Cheese Making!

Making Mozzarella

Since we have a surplus of milk, I took a shot at cheesemaking, using a recipe found here.  After adding citric acid to the cold milk, warming to 90 degrees and stirring in the rennet, below is what it looks like.

Testing the curds - the whey should be clear and the curds stiff enough to peel back like this.  I left it to sit beyond the recommended 5 minutes to get to this point.

Cutting the cheese (nyuck nyuck!)

After heating the curds up to 110 degrees, removing from heat, and stirring for about 5 minutes, you drain the creamy whey off -- it went into pancakes this morning.

After pressing the curds in the colander and nuking it, you knead it and stretch it... at this point, I lost track of the directions (partly because they were on my phone and my hands were messy).  Here's where you'd knead in some salt for flavor (which I forgot).

Soak in cold water, wrap, and you have cheese!

Back to the big pot of yellow whey (which after some later reading I found is handy to keep hot for bathing the cheese in as you stretch it), heat the whey to 200 degrees and let it cool.

The proteins that are left over bind together and float -- ladle them out and drain with a cloth, and you get ricotta cheese.

We ate this in our pancakes this morning also!

First Goose Hatching

Had our first run of goose eggs through the incubator hatch over the weekend. Had a 62.5% hatch rate, about 12% unfertilized, and 25% start to develop, but appeared to have died about halfway through.

All eggs were laid within a week and hatched over three days from first pip to last hatch.

Goose Eggs Cookin' Along!

So far, so good on an early hatching of geese. Not to count them before they hatch, but should have eight goslings the first week of March!

Though they're loud, mean and messy, geese are great watchdogs, they keep the grass short around the yard, and lay enormous omelette-sized eggs!

I've read a lot about the benefits of geese in the garden. Since I'm expanding the garden this year, I'm going to try penning them up in there this spring.

Heavenly Eggs

Adena excels at presentation. Since we added the dark brown eggs from the Marans, she's come up with a new pattern.

Cold!

Water droplets freezing on my gloves and boots this morning! Putting a heat tape on the outdoor hydrant this winter has prevented many bucket trips from the bathtub!

De-scurring the shaggy goat

We read Daniel 8 this morning -- Coincidentally (Providentially?) poignant because the chore of the day was to cut back the scurs on Liaison, our Lamancha buck.

Verse 8 reads:

"Therefore the goat waxed exceeding great, and when he was at the strongest, his great horn was broken: and for it came up four that appeared toward the four winds of the heaven."

Liaison broke one scur off a few weeks back, but his other one (the "great horn") needed trimmed as it was curling back against his head.  With some wrestling on the milk stand and a hacksaw, we were able to cut off about an inch.  I'll let it heal up and trim it back some more.

Hopefully four new horns don't appear in its place as Daniel prophesied concerning the Greek empire. 

The joys of livestock!  Here's a before pic... I'll spare the after. 

You can see Liaison's Great Horn above his left eye

Hugelkultur!

After a pretty good garden last last year, I'm more than doubling it this year.  Eventually I want to put in a semi-sunken earthbag greenhouse.  If that's not eco-hippie enough for you, I'm starting a hugelkulture bed (ultimately for wild blackberry canes, but we'll see).  Read more about hugelkultur (or permaculture) here.

I'm starting with the oversized and rotten logs from the wood pile and have been adding leaves, dead cowpen daisies, the last of the old wood chip pile and manure.  The idea is to replicate the deep bed of the forest floor where the fungi and insects found in the rotting wood break it down to useable nutrients for the plants. Anyway, it gives me something to do with the chunks of firewood that are too rotten for use!

The initial pics are below -- I'll add more as I go.