No vegans here.

Well, Brother Daniel and Amanda stopped in for a few days to visit and it was so wonderful to see them. They took off again back to Alaska at 4:30 this morning, which I was gratefully not awake for. They will be home, I mean back here again, in about 3 weeks and then it will be for good. We are so excited to have siblings moving to the state and coming to stay with us for a while until they settle into their own house and jobs. They particularly enjoyed being reunited with their little pig and I was particularly grateful for their help with milking Tadd's goats. Hopefully we will have goats to milk on our own property soon.

With six days of milking nearly in a row, I am experimenting with recipes. Today's recipe is much simpler and faster than my last cheese recipe, though requiring more supplies. I ordered special "butter muslin" and cultures from New England Cheesemaking and got busy today. Today's process was to heat the milk to around 86f, at least taking the chill off it, then mixing in an 1/8th teaspoon of Chevre culture with rennet premixed into the culture. Now it sits until midnight (6 to 12 hours or more), then is strained into cheesecloth and hung overnight before going into the fridge and waiting to be eaten. I suspect it won't be waiting long to be eaten as I made molasses bread (from the Encyclopedia of country living; recipe of 3 cups milk or other liquid, 1/3 cup or so of something sweet, in this case molasses, a couple tablespoons of yeast, a pinch of salt, and enough flour and whatever else is around the house to make it into a good dough, kneed and let rise for an hour or so, repeat, then form into loafs and bake for 45 minutes or so at 350 or so. Most of my cookbooks have pretty loose recipes...) using the whey from the last batch of cheese. I can definitely imagine having hot curds and whey with a little brown sugar for breakfast, in fact, I imagine it about the time we start getting daily milk from goats on our property. I better get more lactose pills. Chevre (the soft cream cheese like goat cheese that is typically sold in stores) is so very much easier and faster than hard cheeses. Next I hope to make some Brie and some ice cream with my milk stash.

I also suspect there are many quiches in our future, as they call for a lot of eggs and milk and whatever veggies are handy, which is about what our farm is growing. This morning I took 5 more eggs from the hen house - 4 in the nest box, one in the yard - at least 2 left over from yesterday - and had a wonderful lunch of 6 rather small eggs. I am wondering if these hens are going to lay larger eggs once they get into the swing of things. Currently they seem a little small for selling.