Milk Cubes

There’s so many upsides to being single, I wouldn’t even know where to start reeling them off.  One downside is milk.  I can’t get through a big old bottle of the white stuff in 3 days.  Unless I am cooking for an army, making ice cream, or having a home-made chocolate milk moment, I just can’t wade through even a quarter bottle before it starts whiffing.  I say 3 days because I don’t buy regular milk – that stuff full of hormones and chemicals and who-knows-what.  That white liquid in a plastic jug or waxed carton that lasts for two whole weeks, even after you’ve opened it.  Fresh milk isn’t meant to last for two weeks, and frankly, whatever they put in it to make it do that – well – I don’t want that careering through my veins, thank you very much.

I buy milk from a local dairy, Twinbrook Creamery.  It is produced from Jersey cows and is nothing but pasteurized and then dolloped into glass bottles.  Twinbrook milk is free of all hormones and GMOs, it is also higher in protein (yay!) and Twinbrook do not use commercial fertilizer or pesticides on the cows feed or grazing pastures.  There are no added colors or preservatives.  Consequently it starts to go off in 3 days, and that’s a great thing.  Luckily, my local grocery store carries Twinbrook’s milk, so I don’t have to drive into the countryside and trek through poopy farmyards to get my mitts on it.

It’s like the milk that used to magically appear on the doorstep every day when I was growing up in England.  Sometimes, if I woke up early I’d hear the clink, clink of the bottles jostling against each other as the milkman ran up and down driveways, depositing fresh milk on each doorstep for the tousle-headed, pajama’d occupants to retrieve as soon as they awoke.  I miss that sound.  The tops were sealed with foil, and every once in a while we’d open the door to find the foil broken by some cheeky sparrow trying to get an early morning guzzle.

If you are switching over to a *SANE lifestyle and your milk intake has gone down drastically, and /or if you are single, you might well be facing the same dilemma; no, not the cheeky sparrow dilemma – the can’t-drink-all-that-in-3-days dilemma.  Several friends have gotten all excited about my solution, and asked me to share.

Milk-cubes.

I do not have a good or sensible answer as to why the only ice-cube trays that I own are heart-shaped.  My long-suffering therapist could likely explain it in great detail, but let’s just move on, shall we?

Tips and tricks for milk-cube joy:

• Use a small measuring jug to pour the milk from.  Milk is not water – it is sticky if it spills.
• Do not fill the trays to the top.
• If you use the bendable / silicone trays, place them on a flat dish to fill them, and then put the flat dishes with the trays on them in the freezer to freeze.  This stops all sorts of potential calamities from occurring.
• Get the trays out of the freezer and leave for 1 minute before ousting the cubes.  It will be a lot easier to oust if you do.
• Once you have the milk cubes out of the tray, put them in a large Ziploc bag.  Do not push the air out of the Ziploc as the milk cubes will freeze together.  Leave air in the bag so the milk cubes can move around.
• Once your milk cubes are in the Ziploc bag, pop them straight back in the freezer.

Then, next time you have friends over for coffee, just pop 5 or 6 milk-cubes in each cup and you’ve got fresh milk in an instant.  Need 1/2 cup milk to make a sauce?  Milk-cubes.  Scrambling some eggs and like to add just a splash?  Milk-cubes are your friend.