Mozzarella!

We bought a cheese making kit a while ago that had stellar reviews on amazon and tried it out last night. I was so pleased that it was as easy and fast as the directions promised and successful!

You start with a gallon of milk...

And a few things from the kit that you wouldn't have at home-rennet, citric acid, cheese salt, and a dairy thermometer 

After combining the rennet and acid with the hot milk-it does this! 

You separate the curds from they liquidy whey...

Heat it and knead in the salt...

Stretch it...

Put it in an ice bath for a few minutes...

And voila! Fresh mozzarella that tasted awesome!!

Bark Family Night!

We've been trying to keep Thursday night sacred for family nights for a couple years now. We've also been trying to build relationships with our neighbors and love on them. So, we combined those two for a Christmas-serve-our-neighbors themed family night a couple weeks before Christmas!

We tried our hand at making bark for the first time. Melting chocolate and adding anything to it proved to be the perfect family cooking experiment! We made white chocolate and milk chocolate with pretzels, MnMs, crushed Oreos, and some chocolate Christmas colored candies. We made a TON and packaged most of it up for 6 of our neighbors. It was a quick project so we decided to go deliver it with our Christmas cards that same night...not realizing it was pouring rain!! But, not wanting to ruin our momentum, we braved it which made for an even more memorable adventure :-)