Cheese, Honey, Garden, Orchard, and Laundry... Update

Wow! Okay, a lot to catch you guys up on and it is raining today so I have the time… This is going to be more of a photo update, and less of a textual experience because even though it is raining, I am doing a million and a half things around the house today. (Making two batches of Chevre cheese, helping my mom make soap, cleaning the kitchen, and I am currently way behind on homework for the two spring classes I am enrolled in this semester –I have three books to read by Monday…)

For starters, I have to catch you guys up on my feta making cheese experience. This first photo is of the ball of cultured curd after it hung for about six-ish hours…

I then sliced it into three pieces and added a sprinkling of salt. I flipped the cheese and salted it about four more times over eight hours before putting it in the fridge to age for a week.

We just sliced a bit of it into cubes this morning and sampled some with our breakfast (of homemade freshly baked cinnamon raisin bread) and the cheese was fucking perfect. Good thing too, because I made another batch of it during the week… We have goats milk coming out of the woodwork around here, which isn't entirely a bad problem to have. Too much free food is never a bad thing. Speaking of which, I priced out some feta at the store just to compare what I have in the fridge aging to what it would cost me to purchase that same amount. And I have a hundred and twenty-eight dollars of feta in my fridge at the moment, and it cost me less than ten dollars to make. But, anyway, onward with the update…

                Honey! We had to buy more bees (I think I covered this in an earlier blog) but, we had all of the abandoned hives honey to process… We got at that this week; it took three days to accomplish, but in the end we salvaged about a hundred twenty pounds of honey. Back to the store I went to price out what local Michigan honey was running, and it was $5.59 a pound… meaning we put up $670 dollars –and about three years’ worth- of honey this week. Not bad for just salvaging some abandoned hives. We also have the new order of bees already living it up in their refurbished homes, so we will probably get close to that amount again this year. 

I showed you guys the repair work I had to do on the clothes line earlier in the spring, and I just wanted to let you know that it was put to good use yesterday. The sun was warm, the breeze was beautiful… we washed about ten loads of laundry didn’t have to turn the dryer on once.

Our chives are already starting to turn to seed. It seems like just a week ago I was sharing a picture of the first of the chives popping through the ground…

My garlic is making a huge comeback… I love garlic!

The rhubarb I planted a few weeks back is growing like weed (and that is awesome).

The newest addition to our semi-orchard… a honeycrisp apple tree. I just planted this about three days ago, and it is doing great!

And finally, some geese that landed in our field that I noticed while writing this blog entry.

This was only about one third of what I got started this week… SO BUSY… I hope I can find some time to give you a more thorough update soon (must read three books in the next forty-eight-ish hours)

P.S. I love the farm life. Good food, good booze, and it is frustrating/challenging/infuriating/fun as hell. Check back soon for more updates.

Operation “feta” is a Go!

Who would have ever thought that making cheese would be so much work? In cheeses defense, in my particular case, it really isn’t the cheeses fault. Our kitchen was a few days behind in the cleaning department, so it took me about two hours of solid cleaning before I felt the whole place was commercial kitchen caliber spotless enough to get the milk on the stove and warmed up to the 86 degrees required… I’ve managed to start in the middle of the story; let me back track a bit. This morning the mail woman delivered the package I had been waiting for from Hoegger’s Goat Supply –this package included new milk filters, cheese cloth, and the cultures I needed to make my very first batch of feta, ever. We have been saving the milk from the saanan every milking for the past three days, so we had three and a half gallons of filtered –clean- milk taking up a lot of room in our fridge, and I was anxious to start experimenting, but I neglected to order a cheese thermometer when I placed the rest of my order because I figured I could buy a thermometer anywhere, so why pay extra for shipping and handling? And then I neglected to go anywhere else, so this morning I found myself running into town to hunt down a thermometer. I purchased a real nice one; it is all digital so after the economic collapse and batteries become scarce, my thermometer will no longer work.

Okay, now I’m back on track… So, I brought the milk up to the required 86 degrees, then added the cultures, let it sit for an hour, then brought it back up to 86 degrees (it had only dropped one degree in that entire hour). 

Then I added to rennet in order to induce coagulation. One hour later I cut up the curd (it was awesome!) and then stirred it every five minutes for fifteen minutes. (I know the picture isn’t the greatest… but, in my defense, taking a picture of milk curdling is a lot like trying to take a picture of paint drying; it’s just not that photogenic).

 I then poured it into the cheese cloth and strained it, and then hung it up to drip for six hours… and that is as far as I am right now. 

At midnight I will be able to take it down and slice the ball into thirds and then start the salting process… I will continue the cheese adventure update tomorrow when I have more to share; I’m pretty much at a standstill for the evening. But, for the record –this is just something that needs said- I think this is super awesome!

Photo Update...

Here is a quick photo of my canned stock (I’m rather proud of it; I’ve never made or canned stock before).

These are our turkeys and ducks… The ducks are getting huge, and the turkeys aren’t little poults themselves anymore either. I know there living quarters don’t look very “open pasture,” but you’ll have to trust me on this one, they will be open pasture birds… It is just now they are A) too young and small, and need protected from predators, and B) they are too young and small, and still need the heat lamp. But both of those things will change in the next few weeks and then we will release them out to pasture.

                My radishes are like “this” close to being ready to eat!

                The Black Seeded Simpson lettuce has a bit of a ways to go yet, but with all this rain and warm weather we have been having, I’ll be having garden fresh salad in no time!

                This is one of the rhubarb roots that I planted last week; it is already getting started! They all are already starting, but it was easier to take a picture of just one of them…

                This is that stick I planted a while back, and it is well on its way to becoming a pear tree.

                Feta taking her noon-time nap.

                This is the temporary pen we built her until she is large enough to pasture with the other goats.

                Two of the dozen or so rabbits that we need to turn into sausage and stock…

                One of the three lucky cocks who escaped the butchers block the other day.

Goats, Stock, Cheese, and Thunder...

I finished getting all of the chicken stock canned yesterday. I ended with a grand total of seven quart jars, and eight pint jars of the finished product… Not too shabby. We had enough chicken carcasses left over to make another thirty quarts if only I had the time and/or the kitchen space. Our chest freezer in the basement is absolutely full to the hilt again; storing the carcasses and canning the stock was out of the question. We either need another chest freezer, or I am going to have to can the rabbit’s when we butcher them. Those little fuckers reproduce so fast… we have ran out of rabbit cage space, so waiting to butcher them is not really an option, but like I have already said, we had trouble shutting the freezer’s lid. I found an awesome sounding recipe in Backwoods Home Magazine for canning rabbit, and there is no better time to experiment with it than the present… maybe sometime next week.

                This weekend we have about a hundred pounds of honey to get processed and stored. For the record, that is a lot of honey. It is also very expensive honey. My dad has been keeping bees for well over ten years now, but like most of the hobby bee keepers in our area, he has trouble getting his hives to survive from year to year. This bee problem has been happening all over the country for a while now, and I have read an assortment of scientific theories as to what is killing off all of the bee population; theories range from cell phone towers and radio waves interfering with the bees radar, to the amount of insecticide that big agri-business is using to murder our environment. Either way, having to purchase new bees for the hives every year is a pricey hobby/endeavor, but the resulting honey is not only awesome, it is supposed to help people with allergies (something to do with the honey being made from the pollen of plants that are local to your specific area… I don’t know the details; I’m not a scientist or a nutritionist; I just love rock-star quality food of the gods, and that is what homegrown locally harvested honey is). That was a long way to go to tell you why we won’t be butchering our excess rabbits this weekend…

                I’ve already got the goats milked this morning, and I filtered, saved, and chilled the milk from the saanan. (The alpine kicked her bucket over… not a good start to the morning, but I took three deep breaths, threw a string of obscenities her way, and then all was well in the universe again…) My feta cheese cultures should be in the mail –I’m actually expecting them to arrive today- and I am super excited! I know I said I would stop promising shit on here, but I promise to recount the entire cheese making experience on here with photos and everything. This will be my first attempt ever at making cheese, so fingers crossed I don’t fuck it up.

                I won’t be getting much done outside again today. It was thunder storming all night (I love thunder storms, I know some people who hate them, and others who are afraid of them, but I love them), and it is supposed to continue on throughout the day. I was up well over half the night, listening to the thunder and the rain, tossing and turning and reveling in the fact that life is pretty awesome at the moment. The end result was I only got about two and half hours of sleep, so we will see how much I get accomplished today period. But, with that being said, I should get off this computer contraption and get back to work.

                Keep a look out for a photo update later on today… this is not a promise (I promise). I WILL post a photo update today; I have already taken all the pictures and downloaded them to my computer, I just have to get them all formatted and the captions written up.  Check back later.