Skip to main content

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal.

Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me.

It would not concern me in the least that I have zero cheese making experience. What is more, I would not be bothered to find or follow a good recipe because following instructions is not one of my better skills. I prefer to play it by ear, seat of the pants style specially when it comes to cooking. I remember my mother make cottage cheese at home, this can’t be any different. Since, this cheese making enterprise was not planned for during this week, I really have no time for it. I realize I have to be creative and work it into my schedule.

So while J regales me with Bop To The Top for the fifth time in a row and pretends her breakfast is a Barmecide's feast, and I get dressed for work, I start to boil the goat milk on the stove. Between corralling J back to the countertop to her breakfast, ironing my clothes and fixing my hair and makeup, I manage to keep an eye out on the milk so I can curdle it with lemon juice at the right temperature. I did read about rennet being a key ingredient in making cheese but was prompt to dismiss as a minor detail.

I tell J that we are going to have home made feta cheese and she lets out a squeal of delight because its her favorite kind of cheese. At this point she has abandoned the song and dance along with the breakfast and is very anxious to help me make cheese. She is trying to drag her chair into the kitchen so she can watch the goings on up close. All this at eighty thirty in the morning.

I know I have a nine fifteen meeting in a building where parking is tight. Why I would embark on feta cheese making at this hour on Monday is a question worth considering. Not being the one to leave a task half done, I finish up with the milk and note that it has completely failed to curdle. The chances of this thing turning into any kind of cheese look remote at this point.

I am fashionably late to my meeting but feel a deep sense of satisfaction about my accomplishments in the kitchen earlier. So what if things did not go as planned or expected, I know I can squeeze something that will look like cream cheese with some effort later in the evening while I am responding to the last few emails from work, getting J to eat her dinner, helping with her music lesson and running some chores on the side. There is never a time and place for anything in my life. I don’t have to look too far to see how J is the way she is.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Parenting, discipling children is a life-time process.
Its okay sometime to be easy with your child.
Please remember there is no perfect parent.
God knows us All.
I hope you shall continue to pray with your child to improve your day.
God bless.
P.
ggop said…
P,
"Pray with your child"?

It is a reminder to stop and smell the roses. Where did prayer come into the picture?!
Heartcrossings said…
ggop - I am just as perplexed :) What's up with the prayer ?? What are we praying for ??

Ah to have the leisure to stop and smell the roses. But then there is never a place and time for that...
Sjs said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sjs said…
This comment has been removed by the author.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques