All the Right Things

After months away, biking around like the crazy hobo she is, my wife is back.  Clemmie Jane of Delaware is back and has been staying with me since Thursday.  I'm starting to have second thoughts about this whole heterosexuality business, because having a wife is a super sweet deal!  She cleans the kitchen, folds the laundry and is smiling with onions caramelizing in the pan when I get home from work.  Seriously, having Clem around has been an utter pleasure and I wish she'd stay in Brownsville forever.



At work today (there are no vacations for farmers) we made 4, count 'em yep, four! kinds of cheese.  Rio Santiam (which will be aged for 6 months after it's done being pressed), Feta (aged 2-3 months, also raw) and two fresh cheeses, Chevre and Camembert.  Clean shit, run around, bring buckets of whey to the goats, cuddle my dog, clean more shit, hang cheese, press cheese, package cheese, clean more, whey more, dishes more, cuddle more, dishes dishes, cleaning, sweeping, peeing, cheese.  That's what I did today.  Just another day at the office.



Since we have more milk than space to make cheese this time of year, we've been making a lot of mother (and daughter) culture.  Culture is the freeze-dried bacteria we add to cheese to give it its flavor and acidity.  By making mother culture, we are able to use just a fraction of the freeze-dried stuff (which is the form culture typically comes in) thereby saving money, but also using mother culture (which is pretty similar to buttermilk in its appearance) produces a different quality of cheese.  And it allows the cheese to culture more quickly.  So all in all, it saves us time, money and makes a better product.  Awesome!

One can also make daughter culture, which I did today, by adding a cup of mother culture to a gallon of pasteurized milk...and then labeling it.  The culture sits out for 24 hours in a 70 degree room to allow the bacteria to ferment the lactose in the milk into lactic acid.

Oh yes, and then Jan and Larry got a puppy.  He's 8 weeks old and his name is Hebert and he follows me around.  Roscoe doesn't seem to mind him much, but he's pretty ugly...

Got home around 4:30 and the wife wanted scones, so of course I obliged.  I didn't use sugar (full disclosure: because it had ants in it) and the scones still turned out awesomely good, especially with some of Laura's bees' honey all over them.  Thanks bees!



Here's the recipe I used, not the normal recipe I use but it's easy to memorize:

preheat oven to 450

1/2 cup corn meal, polenta kind
1 1/2 cup Bob's unbleached white flour
2 tsp baking pow-pow
1/2 tsp salt
(1/4 cup sugar)
5 TBSP butter

combine dry ingredients, cut butter into flour mixture until it's pretty small

1 egg
1/2 cup milk, half-n-half or cream (I used half cream half goats milk)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

beat all the wets together and add to the flour, then add 1 cup frozen blueberries and stir until everything is combined.  I went the easy route and just pulled handfuls of the dough out, shaped 'em a little and threw 'em on a baking sheet.  Bake at 450 for 12ish minutes.

Here's another thing I made.  Morel risotto.  Yum.

bye bye