pour off the floating whey.  If, as for me, pouring is not really an option for you at this point, skip ahead and scoop  out your curds with a slotted spoon, and lay them in a colander, “folding [them] gently as you drain off the whey.”

Heat a pot of water to 185 F.  Dip the curds in the colander into the hot water.  After several times, take a spoon and fold the curds until they start to become elastic and stretchable.  When this happens, remove the curd from the liquid and pull it like taffy to elongate the proteins.  (Don’t try to be as dramatic as cartoon-Ricki is in the stretching pictures, though.  It’s not actually taffy, and you are not a happy cartoon with a kissable cow friend.)

Add the salt, work it into the cheese, and then form your mozzarella into your desired shape.  I decided that braiding mine would be fun, and though it is certainly not the prettiest mozzarella braid ever, it’s the prettiest one I’ve ever made, and it was still quite delicious.

Ain’t Science grand?

My most concentrated Southern dining experience, though, had to be at Mary Mac’s Tea Room, an Atlanta destination known for both their food and hospitality (our waitress was wonderfully genuine, charming and friendly in a way that I have rarely experienced before).

I even got my risk-averse boyfriend to try these and he loved them!

There, I had the four-piece fried chicken dinner with sides of collard greens and fried green tomatoes (another fantastic Southern tradition!), as well as the bacon-infused cornbread (whoa) and cinnamon rolls that came with every meal. I also sampled a few dishes from my dining mates, like tomato pie (which was delicious, but relatively light on the tomato after adding all of the mayonnaise and other good stuff!), fried okra, pecan pie (amazing!) and macaroni and cheese.

All the food was delicious, although the richness gave me a bit of a stomachache afterwards (that place does not play around with butter, oil or mayonnaise), and from what I could tell, it was pretty authentic to Southern traditions with a few restaurant-specific twists. One thing that made me laugh, though, is that I preferred my own version of collard greens to the one served at the restaurant. Despite my infatuation with Paula Deen, I wouldn’t consider myself a Southern cooking expert at all, but one of my experiments with vegetables in recent years has been making collard greens (or any other tough greens) using the recipe below, which has an amazing blend of sweet, sour, spicy and smoky flavors that infuses the veggies and breaks them down into something either velvety smooth or delightfully chewy, depending on how long you cook them (I tend to cook mine less than average because I like a little extra texture).

Mary Mac’s, on the other hand, had a slightly different recipe (which you can find if you purchase their totally worthwhile cookbook in the link above) that relied more on chicken stock, which is a fairly common/traditional way to prepare the greens. But, perhaps because it’s what I had first, I preferred the sweet tanginess of this recipe. I thought the chicken stock made the greens and “pot likker” (the leftover liquid from making the greens) a bit too salty, although Mary Mac’s had a delightful tradition of bringing out the pot likker as a kind of amuse bouche that you were supposed to crumble a bacony cornbread muffin into.

So, while I heartily endorse checking out the Mary Mac’s Tea Room cookbook, in the meantime, here’s my favorite recipe for collard greens to tide you over.

Bacon and Brown Sugar-Braised Collard Greens

From Cooking Light magazine

Ingredients

• 2 bacon slices
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 2 cups water
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons cider vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground red pepper
• 1 (16-ounce) package prewashed torn collard greens (I often use leftover kale or other “tough greens” — I even made this one time from the leftover tops from beets!)

Preparation

Cook bacon in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat until crisp. Remove bacon from pan, reserving drippings in pan. Crumble bacon; set aside. Add onion and garlic to drippings in pan; cook over medium heat 5 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally. Stir in crumbled bacon, 2 cups water, and next 4 ingredients (through pepper). Gradually add greens. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 1 hour or until tender.