Craft Party!

Well, the lemon buns are iced (badly, I don’t seem able to master the concept of icing…), the cold is virtually gone (just a hacking cough left… but I promise I’m well enough to come out and play) and the etsy craft party is this evening!  We shall be bring our own craft projects and there will be a planned craft; we will be making and decorating matchboxes on a “secret santa” style basis, where you make one for someone else, and at the end of the night a few goodies will be popped in the matchboxes and then we take them away as a keepsake.  How lovely   At the moment I think we have 13 people planning on coming along!  I’m really looking forward to meeting crafty people in York!

However before the fun starts I must do mundane things like wash my hair (a girl has got to look her best when meeting new crafty people!) and have my tea (otherwise everyone will be distracted by the rumbling of my tummy…)!  So I shall head home once work is through, make myself all shiny and presentable and have egg fried rice with prawn crackers whilst watching A Touch Of Frost DVD which I picked up at the charity shop yesterday (more hints towards my being an old lady…).  There are two routes I can take between my new job and my house, both encounter a charity shop which could prove fatal for my bank balance…  Somehow I believe that spending in charity shops doesn’t count because it’s raising money and recycling things and it means I don’t have to give my money to big nasty exploiting companies.  However, despite all this the money does still come out of the bank…  I have a similar attitude to spending on folksy… it doesn’t count because it’s helping someones crafting business and means I’m buying something that’s far more unique than if I bought off the high street…  But still the money comes out…!

Lactose free cheese (and a craft meetup!)

The recipe for the macaroni cheese will be following as soon as I can make my other half tell me!  In the meantime I thought I would explore lactose free cheeses.  I feel it’s necessary to pass on my experiences because some of them were absolutely awful!

My absolute life saver is Lacto-free cheese, they sell a hard and a soft version and it’s available in a number of major supermarkets including Sainsburys and Morrisons.  These are made from cows milk but the lactose is removed.

The hard cheese has a bit of a rubbery texture, similar to Edam and has a mild but pleasing cheesy flavour.  We quite regularly use this when cooking for guests and they can never tell that it’s  not ‘real’ cheese which is excellent!  The soft cheese is, as far as I’m concerned, the same as Philadelphia just with the lactose removed.  They also offer lactofree milk and yoghurts.

Prior to the wonder of lactofree cheese and before I realised I was mildly soya intolerant I dabbled in the world of vegan cheese.

The best vegan cheese I found was the above Cheezly mozzarella style and is available at Holland and Barrett.  It melts pretty well so is good for things like Pizza toppings (although I found it worked best if you had the oven hotter than you normally would).  The same company now also offers mozzarella style slices which are probably worth ago (the block of cheese is quite soft and hard to grate).  These mozzarella slices were the ones I managed to get hold of when I was still eating them (also available at Holland and Barrett):

The slices are individually wrapped and last for ages in the fridge so they are quite convenient.

Vegan parmesan, available at Sainsburys, was quite useful as well:

Overall I rate lactofree cheese the best but the others are excellent substitutes for non dairy eating people who don’t mind a bit of soya in their lives!

If you’re feeling adventurous there are also a number of recipes available for making your own including this recipe for cheese sauce which looks like it would probably be ok (I would add a bit of mustard to it to give it a bit more flavour).

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For those of you in and around the wonderful area of York there is an Etsy Craft Party Meetup being planned for 18th June.  Head over here to get involved!