Cheese presses

Howdy!  This is just a quick check-in to let you know about two things, which you might not be interested in yourself, but maybe have a friend who is.  (So I would love, love, love if you could quickly pass this on to them via the "Share" buttons below this post - Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc!).

1) I made a little video tutorial on how to make a cheese press for under $10.  It's super easy to make a cheese press inexpensively but very effectively, instead of spending hundreds of dollars buying one.

2) If you don't want to make it yourself, you can now buy a cheese press from us!  Steve makes 'em himself, and only charges $29.99 for them.  Wow!

I have made hard cheese for over a decade and have taught hundreds of people how to make cheese.  It's really tricky to find a proper cheese press, especially if you don't want to spend a lot of money.  I can attest to how amazing our cheese presses are.  They work great, are inexpensive, and easy to clean!

Click here to watch my movie tutorial for a DIY cheese press on Youtube.

Click here to buy a cheese press from us.

Remember, if you know anyone who might be interested, share this post!  Thanks for supporting our little family business!

Share with the bear

Recently, we have spotted enormous heaps of bear poop everywhere: on many trails around our neighborhood, on our driveway, under our apple tree, on top of my beets!!!  Please!  On top of my beets!  Turns out the bear has been feasting on our apples, of course, but also on the very beets I had planned on making pickled honeyed beets with.  Hmpf.

I saw the bear when I was working on the computer upstairs - in broad daylight.  The reason I looked out the window was because the ducks were quacking more hysterically than usual.  And there he she it was.  A big, black bear with teddy bear ears, looking straight at me.  I started yelling for the rest of the family downstairs to alert them to the bear, and although the window was wide open and the bear heard my shrieks perfectly well, he she it never moved - just kept checking me out.

We all ran outside, and even though we made quite a racket, the bear just serenely stood under the apple tree for a while longer.  When we got closer, it finally bolted.  Here is a very bad photo Steve managed in the excitement.

When we got to the apple tree, I mobilized our family to immediately pick all the apples.  It was a miracle the bear hadn't climbed up the tree and destroyed it already.  When I checked out my vegetable garden right next to the tree I saw bear tracks amidst all the deer tracks, and a big pile of bear poop on top of my beet bed, with half of the beets gone and the rest with the tops eaten off.

Since I had taken a shower earlier, I was still in my bath robe, furiously pulling beets, harvesting basil, and micro-managing the apple picking.  Ahhh. Country livin'...

Instead of the usual dozen or so quarts of honeyed beets, I only made 5 quarts. Hmpf.

Oh well.  I shouldn't be so resentful of the poor bear, who has had a tough time with this droughty, fiery, smokey year without many berries in the mountains.  The bears are hungry.

Talking of hungry: Steve smoked all the salmon that the boys caught on their river adventure.  They continue to catch fish every day, good boys!

Also, I harvested squash a couple of days ago, a little disappointed with the meager crop (compared to other years).  And, of course, I keep making cheese like mad.  This week, I experimented with Gouda, flavored with cracked pepper and mustard seeds.  We'll see in two months how it tastes.  

(By the way, there is still time to sign up for my online cheese making course!)  Have you watched my movie yet?  In it I give FREE tips and tricks for making great Gree Yogurt, Chevre and Gouda.

A good excuse...

I like having a clean house, I really, really do.  Unfortunately, this rarely happens.  I only go on cleaning frenzies when my mother comes visiting (which is once every six years), or when I teach a cheese making class in my home, like I did on Sunday.  The piles of laundry got put away (or at least hidden in an upstairs bedroom with the door closed) and the floors got scrubbed.  I made my husband Steve do it because my back conveniently has been out of sorts for a week.  Windows were cleaned (ahem, thanks, Steve!), and I cleaned clutter (or at least hid it in my bedroom upstairs, with, you guessed it, the door closed).  I polished kitchen counters and the stove so that they were positively gleaming!

I love teaching people how to make cheese in my kitchen.  Not only because it gives me an excuse to clean, but because I love watching people being so excited about learning how to make cheese.

On Sunday, one of the hottest days of the summer, ten people crowded around my stove, cutting curds, stirring whey, and eating their body weight in cheese.  There were even two kids present who turned out to be pros at getting their hands in the whey.

My goats continue to crank out milk, even in this terrible, terrible heat.  Mind you, they do sprawl out in the shade panting during the hottest part of the day, but in the evenings, they come back to life.  I love to pull up a picnic chair and sit in the pasture with "the girls".  Their backs make excellent foot rests, and they don't mind as long as I scratch their chins.  Eva and her friends take them for walks to forage on fresh browse.

Another critter who doesn't like the heat is Pluto, my beloved 15 year old dog.  I think the end of his life is near, with a growing tumor on his backside, weaker legs, and more sunken stature every passing day.  But he is still happy to go along on walks, although he limps a lot at the end, and he still gets excited when I fill his food bowl, although he has been pooping it out on the living room floor every other morning.  Yes, the end is near, but in the meantime, we are loving him up.

You know who IS loving this heat?  The tomatoes, the figs, the laundry, and the calendula flowers, that's who.  The tomatoes and figs are putting lots of treats on the table.  There's lots of Greek salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, basil, Kalamata olives, and my own Feta cheese.  It's all grown here on the farm, except the olives (I wish...).  

Our fig tree is loaded with sweet morsels that look a lot like a bowl full of worms when you split them in half.  No, they don't LOOK very appetizing, but they taste like heaven.

The laundry dries in about 20 seconds, flapping in this incredible heat and wind.

And the calendula flowers? They grow new blossoms as soon as I harvest them.  I have picked many pounds of flowers this year, to be dried and then infused into oil for my goat milk soap.  Instead of using the jar-in-the-sun-for-six-weeks infusion method, I experimented with infusing them in the crock pot.  It worked great.

On the garden front, I had to put netting over the beans, because the *^&#-ing deer are nibbling on the plants and destroying them.  I HAVE to grow beans to make my famous dilly bean pickles, you understand?  So although it's not pretty, the netting will keep the bastards out.  So there.  (Visions of venison stew are floating in my head.)

My cucumbers are slow to emerge, but they are starting to yield.  

Lettuce is being succession-cropped, standing in the shade of their old-growth relatives, who I am letting go to seed for the bees.  They love the blossoms.  When the lettuce is done blooming, the pigs will finish them off.

And talking of the garden, we started juicing again, now that produce is abundant a few feet away from our kitchen.  Beets, carrots, collards, apple, zucchini make a drink that looks like wine, and in Eva's words, tastes like dirt.  No, it doesn't, of course... it just tastes... healthy and earthy.

I will leave you with a few random images from the week.

... a walk in our neighborhood creek...

... a sunset in the Methow Valley, where we camped out for a night, only to flee back home to seek relief from the heat. Ha!

... a collage of handknits, knit by my mother's arthritic hands and sent to me in a big package, along with four pairs of handknit socks, reducing me to tears (of joy). Now you know where my knitting gene came from!

... a wheel of Gouda made by my cheese making students...

Abundance

One good thing about all this heat and drought we've been getting is this:

RIPE BLACKBERRIES!!!

Last week, all five of us trudged out to one of our favorite blackberry picking spots, where you get a sweeping view of the valley as you stuff your face pick blackberries dripping with sweetness and juice.  One hour later, fingers, tongue and clothes stained, we had picked over a dozen pounds of berries. 

I made cobbler with whipping cream that night, and froze the rest.  They are great in smoothies all winter long.  We better pick some more...

We've been eating well around here.  The garden is my best friend come 4pm, when I realize dinner time is coming up soon, and no fairies have offered to cook it for me.  Usually, I wander out to the garden to see what looks good and then whip something up with it.

Potatoes, carrots, onions, cauliflower and a round of my Caraway Gouda get transformed into cauliflower cheese soup.

Zucchinis, tomatoes, basil and grated Gouda cheese turn into this:

Dessert? My own home made raw cacao truffles, super food extraordinaire.

All this food creates a lot of nonsense at the dinner table.  My handsome husband Steve and good looking son Luke really, really like what I cook.  You can tell from their faces.

It's not just the garden that produces lots of food.  The goats are cranking out milk by the gallons.  Poor things are looking skinny.  I feed them groovy, organic, non-gmo grain, alfalfa hay and grass hay, but they have decided they don't like the hay any more.  So I fenced an area full of thimbleberry and salmonberry bushes, which my four-legged friends devour happily.

I make lots of cheese and yogurt every week.  Yep, here I go again.

Cheese making fame, drama goat queens, and happy seedlings

If you feel adventurous and spontaneous, I want to invite you to come to my cheese making class this Saturday, May 4. I know it is Friday already, but I'm just saying. Plus, I'm kind of famous this week, since I got featured in the popular New England Cheese Making Supply Company blog.  My ears are burning, and my Ego has inflated even more than usual. You can read about it here if you want.

Famous or not, the pigs still need to be fed, the goats need to be milked, and the seedlings transplanted into the garden. Mucking around in manure keeps me humble. Watching the pigs has been a lot of fun this week. I swear we can see them grow, and no wonder – every day, they are getting a gallon of milk or fresh whey from cheese making. They are so used to us already that they let us sit with them while they eat, and we scratch their backs for them.

Unfortunately, one of them (named Porky) has what I believe to be an umbilical hernia, so we have to return her and switch her out for another piggy. It's strange how much we already feel bonded with all three of them, so letting one go seems sad.

It feels like summer here this week! We are gardening in shorts and T-shirts, and the kids jumped into the (cold) pond yesterday. I have been transplanting all the beautiful little seedlings I raised in the greenhouse, and now they live in the garden, where hopefully, they will be spared by slugs, flea beetles, and other assorted monsters. Asparagus stalks are shooting out of the earth, surrounded by their friends the Jonny Jump Ups. It's not a bad way to live, surrounded by flowers, I think. Eva loves swinging in her swing underneath the dogwood tree. It's not a bad way to live, swinging under a blooming dogwood tree, no?  The goats get walked to fresh pasture every day.  Not a bad way for them to live, either...  The problem is that Quasar, the new goat, hates to walk on the leash, so I often end up pulling and pushing her.  Sometimes, she flops herself dramatically on the ground and refuses to go on.  Doesn't she realize this is the way to lush, green, sweet grass?

In this photo, only two of my goats are present.  Quasar pissed me off too much doing her drama queen show, so she had to stay in the barn.

Many people envy my yearly onion crop. “How do you DO it?”, they ask, and I don't really know if I am doing anything special, but I will show you step-by-step how I grow mine, so you can try it.

In the middle of February, I sow onion seeds (Walla Walla and Copra from Territorial Seeds) into 4 inch containers in the greenhouse. Two and a half months later, they are ready for their new home in the garden. I give them a little hair cut first if they are flopping over. Then I take them out of their containers and put the whole block of soil into a bucket of water, so the soil gets washed away gently. When there are only roots left, I gently tease apart one plant at a time, and then place it into the earth. I fertilize with manure made from my goats, and organic fertilizer. Voila! Nothin' to it.

Kai rescued a humming bird from our living room.  See it in his hands?