hand milking, cheesemaking

After a very rocky start 2 and a half months ago, during which I questioned whether I would ever learn HOW on EarTH to hand milk a cow, I can now say that I find milking our cow to be a pleasant daily experience. What began as a very stressful hour and a half to 2 hour chunk of time that I had to be away from all my kids in the house twice a day, now takes me only 40 minutes of milking time every evening. After weeks & weeks of practice that included my hands cramping up and aching 24/7, somehow I finally managed to get the hang of it. I was not born a natural cow milker.


Cows love routine, and thankfully so do I so our nightly ritual flows peacefully & naturally. I look forward to hanging out with, and under, my warm cozy cow. I've read about how many people back in the day questioned why in the world anyone would want to ride around in the icy cold, new-fangled things called automobiles when you could be sitting atop a warm cozy horse. I never really grasped what they meant until I began hanging out under a cow when it's 17 degrees outside. Our 915 pound beast of a cow radiates heat! My hands & lips might freeze on my walk down to the barn, but I take my jacket off when I'm milking so I don't sweat! I'm perfectly cozy down there, but the wet washcloths I cast aside after washing her udder freeze solid by the time I'm done milking.

Gertie is in a paddock right next to our calf, 2 sheep and our new goat. So I have plenty of company. I get to enjoy the milking with my mellow cow-lady whilst enjoying the sounds of the calf & sheep chewing their cuds, and the sheep coughing & farting. Who knew that sheep cough & fart all the time?? Not me.

Here is the face I commonly see when I look up from my steaming pail of milk. She stares at me like this, unblinking. I laugh.




The smelly boy goat cuddling up with the warm calf's behind. :)




This is how Gertie likes to be presented in my blog because anytime I go to take a picture of her, as I mentioned in my last post, she rushes up to smell my camera. Here is her big slobbery cow nose:



She gives a gallon and a half per night. I milk only once per day, and her production went down when she suffered from bloat, but a gallon and a half is plenty for us! Here's a recent half gallon. It is cream all the way down to the arrow:




So, I ordered a cheesemaking kit that came with small, simple recipe booklet, and also a full book on cheesemaking. I knew absolutely nothing about cheesemaking. I'm so glad that I started by following the simple recipe booklet before cracking open the big book because it seems totally daunting in the big book! The small recipe booklet contains some of the same recipes but in a very simple format. I followed the recipe for "farmhouse cheddar" & found it way easy. I've been throwing together a new batch every 3 days or so. This is the big book full of overwhelming amounts of information, and the booklet that tells you how to throw a cheese together simply. :) Plus some cottage cheese on the right.




Some completed cheeses. The 2 on the right have been waxed & are now just sitting around being "aged" 'til we feel like eating them. The longer they age the sharper the flavor. The 2 on the left are sitting around & "drying" in preparation for waxing.

I've had to get creative in seeking good spots to hang the cheese to drain. lol

This was my very first batch. This is funny because all those blobs of curds are supposed to be fitting in that cute little cheese mold. :p

Cream cheese! It is sooO good. I love cream cheese & now I never have to buy it from the store again. Yay!

A meal made up of homemade cream cheese on a homemade bagel with squash from my father-in-law's garden.

A cheese aging above my milking pails that are sitting on the fridge in the kitchen.

One of the very few ingredients in cheesemaking (at least for the simple recipes I'm following) is "mesophilic culture". It came as little tablets in my cheesemaking kit. I learned that you can make your own culture very simply! You don't need to be ordering it online all the time in order to continue making your cheese. All you do is leave a jar of milk sitting out on the counter, with the lid slightly ajar, until it becomes thick like yogurt. I read that this can take only a day but our house is super cold & it takes 3 and a half days for my milk to thicken.



Then you pour it in ice cube trays & stick them in the freezer. Once they freeze I put all the cubes in a ziploc bag & store them in the freezer. One cube is equal one ounce of mesophilic culture. The farmhouse cheddar recipe calls for 4 ounces.Groovy!

Frozen culture cubes on the right, a drying cheese on the board:

I didn't realize how easy it is to make butter. You just put some cream in a jar & shake it 'til it's thick. Then pour off the buttermilk and add salt to your butter. And it's yummy! You can also make larger quantities in a blender or food processor.

A cute little stick of butter. :)

Homemade butter on homemade raisin toast = MmmmmMMMm.

A busy scene. On the left is crackers I'd made for the kids, there's cheese being pressed under boxes that weigh zillions of pounds in the back, my Ball Blue (canning) Book open to the potato canning recipe (I got a great deal on organic Russets from Azure this month!), a cookbook on top of that with that night's dinner recipe (flaky broccoli pockets), my day planner (if I don't write stuff down it never gets done), the 2012 Rod & Staff homeschool curriculum catalog I was drooling over, and a pot full of potatoes! :) I love taking pictures like this because I fully expect to smile over them someday when I'm a wrinkly old lady that's no longer busy, busy, busy.