Ricotta cheese pizza sauce

A few day ago, I alluded to how I use a homemade ricotta cheese pizza sauce on my pizzas. Many of you were interested in the recipe.

I'm not overly fond of tomatoes, so when it comes to pizza sauce I opt for alternatives such as pesto sauce, Alfredo sauce, etc. When I came across a recipe for a garlicky ricotta cheese sauce, I decided to try it. Don was stopping at the grocery store in town, so I asked him to get me a container of ricotta. The recipe turned out terrific, and I decided I wanted to make a large batch, which I could then freeze into one-pizza serving sizes.

But when I went to the store to get a larger quantity of ricotta and saw the actual price Don had paid, I had an absolute snit-fit – $9 for two pounds, and I wanted at least four pounds of ricotta to make a large batch of pizza sauce. There was no way I was paying that price!

I'd never made ricotta before, but I'm getting a gallon of milk a day, so purchasing the store-bought stuff was, admittedly, a lazy move. Time to learn how to make my own.

Whole-milk ricotta requires only two ingredients (or possibly four, depending on what recipe you follow): Milk and an acidifier. Salt is optional, though it enhances the flavor and helps coagulate the milk proteins. Adding a bit of heavy cream to the milk creates a richer, silkier ricotta.

I started by pouring a gallon of whole milk into a pot. It's best not to use skim milk for making ricotta, as the results will be a cheese that is too dry.

I heated the milk (slowly) to between 185F to 195F.  This step takes 20 to 30 minutes or even longer, and is not a step to be rushed. I stirred the milk periodically.

Once the milk reached temperature, I added the acidifier. There are several different kinds of acidifiers that can be used, including citric acid (mixed with water), apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, or distilled white vinegar. Distilled white vinegar is the default acidifier and works extremely well. I used about two-thirds of a cup per gallon of milk.

After the acidifier is added, the curds should start separating from the whey almost immediately. You can see how the milk started curdling.

Then it was time to cover the pot and let the curds rest for anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours. The longer this resting period, the more curds will form. The curds should not be stirred during this resting period.

Next, I drained the ricotta. The longer it drains, the drier it will become. For a creamier consistency, it should be drained for one to two hours. For a firmer ricotta, drain it for around 24 hours. Somewhat arbitrarily, I drained mine for about four hours.

Here is what the final result looked like.

Trying to use up milk (and maximize the amount of pizza sauce), I made a second batch of ricotta the next day. I ended up with 3.5 lbs (56 ounces) of ricotta.

I stored this in the refrigerator overnight, then made pizza sauce the next day.

The recipe for ricotta white sauce is easy: Eight parts ricotta, four parts cream (or half and half), one part olive oil, and spices to taste. For one pizza, for example, the recipe called for one-half cup ricotta, one-quarter cup of cream, and one tablespoon olive oil (plus spices).

I had 56 ounces of ricotta, therefore I needed to add 28 ounces of cream or half and half (1.75 lbs.) and seven ounces of olive oil. It's worth noting that I measured the cream and olive oil by weight, not volume. Then I added salt, pepper, minced garlic, and basil until the taste was satisfactory. (Your choice of flavorings may vary.)

Adding cream to the ricotta:

Blending the ricotta with the cream was challenging because the ricotta was so thick. I used a potato masher to start...

...then graduated to beaters to blend all the rest of the ingredients and make a sauce.

The final sauce was somewhat lumpy from the ricotta, and that's as it should be.

Then I bagged it up in one-cup measurements for freezing.

In retrospect, I should have bagged up more per bag, anywhere from 1.5 to 2 cups. At any rate, it freezes well.

Labeling.

Now, whenever I make pizza, I can just reach for a bag, defrost it in the refrigerator overnight, and make pizza the next day.

So that's the trick for ricotta cheese pizza sauce. This is my kind of convenience food.

The new reality

Older Daughter, as you know, is now attending college to become a nurse. She's doing extremely well in her classes. As in, extremely well.

Listening to her stories, it's interesting how things have changed since Don and I were in school in the early 80s (and for me, the early 90s for grad school). For one thing, the internet, smart phones (and other devices), and artificial intelligence have made teaching much more challenging than ever before. Apparently instructors have to bend themselves into pretzels to prevent cheating.

So when I saw this illustration below, I sent it to Older Daughter labeled, "Your chuckle du jour":

I meant this to be nothing more than a lighthearted poke at something students have always tried to do, namely cheat.

But Older Daughter replied, "This is why the testing center a) doesn't let you bring ANY loose item in, and b) makes you take off and display all angles of your glasses or hearing aids, and c) makes you lift up your pants to expose your socks and ankles. They are taking NO chances."

I said, "You're ... kidding ... More security than an airport."

She answered, "You can't even bring your own pencil, they provide one."

I responded, "Wow. And the sad thing is, presumably they had to implement these protocols for a reason."

I guess this is the new reality in college.

What to do with five gallons of milk

Once in a while, despite my best efforts, milk piles up in the fridge.

Last week, here's what I did with this much cow juice.

First, I skimmed off the cream. I just use a soup ladle for this task.

Here's some of the resulting cream.

Then I measured two cups of the skimmed milk into a pot and scalded it as the first step toward making ice cream. I've gotten to the point where I don't bother using the ice-cream churn, and just use the freeze-and-mix method.

I make vanilla ice cream for Don, and peach ice cream for myself.

Each batch requires three cups of milk and five cups of cream (six cups of milk and ten cups of cream for two batches), so skimming the cream from all those gallons is going to good use.

The (unfrozen) vanilla is on the left, and peach is on the right. (This is another reason I love making peach purée; I use it for flavoring.) I put these batches in the freezer overnight, being sure to mix everything once an hour for the first four hours of freezing.

That used up all the cream. I was left with gallons of skimmed milk. Incidentally, home-skimmed milk isn't like the watery-blue stuff you buy in the store. It's a whole lot richer, almost (almost!) like store-bought whole milk.

I used this milk to make thirty-minute mozzarella. The recipe in my cheesemaking book calls for using one gallon of whole milk.

I experimented with making two-gallon batches using skimmed milk, and it turns out fine. Perfect for pizza, in fact. Plus, making two two-gallon batches is far more efficient than making four one-gallon batches.

By the time I skimmed the cream and took out the skimmed milk necessary to make the ice cream, what was left was almost exactly four gallons of skimmed milk. This is what I used to make the two batches of mozzarella.

This is the finished mozzarella.

Final weight of the cheese came to about 5.25 lbs.

I cut it up...

...and grated everything. With this much cheese to grate at the same time, you can see why I love this rotary cheese grater so much!

Ready to bag.

I portioned it out into one-pound bags and froze all but two bags.

I held back those two bags because I decided to make some pizza. I pulled the sauces out of the freezer to defrost. Don prefers tomato-based pizza sauce, but I use a homemade ricotta white sauce (remind me to post that recipe later).

Here are the uncooked pizzas topped with cheese...

...and then with pepperoni and onions. (Ahem. I love onions, so I tend to go a little crazy with them as toppings.)

The finished pizzas.

And that's what I do when I have five gallons of milk to use up.

A praying mantis I'd never heard of before

Once in a while I catch wind of a critter I've never heard of before. Today I learned about the Conehead praying mantis (Empusa pennata).

This insect is so bizarre-looking that I legitimately thought this was an AI image at first. Nope, it's real, and lives around the Mediterranean in Southern Europe and Northern Africa.

Even Wikipedia describes them as having an "alien" appearance. No argument there.

Nature is amazing.

Problems of the wealthy

A random story popped up on my computer the other day, a story from Kiplinger's "Wealth Wise" advice column: "Can a 64-Year-Old Retire on $1.6 Million and 'Shaky' Social Security?" (Please note this person is my age.)

"Dear Wealth Wise," wrote the advice-seeker. "I'm 64 (almost 65), work full-time, and I'm tired of being told to use AI at my job. Can I retire on $1.6 million if my yearly spending needs are roughly $90,000 and Social Security will pay $3,500 a month (if benefits remain fully payable)?"

I confess I choked on my tea when I read this. This dude has $1.6 million in his retirement and his Social Security benefits are $3,500 a month? Yowza. Don receives Social Security, and let's just say his payments are considerably less than $3,500 per month.

This man's spending needs amount to $90,000 per year, or $7,500 per month. To us, that is wealth untold.

I think one of the things that baffles me about this kind of financial question is it highlights the different approach to spending and the dichotomy between the wealthy and the lower middle class. Because our income has always been unstable – and because we've experienced the horrors of debt – we've learned to live below our means, however humble those means are. We've spent years finding ways to whittle down our expenses and our spending. This has enabled us to pivot on a dime and adapt when times get tough (see here and here). As a result, we feel very financially stable.

The Kiplinger advice columnist was able to assure the man that yes, he could retire on that kind of income: "Our reader's estimated $42,000 annual Social Security benefit should cover roughly half of annual spending needs. The remaining $48,000 will need to come out of savings. Using the popular 4% rule, $1.6 million could support $64,000 in annual withdrawals. Since our reader only needs $48,000, they have a pretty good buffer."

Now don't get me wrong; this person is to be commended for his diligent savings during his working years. I know no one who has that much put away, so kudos to him and I hope he enjoys his retirement.

But for those of us who were not as financially blessed during our productive years (obviously we get by on a whole lot less than $90K), we've had to adapt and make do. This video is more along the lines of our financial philosophy: "How to Live on a Low Income, $30,000 or less." Don points out that $90K is not a huge income anymore, and in fact falls distinctly into the middle class. I guess that puts us in the "lower middle class" category.

This kinda reminds me of a couple of quotes. Someone once said, "A rich man is not the one that has the most – it's the one that needs the least."

And Diogenes of Sinope (c. 413/403 – c. 324/321 B.C.) famously tells a similar anecdote, to wit: A philosopher named Aristippus, who had quite willingly sucked up to Dionysus and won himself a spot at his court, saw Diogenes cooking lentils for a meal. "If you would only learn to compliment Dionysus, you wouldn't have to live on lentils." Diogenes replied, "But if you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn't have to flatter Dionysus.

As it happens, I'm very fond of lentils.

What are your thoughts? Could you afford to retire on $90,000/year?

My (belated) birthday present

On or about my birthday (Sept. 6), I made what I called an "executive decision": I was going to order a kitchen gadget I've been wanting for quite a while.

To back up, I've been making a fair bit of "thirty-minute mozzarella" lately. This is a fast and easy way to use up surplus milk, freezes beautifully, and supplies us with endless ingredients for future pizzas. However I was stymied by one essential step: Grating the cheese.

Using the faithful box grater I've had for years, this mozzarella simply didn't want to shred. It would tear. It would clump. It would fall apart. But conspicuously, it wouldn't shred. It was beyond frustrating, especially since I was making so much mozzarella.

So I told Don I was buying myself a birthday present: A rotary cheese grater.

This grater has a suction feature to affix it firmly to a surface by turning a knob. I learned it doesn't affix well to our wooden kitchen table (since it's not perfectly smooth), but it does well on the kitchen counter.

And I tell ya, the difference in grating mozzarella is night and day. Here's some cheese which I cut into chunks small enough to fit in the grater's hopper.

The grater has a pusher used to push the food into the cutting blades (for safety).

It grates the cheese cleanly and easily, unlike the hot mess I would make with the box grater.

The grater comes with several different blades (coarse, fine, slicing), though I've only used the coarse blade so far. It grates potatoes, cheese, veggies ... anything, really.

I told Don this is my new favorite kitchen tool. The only remaining question is – why did I wait until I turned 64 to get one?

UPDATE: Sorry, I should have linked to the actual product when I posted this. Interestingly, the box it came in doesn't have a brand name on it, which means doubtless they're all made in some overseas factory and then slapped with a label from various "manufacturers." At any rate, this is the kind I bought, though there are numerous similar (or identical) graters available.

Phew! The yard sale is over

Whew, what an intense week. We finally had our yard sale.

Comically, after the last yard sale we had three years ago – which we vowed would be our last – a reader said, "You know you should never say never again." S/he was right, 'cuz here we are again.

We managed to target – literally – the only weekend in which rain was not predicted, either during the crucial set-up phase, during the weekend itself, or during the breaking-down phase.

As with our previous yard sale, we had items stored in several locations, waiting for the opportunity to sell them. We also planned to make multiple "sweeps" (as we called them) through the barn, the lofts, various sheds, and of course the house to remove everything that was superfluous.

When she moved out, Older Daughter also earmarked a great number of things she no longer needed, including a mountain of clothes. (I don't know where she gets her excellent taste in fashion, because it sure as heck isn't from me.)

We spent a long time combing through our possessions, being a lot more brutally realistic about what we did and didn't need. Those two baskets made from branches I used almost every week to transport food to our neighborhood potlucks? I haven't used them since we moved. Some extra blankets beyond what was necessary for house guests? Gone. A water pump Don bought second-hand years ago and has been taking up space since? Up for sale. You get the idea.

Next, we had to make sure our driveway area (which is very large) was clear of anything unrelated to the yard sale. Specifically, we had to get rid of the mountain of firewood, which is why we put so much time into splitting and stacking it.

With the firewood put up, that cleared a lot of space.

Next, Don used the tractor to pull this massive trailer from against the fence line and position it broadside across the driveway. This served two purposes. One, the trailer itself is for sale; and two, it would allow us to display items on its surface where people could see things from all sides.

We had an old and absolutely filthy propane stove we removed from our last house and which we've been storing in various barns for probably 20 years. We kept it because it's the old-fashioned kind that has a pilot light and therefore doesn't need an electrical ignition (they don't make them anymore) and we thought it would be nice to put it in a guest house. We decided to sell it.

It took me hours to scrub, vacuum, and polish it as best I could. Don't worry, the bottom photo is only halfway through the process.

Don started transporting tractor implements we no longer needed from the barn area behind the house to the front driveway.

Ironically, this six-foot yard rake is one of the first things we sold.

We had a number of old wood stoves we'd accumulated over the years. Don used the tractor to move them out of the barn.

In the days preceding the opening of the yard sale (which ran Friday, Saturday, Sunday), we kicked things into high gear.

After splitting and stacking the firewood, we reserved twelve smaller logs of roughly the same length to be used as table legs.

We screwed down sheets of plywood to make display surfaces.

We dusted off unneeded shop tools.

We rigged up a clothes rack by using a 22-foot steel well pipe rod. At first we (naively and optimistically) simply attached the rod to the uprights using Gorilla tape. Let's just say it didn't work. We ended up bracing the rod with 2x4s, which worked beautifully.

The clothes rod was held up by two shorter pieces of rod, inserted through a wooden base Don had made years ago and then pounded into the ground with a T-post pounder, then later reinforced with the 2x4s. These babies weren't going anywhere.

As a result, we were able to hang all of Older Daughter's clothes to display them.

Some things we just grouped on "$1 tables" and "$5 tables."

We tried to group things in sections: The clothing section, the furniture section, the tractor-implement section, the farm section, etc. Not everything fell into neat categories, but we tried. This is the camping section.

The furniture section. Most of this is furniture we were selling for friends.

The tractor-implement section.

The woodstove section.

We printed clear signage explaining what an item was and how much it cost (and of course, we were willing to dicker).

Finally, we put up signage, starting about a mile and a half away and guiding visitors our way.

We also put up a hasty sign directing people to a neighbor about a quarter-mile past us who was also having a yard sale, capitalizing on our efforts. We always told visitors to be sure to see what the neighbors had too.

After all the frantic prep work, the days of the actual yard sale were far less busy. We simply had to wait for customers.

Over the three days of the sale, we met many lovely people – and a couple who was not so lovely. This couple, annoyed that we politely declined their lowball offer on our brush hog, actually tossed some garbage out of their truck before they drove away. When I went over to see what they tossed, it was – I kid you not – clumps of soiled toilet paper. Ewww.

As the sun went down on the last day, Don drove around and removed all the signage, then parked the car broadside across the driveway so no one could get in.

Today we're boxing things up for donation to various thrift stores. We have a fairly small pile of things to just throw away. We also took photos of all our big-ticket items that didn't sell so we can put them up on Facebook Marketplace.

Our goal is to put nothing back in storage, with a couple of exceptions. This torn-up wool blanket once belonged to my grandparents. It would be one thing if someone could use it for a project, but I can't bear the thought of it being tossed in a dumpster, so I'm going to hang on to it.

It's a good thing we had the yard sale this past weekend. We have rain moving in again next weekend, so we'll have to make sure everything is put away and under cover before the weather changes.

Both of us are wildly relieved this project is over. Planning and implementing this took a lot of our time and bandwidth. Now we can relax a bit and move onto other tasks.

Can I say "Never again" this time around?