Oh My Stars and Garters: I'm LATE!

for a very important date! It involves me, The Most Wonderful Woman In The Entire World, and two of the most wonderful homemade pizzas (with dave's special sourdough pizza crust) that there ever were invented.

Fortunately, I've bailed myself out food wise, cus I've got one ready for you.

But I don't have a usual, rambling, disconnected, disjointed, stupid, dumb, smartassy, post for you. Have no fear though! I can always pull something out quickly:

Story time with Unkie dave:

Imagine this: You are seven years old and you've just swam through the canal in the lake behind your house. This is no tame, retarted, timid, lake or canal... This canal is only four feet deep, but has another four feet of muck which suck at the feet of a little brat. If the poor, unfortunate child is unlucky enough to put his foot down, then the little moron KNOWS it will be covered in LEECHES. Needless to say, the little idiot learns how to swim very very very very well without ever touching the bottom.

Now imagine you are the little dork and you've just climbed BAREFOOT up the 3000 foot bank on the other side of the canal (I swear! It was that high!), and you have nothing on but your shorts (very familiar for dave later in life --foreshadowing...). Ah, that's IT! Just shorts after swimming across the leech infested canal.

Now imagine that you (dave) are all happy at getting through the canal with all of your blood, and you are running and jumping merrily (gaily?) along a rabbit path through the tundra to get around the lake to get home.

Now imagine that your bare foot post-holes straight down into the what was semi-solid tundra. Then imagine a boatload of wasps come pouring out of the hole, and they are very intent on finding every single square inch of exposed skin of the dumb, stupid, moronic, little kid (you know, dave!).

Do you remember the song "The Streak"??? Well, needless to say, that was me that day. I've never ever ever ever been able to run that fast --not through a lack of trying, but that's another story.

Ok, food time:

Fake Neufchatel Cheese

This cheese is from Switzerland, and it's pretty hard to get the real stuff outside of Europe. HOWEVER, I (dave) have come up with a pretty damned good approximation for it and it's VERY VERY VERY easy to make.

Neufchatel is a creamy cheese, great for spreading on goodies that need a spread --you'll find many uses for it, trust me! In fact, you'll never buy philly cream cheese ever again!

What you need:

2 cups of fresh homemade plain yogurt (yoghurt)
some sea salt
cheesecloth (or chuxcloth for you folks down under)


What you do:

Place the cheesecloth (or chuxcloth) in a bowl, then plop in the fresh, homemade, plain yoghurt (yogurt). Lift up the four corners of the cloth and tie it around your sink faucet (spigot) with the bowl below to catch the whey (the whey makes great veggie soup stock. Hell, you can drink it straight!). Let it drain overnight --ummm, do I need to tell you not to turn the faucet on while it's draining? No? I thought not.

Once it's drained and *fairly* firm (might take an extra day, heck you didn't need the sink anyways, right?), then spread the curds out on a wooden cutting board. Lightly salt them and then mix well with a good chef's knife. Ahhh, yes! How to mix the curds with a knife... Use the knife blade to pile the curds up, and then "cut" the curds. Repeat till you think it's mixed enough. This should only take around 10-15 secs if you know what you are doing with a knife.

Chuck the curds into a container, put a lid on, toss it in the fridge, and then the next day you'll have the best damned creamy cheese you've EVER tasted! No lie!

Variations: you can easily add the following to the "curd cutting" process: roasted garlic, minced onion, chives, smoked salmon, mint, tarragon, coriander etc. Ahhh, I don't suggest using all those together, DUH! Oh, yeah: if you'd like it to be yellow then mix in some turmeric (a very small amount).