I had a new floor installed in my home to give me a chance to fix some water damage I had noticed (I’m pretty sure that’s how the chipmunk got in!). I needed to pull up the carpet in the dining room to patch the hole, and I decided to put down laminate flooring since carpet is a really good crumb trap. The install went well – I was completely floored by it! :P. Photos are in the slideshow below.
-
Anna’s New Floor
-
Non-dairy Cheese Part 2: Cheddar
I want to make cheese for all of my friends. This is part two in my attempt to accommodate my friends who can’t eat dairy products.
4 cups of cashews for vegan cheddar. Vegan cheddar begins the same way as vegan yogurt: lots of cashews!
Oh, and a few extra ingredients:
Cashews, yeast flakes, tapioca flour, miso, canola oil, carrageenan, yogurt, salt I blended everything together and heated the resulting “cashew goo” on my stove. This mixture was then poured into my cheese press to give it shape. Finally, the cheese was air-dried for a few days.
Cashew goo
Vegan cheddar “curds” in the cheese press
Vegan cheese that has been air dried for about three days.I was happy with the turnout, but I would do a few things differently the next time I make this:
- I doubled the recipe from the book, and I don’t think all the cashews were ground up in the second round of blending. Next time: I won’t double the recipe.
- The yogurt I used was thinner than I was expecting (see Part 1). Next time: I’ll either buy soy yogurt from the store or spend more time focusing on the cashew yogurt so it thickens a bit more.
- I noticed that I cooked some of the cheese to the bottom of my pot while heating. Next time: I’ll use a double boiler setup to distribute heat more evenly.
- I only “pressed” the cheese on one side, leading to one smooth side and one rough side. Next time: I want to press for a few minutes on both sides.
- The book told me to rub salt on the cheese before air drying, but I think this led to the cracks you see on the sides. Next time: I want to apply salt with a brine solution instead (I would normally do this with a dairy cheese)
-
Non-dairy Cheese Part 1: Cashew Yogurt
My goal as a cheese maker is to make delicious cheese for all of my friends, including those who can’t eat dairy due to severe allergies or chronic veganism. Let’s start cashew yogurt.
Cashews, Almond milk and cultured coconut milk for yogurt 
Blend together cashews and almond milk. 
Heat cashew – almond milk mixture on the stove 
Put next to oven light for heat. Cashew yogurt seems pretty easy. Just mix together the cashews and almond milk, add heat, culture with existing yogurt and then leave somewhere warm for a few hours.
If you leave the yogurt in the oven for too long, and then forget to refrigerate overnight the yogurt will separate.
If you leave the cashew yogurt in the oven too long, and then forget to refrigerate overnight you get this. 
Soak the cashews before blending, otherwise they won’t blend completely. So let’s reread the recipe and try again. My first mistake: I didn’t soak the cashews in water to soften them before blending. Also, soy milk is recommended over almond milk for making cheese. So I made these changes and left the yogurt in the oven for a little less time. The result was a little thin, but actually looked and smelled like yogurt!
Final soy-cashew yogurt I would do a few things differently if I ever make cashew yogurt again:
- Cashews are soaked in water to make them easier to grind up in the blender. I soaked these for about 4 hours, and I still noticed some cashew flakes floating around in the end. Next time: soak cashews longer.
- I used cultured coconut milk as my yogurt starter. This might have led to some problem getting the yogurt to thicken. Next time: use either soy yogurt as the starter or find a vegetarian yogurt culture packet.
- I left the yogurt in the oven for about 6 hours to firm up, which may also have led to my thickening problems. Next time: leave the yogurt near the light for the full 8 hours.
Next time: cashew cheddar!
-
One Year Full-Time
It occurs to me that I’ve been full-time for a little over a year now, so it’s time I shared the story of how I decided to switch over to living as Anna 100% of the time.
I had a plan for my transition from the beginning. I started hormone therapy in April 2013, and I wanted to give the hormones time to work before going public. The plan was to make an announcement at work right before leaving for the Christmas holidays, giving my coworkers a couple of weeks to let the news sink in. That was the plan … for about four months.
I had a camping trip with some friends that August. In the weeks leading up to it I managed to convince myself that I should spend the entire weekend as Anna to get some experience around other people. I had a lot of fun that weekend! I got over my initial fears on the first day, and some of the people I met that weekend had no idea that I’m trans.
That camping trip was a huge confidence boost for me, but it came with a side effect: I didn’t want to go back to a life where I had to pretend to be male. I delayed as long as I could, but I eventually had to go back to work. My mental state started falling apart during my walk to downtown, and I ended up complaining to a group of friends that all my male clothes were big, baggy, and uncomfortable.
The day got worse from there.
I was just beginning to bring my attention to my work again when a group of people returned from lunch and greeted me with a friendly “Hey Bryan, how was your weekend?”. This was an innocent question, and in any other context would have been fine. Unfortunately, the reminder that the camping trip was over and I was back to presenting male felt like a huge slap in the face. I spent the next hour trying really hard not to cry at my desk in front of everybody.
Later that day one of my friends pointed out that if presenting male was causing me problems, then why continue doing it? The idea of switching to “Anna-mode” publicly and permanently made a lot of sense but it scared me at the same time. Was I ready for full-time so soon? What about my plan? By the end of the day I had decided that relying on “the plan” was just a stalling tactic, and that I really needed to make a change for my sanity. So I talked to my friends, I emailed my coworkers and by the end of the week I was full-time!
I haven’t regretted my decision one bit. This past year was absolutely fantastic, and I’ve had a lot of fun. I want to give a huge THANK YOU to all the people in my life who are there for me. The whole transition process would have been way scarier if I didn’t have your friendship and support through all of it. Here’s to year two!
-
New Project: Gossip Stone
I’ve spent the last several years using NetworkManager on my laptop, mostly because I needed an easy way to connect to my work’s VPN. This worked fine at home, but for whatever reason NetworkManager, Workantile’s wireless hardware, and my laptop do not get along. I put up with this problem for well over a year before finally deciding to switch back to using WICD to manage my network connections and find something else to manage VPN.
I tried a handful of different VPN managers, but I wasn’t super impressed with anything I saw. So I made a list of features that I wanted and got to coding! Gossip Stone is the result – it provides a
straightforward right-click menu to connect to different VPN profiles (defined in /etc/vpnc/). For now users need to write vpnc scripts by hand, but I would eventually like to add in a connection editor so config files don’t need to be modified by hand.Let me know if you try it out!
-
Farmhouse Cheddar
A wheel of Farmhouse Cheddar air drying under a piece of cheesecloth. This cheese will be flipped twice a day until a yellowish rind develops on the edges. Farmhouse Cheddar is cheddar with a few shortcuts. Traditional cheddar is waxed and aged for three to six months before enjoying, but farmhouse cheddar will be ready with just a few days of air drying.
Wax has a low melting point and is very flammable. Always melt it using a double boiler setup. Farmhouse cheddar is good for two weeks when refrigerated, but will last for up to three months if sealed in wax first. I’m not capable of eating three pounds of cheese within two weeks all by myself, so I decided to try waxing! As a bonus, this gave me valuable experience in what to do … and what not to do. Wax is flammable and can only be melted safely with a pseudo-double boiler. Be very careful! Steam rising out of the lower pot could scald you, and cause you to drop the cheese into liquid wax out of reflex. It could be messy:
DON’T drop the cheese into the wax. I still don’t want to eat an entire cheese by myself, even after aging, so I cut the wheel into quarters first. Aging cheese makes it sharper, so every piece I peel open should have a subtly different flavor. I’ve just reached the most difficult step of cheese making: deciding how long I want to wait before digging in!
Ready for waxing!
Dip cheese into melted wax then put on wax paper to dry. Repeat until entire cheese is waxed, using the paintbrush to seal in any gaps.
Cheese can now be stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 months.
-
Caprese Bites
Tomatoes wrapped with dill mozzarella.
-
Queso Fresco
Queso fresco (Spanish for “fresh cheese”) is a Central American cheese, and can be used when making quesadillas. I started with three gallons of milk, which should give me three pounds of cheese in the end. I spent the entire afternoon working on this cheese, and it still needs to press for five more hours. I’ll be staying up until past midnight just so I can refrigerate the result. Hopefully I can keep myself awake that long …
Chemicals used for queso fresco (7/3/2014) Shot glasses (left to right): calcium chloride, mesophyllic starter, lipase powder Bowls (left to right): rennet solution, cheese salt
Queso fresco curds right before pressing.
Queso fresco that has been pressed for 1 hour
Queso fresco will be pressed under 30 pounds of weight for 6 hours.
-
Red Pepper Mozzarella
I’m getting into home cheese making, and my kitchen is turning into a small creamery! I made this red pepper mozzarella last week:
Mozzarella with red pepper flakes added.
-
New Hosting!
For the last few months OcarinaProject.Net had been hosted on a Rackspace virtual machine. It was cheap, and worked well at first. Unfortunately, I kept adding different services: wordpress, git, my webcomic fetcher, bugzilla… My basic server quickly ran out of memory to run everything!
I decided to search out different hosting options and settled on Linode, which gives me more memory AND automatic backups for less than what I was paying to Rackspace. I spent the evening switching everything over, but it’s possible I missed something. Please let me know if it looks like I missed something!
