We're an ordinary family, complete with picky eaters, budget concerns, and time management issues. But to prove that "eating local" works - even for busy families in cooler climates - we're trading Chick-Fil-A and goldfish crackers for grassfed meat and local produce. Join our adventure in learning to eat (sort of) sustainably for the summer!

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Cheese straws

Have I mentioned that we like our cheese around here?  Liza eats virtually nothing but string cheese some days, and Jason and I have to be careful to avoid doing the same with more "adult" flavors of cheese.  If Jason was going to get a tattoo, "Everything is better with cheddar" would probably figure prominently in it somewhere.  And cheese-flavored crackers are a big deal around here, often opened and finished in the same day.

So figuring out sources for local cheese has been a priority for me.  I'm still working out the details - it shouldn't be hard, as Amish country isn't too far south of us, so there's a whole tribe of bearded cheesemongers not far away.  And cheese crackers - how hard can they be to make?

Not terribly difficult, as it turns out.  I followed the recipe for cheese straws from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, which is basically the same as this one, only with 1 lb of cheddar cheese in place of the blend in the online recipe.  Once I coerced our food processor into shredding the cheese, the rest was a piece of cake.  Five to eight minutes later, I had a whole stack of these babies:


Beautiful cheese straws, even if they do look exactly like french toast sticks.  And the best part?  Liza won't eat them, so Jason and I have them all to ourselves!  Of course, after a few weeks of the "no goldfish, no Cheese-Its" diet, she may get desperate enough to try them again, but until then, all the salty, cheesy goodness is just for us grown-ups.  Bwahahahahahaha!

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