Cooking aboard or outdoors

I wasn't especially impressed with the presentation of my last dish so, as the kids say, I did a reboot.

Exhibit A... Yes, ricotta cheese can be made from UHT milk and cream. I can't imagine why people suggest otherwise.

Exhibit B... The reboot, a much better looking dish.

Exhibit C... Just for something different, a beetroot and ricotta salad/starter.

Nothing refrigerated or with a self life of less than 6 months (the parma ham).

I've seen quite a few unnecessarily complicated recipes for ricotta cheese. Try this:

2 Lt full cream UHT milk (about 2 quarts or a half gallon for those still stuck with base 12 mathematics)
200ml UHT cream (about 1 cup)
1/2 tsp salt
3 Tbsp lemon juice or white vinegar

Heat milk, cream and salt gently till just beginning to foam and boil, stiring periodically to prevent burning on the bottom of the pan, reduce heat immediately to a simmer.

Add lemon juice or vinegar and stir frequently till curds form. Depending on the quality of your UHT milk and cream this can take anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes.

Remove curd from whey with a sieve/strainer and transfer to a colander lined with a clean fresh tea towel over a bowl to collect whey.

Let cool in the sink or refrigerate as need dictates. It is ready for use when whey has drained from cheese and a soft creamy but dry quality it evident.

If feta is your "kink", try this reasonable I-can't-believe-it's-not-feta.

Refrigerate and then press/squeeze cheese often to remove all possible whey from ricotta to form a firm and dehydrated ricotta cheese. Cut prepared ricotta into cubes and coat with a very generous amount of salt, let salt infuse for 4 hours and then marinate cubes in olive oil, whole pepper corns and fresh thyme sprigs or a few tablespoons of dried thyme leaves for 24 hours.

 

Tks for the faux feta recipe, James. I'll give it a try, if I ever find time. I've been so busy between work and honey-do lists lately, I haven't even had time and ambition to cook up some of Frosty's bread pudding.

I checked the overtime log this morning. So far this year, I've worked 425 hours of overtime. If you divide that by 40-hour work weeks, it comes out to 10 1/2 weeks... By the time the new year rolls around, I'll have worked a 15 or 16-month year.

 

Yah... overtime. I Recently came off a cruise, 160 days, covered 10,000 miles. . Days tend to be 18hrs...the occasional 24hr day and weeks are always seven days. When its over it takes a while to remeber what weekends are and re enter humanity.

 

I hear you... In my last job I was expected to put in 17 hour days with disturbing regularity.

Oh, talking about work, I've abandoned my career to start a new one as an apprentice chef!

Unexpected good news too... I now have a regular column in Cruising Helmsman magazine... The Cruising Chef.

 

Gee...Chefs work 12 hours per day and apprentice chefs 18 hr.

Wouldnt it be better to become a professional eater and food critic ?

I regularly do it in my spare time..easy, low stress

 

Thats nothing --why when I was a lad in Yorkshire me dad would beat us wi stick and I had to get up 3 hours before I went to bed then lick road clean wi tounge.

 

Sounds logical. Its the only way to get any work out of a Skiving Pom

 

That does sound interesting... Must look into it, how did you get into it?

My problem was that I kept being promoted, so in my previous career, I started as a machine and process operator of a very complex dairy processing plant... Actually making/cooking/manufacturing something, in absurd volumes of hundreds of thousands of litres a week.

Eventually I was very well paid to just watch others in my team do all the fun stuff, while I "supervised" and spend my day with pointless emails and endless forms that no one ever read.

Even collecting Dairy board awards, became boring, as they were too frequently won by us, and no longer a rewarding surprise.

I miss the money, but love what I'm doing. I got a thrill out of making 2 cups of honest home-made ricotta over the weekend.

In the old job, I would make a 4,500 kilogram batch with just a few mouse clicks within minutes of a 40,000 litre milk delivery, right from my office and then watch the kids at the end of almost a kilometre of pipework at a filling machine packing off the finished product from my office window while I procrastinated over replying to yet another idiotic email.... Thats not cooking!

In three short years, I'll be an executive chef on some rich ******** mega yacht, or sailing the world in my own boat and putting money in my back pocket with stints at tacky coastal hotel resorts along the way.

Now, that sounds like fun!

 

Completely over your head --I guess you dont know about monty Python.

 

Oh Yah !!!!


"you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries. "

Take that

 

Part of the problem is that my home is a three-hour drive from where I work, and I work 12-hour shifts. So I keep a motor home here. On the days or nights when I'm working, I really don't have time to do much more than shave, shower, cook dinner (or breakfast, if it's a night shift), do laundry and hang out on the internet for a bit before I crash and start over.

The original theory was that since I work 12-hour shifts and our pay periods are based on 40-hour weeks, I'd get a lot of time at home (14 days out of every 28, in fact). But the reality is that overtime shifts for the last couple of years have interrupted that schedule to the point where I only make it home a few days out of every month -- and I generally spend those days uncrossing my eyes, because of the switching from day shifts to night shifts and back again...

I'm starting to seriously burn out. Overtime pay is nice, but I also need a life -- and a chance to catch my breath. Oh well, I only have two and a half years before I officially retire. Assuming I survive my work schedule and live that long, of course.

congratz on the cruising chef thing; that's a pretty high compliment.

 

Only about ten years ago ,over on this side of the pond , there was this popular concept called work life balance. 35 hour workweek, shops closed on weekends so as to not upset the "balance , great pay and contracts for life, free medical...

No look at it ? 25 percent unemployment and people jumping out of windows.

I believe that the true reality of life is feast and famine...the farmers lifescycle. When the work is there...work till you drop.... because things certainly will change.

 

I saw it in the news net. Expats who came to your country and had it good for the last ten years but now has lost their fortunes, out of job, and living in the streets.

Is it really true that they cannot get out to return to their homeland without paying the debt first?

 

The situation is pretty bad all around. Locals survive easier because they can fall back on the family. Expats cant fall back into a family network..

A big issue today is evictions . Your fail to keep the payments on your loan, your out.

Some evictions are common sense. When evictions effect normal working families social disorder results.

Can expats return home after bankruptcy ? I dont know. Expats typically spend there savings and buy a house in the sun. Once comfy in the sun they need additional revenue for a lifestyle so the easy way to make money ,without a job, was to speculate on real estate. For years it was easy for an expat to make 50 grand a year by purchasing a property from the developer during construction, with a no money down 100 percent mortgage. Then at the end of the year sell the finished property for a 50 thousand profit. Happy days !!

This cycle has collapsed. Many Expats are now stuck with mortgages for investment property that they cant pay and cant sell. They loose the investment property and their personal property because they used it for collateral to purchase the investment.

Bad scene. Hopefully they can get the economy moving again , restore confidence and stop this death spiral

 

Make hay while the sun shines...

A friend of a friend tried to convince me to invest in Spain RE/flip/etc- I just didn't get how it all worked. And when I don't get something,I stay away.
I heard he was up $2-3 million on paper..then last I heard he was living in a van and surfing somewhere.

BTW congrats James on the column.