February Fotos

The cheesemaking continues! Mick is our resident expert cheese-waxer. After making the cheese, we set it in the fridge (a cool, dry place) for a couple of days to let it dry out and begin to form a rind.


Then we melt the cheese wax in a double boiler. (All donations of wax gladly accepted and added to the pot!) :)


Once the wax is melted, Mick dips the cheese in, one half at a time.


He blows on it to cool it off.


Then dips the other half.


He dips it again in the other two directions, so that the whole thing is covered twice.


It'll set in the back room (since it stays quite cool) for a few weeks until we crack it open! In the meantime, the whey is transformed into ricotta, which makes the most delicious pizzas! (This one was a meat-lover's.)


We also made a pizza with leftover ham that we thought turned out rather beautiful.


In other news, Mick made some blackcap wine a few weeks ago (trying to clean out the berries in the freezer). He saved the juice that was left over from the pulp after racking the wine, and it was sitting in a bowl in the fridge. (I was adding it to yogurt.) A few days later, when he sampled the juice, he was surprised by how juicy it was and suggested we make snow-cones! So we went outside and scooped up what we hoped was clean snow :) and poured the juice over it. It was delicious, and very fun!


We did find some surprises in the snow, but none that adversely affected the taste or healthfulness, and they did provide quite a nice garnish. :)

Feeling Sappy

Last Saturday we headed up to the home site.


I took pictures,


Roscoe explored,


and Mickey tapped maple trees.


For each tap, he drilled a hole to the proper depth, indicated by a piece of tape he had wrapped around the drill bit.


He then used the flat end of an ax to gently insert the spile [tap].


We hung a total of fourteen buckets,


and headed home.


We returned on Tuesday afternoon, after UPS delivered the remainder of our supplies.


We now had a total of twenty buckets ready to collect sap.


We came up again later that week to check the progress.


We were quite excited to see (and taste) our buckets beginning to fill with a not-quite-clear, mildly sweet liquid!


Mickey also fit the lids onto the buckets.


Our route to check the taps is not very long at all. We didn't even have to venture into the woods for this year's twenty taps.


The sap has begun to run!

Back to Cheese!

After a long forced hiatus from hard-cheese-making, due to store-bought milk not setting curd, I have returned, woo-hoo! I discovered a few weeks ago that calcium chloride added to milk can help it set curd. Google revealed that calcium chloride is carried by brewing supply companies (apparently it affects the pH of water, which makes it desirable to some brewers), so I asked my resident brewer to add some calcium chloride to his next order. He graciously complied, and I set to work yesterday morning. The curd set up incredibly well, in greater quantity than when I made cheese with raw milk. So far the process seems to be going great!


The round weighs 20 ounces! My gallon of raw milk made a pound of cheese, pasteurized milk treated with calcium chloride apparently makes 25% more. The whey is waiting to be transformed into ricotta for Friday's pizza night. As for the "Colby," it will spend a couple of days forming a rind before it is waxed and set to cure for several weeks. Then comes the taste test!


I finished my January/February blanket (since these months require different colours than Christmas.)


We have been making an attempt at cleaning up our food stores, which included finishing last year's homemade sausage. The krautwurst tasted amazing! but didn't look quite so good when it was cooking. :)


Bart and Gerard seem to be adjusting well to each other. They even play together once in awhile! And they no longer play the "smack the other cat off the bed if you got there first" game.


They seem to be sharing their food well.


And they of course have claimed their favorite perching spots. :)