As free-range as it gets...

We keep threatening to sell eggs and milk but the long weekend came and went, and we still haven’t put up a sign, so no sales yet!

Today Benji and I actually did launch into cheese-making, and I have to say in all honesty that so far it looks like an unqualified disaster. 

Five liters of milk, as described in the recipe. All carefully heated to 32 degrees, at which point it is poured into a sterilized bowl. Four Tbps of pre-boiled water, mixed with four drops of rennet. In the olden days of the American pioneers, rennet was the lining from a calf’s stomach. In these (thank goodness) more civilized ones, it comes in a tiny glass bottle, and you tip out the drops - four of them, in this case. 

Then you mix in two spoons of this so-called “cheese starter.”

A word about the cheese starter - on the rainy bank holiday Monday, Rich and I set out to make starter. We were surrounded by leaflets and the cheese-making equipment that we had ordered, plus some bits and pieces from his kit of years ago. We read and studied and looked through bits of paper until we finally looked at each other and said, “Ok, let’s just do it.” 

The Rambo’s of cheese…

Things started to go wrong right away. First of all, you are told to keep a liter of milk at 30 degrees for ten minutes. Well, might as well try to balance a feather on your nose for the same amount of time. The heat is up, it’s down, by the time you turn off the burner it’s too late, the temperature is too high, and then it’s too low. It might have been at 30 degrees for a few seconds as it slid up and down the scale, but as for keeping it there…

The thermometer we had that clipped on to the side of the pan was determined to not work properly, because the temperature in the middle of the pan was different. So that was discarded, and we were reduced to stirring the milk round and round with the skimpy glass thermometer that had come with the kit. 

At one point Rich looked at me and said, “Did you know that you can just buy cheese, from the shop, already made?”

And I said, “Really? What a great idea!”

But we kept stirring…

Then the milk was mixed with a sachet of the cheese starter bacteria that came with the kit. And then, it was supposed to be incubated at 20 degrees for 22-24 hours. 

Using the same puny thermometer, we determined that there was no place in the entire house that was that exact temperature. Hotter, yes. Colder, definitely. But no exact match. 

Until we hit on putting it in the yogurt maker - which, we assumed, would hold it at exactly the right temperature for fermentation. 

Or maybe not…

Because today, when I took out aforementioned “cheese starter” and put two spoons of it into the carefully heated five liters of milk that I had poured into the sterilized bowl, nothing happened. 

I added the rennet. Four careful drops-worth. Nothing.

Ok, I reasoned. These things take time. Covered it with a clean cloth, waited the required one-and-a-half hours. 

Came back, checked again. According to the directions, if I had a “set”, my finger would be clean when I stuck it in the pan and pulled it out. 

My fingers was coated with guck. 

A lot of huge, lumpy, slightly-thickened milk. Nothing, but nothing, that looked like the described thin whey with cheese at the bottom…

So, no cheese successes to report at the moment. 

But at least it used up some of the milk!

How much milk is too much milk?

The yogurt has met with mixed success. I stewed up some rhubarb from the garden and apples from the farmer’s market, mixed it with the home-made yogurt and colored the whole thing pink with food coloring (Now I understand why they color food. If you don’t, it all looks disgusting and brown, and no matter how good it tastes, no one will try it!) 

The resulting yogurt is actually delicious, although quite tart. But Benji, who takes “goggi” to school with him every day, loathed it. Even when I resorted to tipping in some honey to make it sweeter - sheer bribery - he hated it.

I was gutted. 

Tomorrow, however, I plan to rise from the ashes and try again. Banana this time, I think. 

The only really unqualified success has been the goat’s milk ice cream, which everyone adored. 

Here’s the recipe, which can be made with any kind of milk, and doesn’t need an ice cream maker - and it’s truly gorgeous and decadent!

1/2 litres milk

8 egg yolks

250 grams castor sugar

1 vanilla pod

Infuse the vanilla pod in the milk and bring to the boil. Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together. Continue stirring and pour on the boiled milk. Put the mixture back on the heat and stir until it thickens and coats the back of a spoon. DO NOT BOIL AS THE MIXTURE WILL CURDLE. Put through a sterilized sieve and leave to cool. Put the mixture in a shallow dish in the freezer for 30 minutes. Take out and whisk, then replace in the freezer until firm. This ice cream is best taken out of the freezer and left at room temperature for about 10-15 minutes before eating.

We just dumped in 1 tsp. of vanilla extract, not being “foody” enough to have vanilla beans on hand. And it was lovely. Having eight egg whites hanging about, I decided to make a meringue. And a word to the wise - eight egg whites is too many! Delia only calls for three, and now I know why - the whole thing died of its own weight. Next time I’ll do two small ones…

Benji feeds the chickens

This weekend was lovely, sunny and warm, and we got loads done. Rich, at my request, made a staircase down from the parking lot into the used-to-be-pigfield-but-now-is-going-to-someday-be-a-garden. It’s luxurious to be able to walk down into the garden, instead of having to walk all the way around…

Taid tries out the new staircase

We also put the liner into the pond, after long sessions of agonizing whether or not we really needed to put sand into the pond under the underlay and liner. We decided in the interest of practicality that it was now or never, and took the plunge to put the previously-ordered liner down into the previously-dug hole. So now its a black-rubber nightmare, and just hoping that putting soil over the edges, stones around, plantings inside and a few fish will have a transformative effect, or everyone will have my guts for garters…

Monday was rainy, so we stayed inside and did some cooking. Cheese starter, so that we can make cheese out of the gazillions of pints of goats milk that we have backing up…

Buddug has a laugh

Milking the &*(^%$$* goats - who thought that was a good idea?!

I swear, I have hosted a live radio show for over a million listeners a night. I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer prize, and I’ve gone undercover in the high school, pretending to be a high school student. And I have never struggled so hard to do anything with so little success. 

Night after night, I watch Rich out there, milking away. The milk just jets out from between his fingers, so fast that it makes an actual head of froth on the bucket. 

And then when I try, I get out a few tiny squirts, and my fingers slip down the teat, and I have to start all over.

Marmite, my particular nemesis...

And then there’s Marmite.

Marmite is our Toggenburg princess, blood as blue as the sky and formerly accustomed to wearing a jacket, getting three different kinds of hay and eating Marmite sandwiches with her warmed drinking water. (That’s why we called her Marmite…) She’s not getting that treatment at our place, unfortunately for her - having to settle for fields of grass, clean fresh bedding in her stall, a good stock mix with sugar beet shreds and oats, and regular cold water. (Note - she seems quite happy in her new reduced circumstances…)

But I cannot milk the %^*&^*& creature. Her teats are microscopic, and I just can’t get a hold on them. What Rich can do in twenty minutes - feeding and milking all three - I couldn’t even do in an hour. I milk each night for a little while and then let him finish before the goats, understandably, get fed up and start kicking.  

In the meantime, the three goats are producing about four liters of milk a day - eight pints! And although Rich keeps protesting that we just don’t need all the milk, he gets quite cross when the yield is down - he watches the levels carefully. When the goats have to stay in because of the rain, yields go down, so rainy skies mean frowns all around…

Milk and eggs, eggs and milk!

In the meantime, we have got to figure out something to do with all the surplus! I got a yogurt maker and have been making yogurt, which comes out really thin unless you add dried milk powder - which I haven’t ordered yet. So, not an unqualified success, although we blended our first batch up with strawberries and sugar and Benjamin declared it “Lush!”

Benjamin and his friend Buddug

Benjamin has fallen whole-heartedly in love with Buddug. Instead of singing him “Mary had a little lamb,” for bedtime, for a while he demanded “Joli had a little lamb,” which has now become “Benjamin had a little goat.” And he’s asks now every night for Benjamin-and-Buddug storiess, a boy who rides his magic goat into all sorts of adventures. Apparently they live together in a little house in the woods…