I’ve blogged at this site — and, in the past, at crummycook.com — about my escapades in cooking, growing, and making food.

My latest attempt is farmer cheese.  This is a soft, bland cheese that is quite similar to cottage cheese but does not have a discrete curd structure.

I wanted to make it because my grandma had served it at breakfast years ago when I was a boy, and I, who didn’t like anything very strongly flavored, took a liking to it and asked her for it when we visited.

Her farmer cheese was a block of solid somewhat like halvah in texture, but easier to cut.

I ran across a recipe in Mother Earth News last year for making farmer cheese, and decided I would give it a shot.  Which I’ve finally done.

It didn’t come out 100% like Grandma’s.  In the first place, the lemon juice and buttermilk made the product slightly but noticeably sour, which would have dismayed young Danny but didn’t bug me.

More importantly, the cheese was too granular to slice.  You could scoop it up and spread it (like Boursin, perhaps), but I wanted to slice it as I had sliced my grandmother’s farmer cheese so many years ago.

My daughter and her vegetarian boyfriend put it on some vegetables my wife had whipped up and it crumbled nicely on top and was a great complement to the veggies.  Happiness all around.

Next?  I’ll make farmer cheese batch 2 or perhaps try a companion recipe for cottage cheese.