summary: Blue Grapes are perfect for pie; they also might be perfect for jam; what to do with grape jam that tastes like raisins instead of grapes: make a jam roll; recipe for making yoghurt cheese; information about Two For Tuesdays! (real food); submission for YeastSpotting and Forging Fromage; (click on images to see larger views and more photos)

I bet you thought I was crazy to be baking bread this past Sunday when it was so ridiculously hot. Ha! You don’t know the half of it.

At 6:00am BEFORE I mixed the dough, I made grape jam. Without pectin.

Stirring stirring stirring molten lava like grapes. Stirring stirring. I left the kitchen light turned off – thinking it might make me imagine it wasn’t really very hot in the kitchen.

And then the tragedy of it all was that I over-cooked the grapes (all those beautiful blue grapes) so the jam tastes like raisin jam instead of grape jam.

Undaunted (well, sort of…) I slathered some of it onto a third of the sweet Portuguese bread dough to make a spiral jam ring.

But I’m not the only crazy person living here. The other 50% of the residents here are equally crazy and baked pie the day before when it was over 30C outside and not much less in the house. Baked pie AND railed about being blinded by the sweat dripping into his eyes.

But stop me now. I shouldn’t complain.

We got to have pie. Grape pie. Great grape pie!

60% of those who had grape pie ate it with vanilla ice cream (I really must post T’s latest way to make ice cream) and 30% had it with yoghurt cheese – from plain yoghurt that had been spooned into a cotton bag and left to drain over a bowl.

I kept the whey for the sweet Portuguese bread I made the next day. (okay okay, stop sniggering. I already said I was crazy, didn’t I?) I did this instead of cooking a potato. Because I didn’t want to heat up the kitchen by cooking a potato. (Cue hysterical laughter.)

How to make Yoghurt Cheese

Wrap plain yoghurt in an un-dyed cotton muslin bag (the kind of cloth that flour bags are made of) OR *several* layers of cheese cloth. Tie it shut and hang the wrapped yoghurt over a bowl to catch the liquid that drips out – we string ours up using the handle of a kitchen cupboard, with the bowl on the kitchen counter below. Draining anywhere from 4 hours to overnight is perfect.

NB If you are using cheese cloth, use several layers to ensure that you don’t lose any of the yoghurt solids. The lower the MF (milk fat) the more likely you are to lose yoghurt solids when draining. One of our friends uses extremely low fat yoghurt and drains it in a coffee filter.

• recipes from OUR kitchen:
  » grape pie
  » sweet Portuguese bread Flatten the dough into a long rectangle and spread the rectangle with jam. Roll it like a jelly roll and form the roll into a ring.
  » yoghurt
  » srikund (Indian dessert made with drained yoghurt, saffron and cardamom)
  » vanilla ice cream
  » blog recipes index
  » recipes from OUR kitchen – index

Oh yes, the jam roll bread? It made delicious toast this morning!

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