Cheese, boerewors and moving house

So much has happened since my last post. I have learned to make cheese, made our first batch of boerewors, gained an extra qualification and moved islands!

Let's start with the cheese. My dear friend Karin got me to go along with her and 2 other gals on a cheese making course. We really had the guys clamouring for us in these sexy hairnets!

We learned to make mozzarella, haloumi and ricotta. We stopped off for a light lunch and then went off to the course where we were laughing so much at times the teacher couldn't get much said. We went home with our loot, considerably poorer because we could not resist investing in a cheese making kit with all its bells and whistles ready to become artisan cheese makers. As we were moving a few weeks later, I just put the kit away in the cupboard to be dug out two weeks ago for some fresh ricotta for spinach and ricotta cannenoli. Yum. I felt really pleased with myself scooping the fresh cheese into the pasta tubes. Feta, here I come!

Now the boerewors was an interesting experience. I have been looking for the sausage casings for a while, ever since I smuggled ouma's meuletjie (mill) through customs at Jan Smuts (I mean OR Tambo). Told them it was a coffee grinder! In Sydney I had to dismantle it to prove that the blade was in my luggage that was in transit and not on my person. How they thought I was going to kill the pilot with the little blade, I don't know because I would have been far more successful if I slugged him with it! But once I had the lethal weapon home, wors attachment and all it was all systems go.

I found hog casings (was quite dubious about that...did that mean it was a very old pig?) on the Internet and ordered them. A few days later they lay in my post box (panicked about that because I thought they would rot - but that are heavily salted and can survive outside the fridge for a long time) and got to work. 7 kilograms of wors later, with some sizzling in the pan, we were very pleased with our efforts: garlic, traditional and cheese wors.

The moving islands bit, I will include in my next post. But for now its cheers and may you all be very blessed in this exciting new year.