Feeling Cheesy

Feeling Cheesy

This past week I finally started getting enough milk from my goats to make cheese again.  It takes at least a gallon of milk to make a brick of hard, pressed cheese.  Any less than that isn't worth the time and effort required.  For several years, I only made fresh "farm cheese" that only required a double boiler, at least 1/2 gallon of milk, and either vinegar or lemon juice to set the curd.  I played around with that, using various herbs and spices.  Hard pressed cheeses intimidated me and the initial cost of a cheese press kept me from jumping in for a long time.  Special recipes and cheese cultures, cheese salt, and a large double boiler were also required.

So last year, I finally did enough research to feel ready for the hard cheese world.  It's a learning curve for certain.  But I do enjoy the challenge and will continue experimenting until I get it down pat.  The cheddar cheese I made last Saturday took 6 1/2 hours from start to finish, with several long breathers in between where I could leave the kitchen for 45 minutes to 2 hours at a time.  Warming the milk, add the culture and wait.  Check the temperature a million times, add rennet, stir, and wait.  Cut the curd and wait. Strain the curd and wait. Add the salt, stir the curd, and wait.  Fill the cheese press, crank it to 10 pounds of pressure, and wait...I think you get the idea.

After several rounds of turning the cheese over and increasing the pressure, a lovely block of naked cheddar was created and left to dry on the counter for a day or two before waxing.  Here's a few photos of the process...

 I ordered that large double boiler through a local restaurant supply store.

It is important to calculate just how many hours it is going to take to get through the cheese recipe or you could find yourself pulling an all-nighter!  I make notes in my recipe book of how long it takes and what is the latest time of day to start a particular cheese so I don't go past my farmer 9 p.m. bedtime.

Curds and Whey.

I catch the whey in a large bowl so I can at least feed

it to my chickens.

Bare, naked cheddar fresh out of the press.

Two days later, a gallon of milk is now 1 pound 2.4 ounces

of waxed cheddar.

Oh yeah, one more thing:  now I have to let it age in my Cheese Cave for 

two to six months before getting to see if it's good or not!

Gone Bananas...

Gone Bananas...

Last week I harvested a stalk of bananas from one of my plants because I saw bite marks in a few of the fruit....the stalk was growing over a fence line, so I'm guessing that the squirrels discovered the stalk and decided to try them out.  The bananas had been developing for several months and were getting close to harvestable, so I thought I would rescue them from the squirrels.  After cutting the stalk, I left it out on one of my screened porches for a few days to allow time for any bugs to vacate the fruit.  (All kinds of little buggers crawl around on bananas!)  This afternoon, I brought the stalk inside for cleaning, cutting, and counting.

The four bananas with squirrel bites in them will be cut up and fed to the chickens this evening when I go out to gather the day's eggs.  The other 68 bananas are now cut into "hands", each containing anywhere from 6 to 12 bananas.  I washed them twice in cool water to make sure they are clean and bug-free, then I weighed each hand and totaled them---ten pounds and 4.8 ounces of bananas!  Realize these are small bananas, averaging only about 5 inches in length.  None of my banana plants give me huge fruit and this stalk actually has larger fruit than I normally get so I'm not complaining.  There's another stalk growing out back with really, really small bananas on it....they look almost silly.  Not sure why they're so small, given that they're growing on a very tall plant.  Oh well, they'll eat.

Things I've learned about bananas....they grow on PLANTS, not trees.  The plant dies after you harvest the fruit.  I did have one banana plant once that grew TWO stalks of fruit simultaneously.  We had to brace the plant up with 2x4s so that the fruit didn't cause the plant to fall over.  

Bananas reproduce by growing "pups".  These are small plants that grow out of the same root as the parent plant.  The root of a banana plant is called a corm and it is a large white bulbous shaped thing. Pups need to be separated from the parent plant and moved about 10' from the nearest banana plant to allow for maximum growth and productivity.  When splitting off a pup, you need to take part of the corm of the parent, too, by using a pointed shovel and stomping it straight down into the ground between the two plants.  It takes a good stomping, which requires wearing boots, NOT flip flops!

Warning:  I started off with about 5 banana plants several years ago and I now have over 50 of them out back.  Keeping up with splitting off the pups is impossible after a while.  I've given away lots of banana plants and will continue to do so until all of my friends are surrounded by bananas or they've disowned me.

Here's a picture of today's bananas:

Pretty, aren't they?

Of course, it's nearly impossible to consume 68 bananas that are ripening at the same time.  That's where canning comes in.  I love to water bath can pureed bananas (with a splash of lemon juice) and then use the bananas in yogurt and smoothies.  My hope is to have enough canned bananas to keep me from having to buy any while waiting for the next stalk to ripen.  That's a challenge, given my daily smoothie habit and the very slow development of bananas.  This stalk I just harvested had been on the plant for at least 4 months, maybe 5!  Patience and persistence.  That's my motto...

Keeping Track

Keeping Track

I saw on a blog somewhere a while back where the homesteader kept records of how much food he produced and thought it would be a good thing to do.  It sometimes seems like all the work around the farm isn't yielding much, but if written down, I might find out otherwise.  My start date is June 15, 2017 because any date will do and I'm ready to set this thing up.  Mid-year is one of my least productive times because of living in the Deep South.  Heat and rain limit what I can grow right now, so harvesting won't be so overwhelming that I can't keep up with production records.  It should give me time to develop the habit so it won't seem like such a big deal come January when things start really kicking out in the garden.

To make it a bit more interesting, I am making production estimates at the beginning to compare with the actual numbers.  My estimates are:  100 gallons of goat's milk, 3,000 chicken eggs, and 1,000 pounds of produce from the garden (this includes all fruits, vegetables, and herbs).  The data will be organized on a spreadsheet to make it easy to analyze.  I'm curious to see how many pounds of fruit I produce, which vegetables provide higher yields than others, etc.  There's always things to learn as a hobby farmer, and this might be a great learning tool.

Basil harvested 6/17/17

This basil will be dehydrated, then hand-rubbed into a powder for use in cooking.  Sage and rosemary were also snipped a bit this morning.

Peter Piper Day

Peter Piper Day...

The eight jalapeño pepper plants in my garden have been kicking out about a dozen peppers a day for a couple of weeks now.  As I bring them inside, I fill quart sized Ziploc bags and toss them in the crisper draw of the refrigerator.  This morning, that drawer said "DO SOMETHING WITH ALL THESE PEPPERS, WOMAN!"  So I did...

When my grandson went down for his lovely three-hour nap, I pulled the water bath canner down from the top of my upright freezer in the utility room (Boy, I need to clean that room up and add some shelves!).  Nine pint jars were filled with water and submerged in the water bath canner to get sterilized for canning. Lids were put in a small saucepan to simmer and get the wax seals soft to create a good seal.  Minced garlic, vinegar, and water were put in another pot to simmer while I proceeded to slice up all those peppers.  There were nearly 100 of those rascals.  Jars were filled with peppers and vinegar solution, lids tightened, and then boiled in the canner for ten minutes.  Easy peezy and done in less than an hour.  The yield was 6 pints of pickled peppers...all six lids popped perfectly after removing them from the canner.  That pop!  Music to my ears...

A Blog is Born

It's been a long time on my mind that I needed a place to record the sometimes amazing, often entertaining, moments of my hobby farm life.   For nearly ten years I have been working at developing a small, two-acre farm that includes an organic garden, a flock of laying hens, and a small herd of dairy goats.  Other animals have come and gone over the years.  Waterfowl and turkeys were attempted, but I lost the war with predators and gave away any of the survivors.  Pigs were raised for the freezer a couple of times, but a lousy processing experience the last time led my husband to tear down the pig pen.  We weren't in agreement on that one, but I'll live without pork before I trouble myself with such things.

So why do I want to document this little life of mine?  First, I find this hobby farming experience fascinating, energizing, and educational.  My enthusiasm for the whole affair needs more of an outlet than just chatting with my goats.  Second, I want to put in writing what I am doing for my family....in case I die while the back yard is still a functioning farm and they need it for food.  No one else in the clan is currently involved in the farm, though my son and daughter-in-law have helped with the evening rounds on occasion and she knows how to milk my goats.  And third, there just might be a person or two who could be encouraged by reading about these experiences.

Daily posts "ain't gonna happen".  Not enough hours in a day for that.  But as things happen that I want to document, remember, or share, I will write.  Time will reveal how often that will be.