Goats Milk Cheese

Excellent curds forming.

With the guests safely returned to their homes we had the house back and quickly moved on to new ways of 'messy-ing' it up. We now have 2 sets of friends who are into the milking of goats and producing more milk than they can handle. Charlotte you will already know about, milking just Nanny Óg and her only on a 50/50 share basis with the kid (Henry Óg, but now shortened to 'Henno'). Well Sue and Rob have recently sold off all their many kids at just 6-8 weeks old, so have inherited, as a result, 3 milking nannies who are going at it like mad things - producing good rich milk and lots of it.

Scooping out the curds

As soon as we heard this we put in a bid for "at least 5 litres" (that is a sensible batch size for cheese making) and Sue and Rob duly turned up with 8 creamy litres, fresh and raw. The only cheese making we had done up to that point was the (supermarket) cow's milk Ricotta and then Mozzarella from the kit which I wrote about in a recent post ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/03/blessed-are-cheese-makers.html )  and then Liz's small rapid batch the other day. Nothing ventured, though, nothing gained. I chose a recipe from our 'Strawbridge' books for "Feta style" cheese and nabbed the first 5 litres. Liz did an Internet hunt for a soft goat cheese "with rind" with the remaining 3 litres. Both these batches are currently mid process.

We were both amazed by the amount of curd you get from this raw, full cream goat's milk. When the cow's milk curded it separated into the curds, floating on the surface as a 2 inch thick mass with almost clear whey under it. From the 5 litres of  cow's milk we actually got back over 4 litres of whey for the pigs (I soak their flaked barley in it, they love it). Because of this, in my ignorance, when I went to cut the curds for this cheese, I only sliced the knife in about 3 inches. When I went to scoop out the curds with the draining spoon, I found that the curds ran right to the bottom - the whole depth of milk had 'set' and the whey was only going to leak out of the cut surfaces of the curd blocks. We both made way more cheese than we had imagined we would.

The drained mass from the sieve and cheesecloth.

The curds, once cut, scooped and set to drain, do actually leak that whey slowly so they need to sit in cheesecloth on a sieve or colander and will sag slowly down to about half the volume as the cheese starts to become more dense (and would be pressed for hard cheeses). For my 'Feta' (not actually allowed to call it that as Feta is one of these protected geographic names) the cheese mass now gets spread out on plates and sprinkled with salt to continue the 'cure' while being drained every day.

Liz filling the moulds.

Liz's rinded one goes into moulds to drain further and then gets tipped out of the moulds and left to start forming that fungal 'rind' that anyone who likes the French 'chevre' cheeses would be familiar with. That is the stage we are now at for each, the 'Feta' is curing and the rinded one is growing its rind. More on these in future posts. We do not actually possess cheese moulds, of course, so the 'moulds' were a makeshift collection of plastic cups and punnets with lots of holes punched into them using the hot meat-skewer method

Makeshift moulds.

All this cheese making put us into 'food processes' mode. We are starting to come into the season for 'harvesting' (nice euphemism) some of the stock so we need freezer space. We generally go through the four freezers doing a bit of an audit deciding what we really need to use up, consolidating the few remaining bits into one or two of the freezers so that we can defrost and clean the empty ones.

Trying to grow rinds. 

All this efficiency threw up some pig's trotters which I have been meaning to slow-boil into pork jelly for use in some Melton Mowbray style pork pies. It also showed that we have way too many chunks of pork belly left and I could salt some down for streaky bacon rashers (which would admittedly probably end up back in the freezer). Thus spurred on I hauled these goodies out and thawed them for onward processing. The jelly is now made and the pork pies will be made this weekend. The bellies are dry-salted and being drained of brine each day (the salt on the surface draws a huge amount of water out of the meat) for 7 days. There will be room for young Ebony and Ivory, our ram lambs, when they come back from the butcher's on the 4th of July.

I am no expert but i *think* this is a lesser
butterfly orchid found in one of the local
bogs. 

All this food prep has left little time for any other entertainments. I had a nice early start on one of the mornings, woken at some ungodly (but dawn-lit) hour by a loud cacophony of magpie and jackdaw screeches and croaks. A Hell of a din. In my barely awake, befuddled state as I came to hearing this my brain was shouting "Mink in the chicken coop!", "Pine Marten eating the gosling!" and "Fox!", not registering that it was the maggies I was hearing. Leaping out of bed, then, in a hurry, I raced outside in wellies, jocks and my fleecy jacket (I know! Quite a look!) and found Blue the cat had one of our newly-fledged baby magpies on the ground in the cattle race and the rest of the magpie family plus half a dozen jackdaws all "mobbing" him. Soldier, our other cat was moving in too.

Blue was not actually touching the bird but sitting a few inches away, the way cats do, tempting it to try to take off so that he could pounce on it again. The baby just sat there in shock. I reached down and picked up the unprotesting bird and moved it to safety on a compost heap where the cats seemed to lose sight of it and I could hustle them indoors. When I went out later at a more sensible getting up time (07:30), to do the stock, it was gone and later that day I saw the maggies feeding 2 babies which is all we think they have this time, so my youngster may have made it. I am not sure I love magpies - they steal too many chicken eggs - so perhaps I should have dinged this one when I had the chance, but it was too early in the morning and my merciful streak got the better of me. Perhaps they will name the lad 'Lucky'.

They do, do they? 

Ah well. Enough for this one. More on those cheeses, slabs of bacon and pork pies next time. Cheers.

Moving up a Gear

Springtime is moving up a gear here and we have new things to discover almost with every wander round the garden. We are now regularly getting 'sworn at' by blue tits, great tits and coal tits as we move about. Our swallows are back from their migration and are now a regular sight up on our phone wires, twittering away and zooming down to inspect access to the Tígín where they successfully nested and raised 3 young last year. We have magpies nesting in the big Black Spruce tree at the top of the 'secret garden' (yellow circle) - we can hear the babies squeaking in a most un-magpie-like way when ever Mum or Dad bring them food. We know they are potential predators and would be getting shot if they'd chosen some of our neighbours trees in which to nest, but to us they are all part of the 'wildlife' we try to encourage; we just need to keep our potential new chicks safe from airborne raids.

We have seen plenty of other bird mating activity although no nest building yet, but they are welcome to the windblown dog-clippings when they find them. Here Broody Betty (left hand box) has 2 laying hens to keep her company for a while in the morning. She is almost there; this is day 17 of 21 and we are delighted with the tightness of her sitting. In theory they get off the nest at least once a day to do toilet, feeding and drinking and last year we saw plenty of that but this time Liz has only seen her off the nest once and I have not seen her off at all. We wait with eager anticipation to see how many (if any) hatch out of the 12 eggs.

In the goose department, our two ladies have now amassed 11 eggs between them but as yet there are no signs of anyone going broody. They start to pluck their own breast feathers to create the warm 'brood-patch' of bare skin, and they use the feathers to line the nest bowl. You may recall that we were worried that the birds using the same hay box might end up in conflict and we started a 2nd box but that so far this has been ignored. You can lead a horse to water.....

This morning I found one of the new eggs outside the first box, whether through bad aiming (for the box) or deliberate starting a new clutch, we do not know. I have picked this up and laid it in full view in the 2nd hay box, hoping that goose 2 might take the hint. These are very young inexperienced geese, of course, so this might all end up being a waste and we will have just dipped out on cooking with or eating the dozen eggs but, Heh, we can cope.

In the garden we are finally staring to get some new colour so the hungry, early start bumble bees will now be able to enjoy a bit more than the yellow of primroses, daffodils and dandelions. Here (above) is our orchard's first ever fruit blossom, in this case Victoria plum. The purple flower here (left) is some Perennial Wallflower just now starting into flower. We hope to have more variety established, from purchases and self seeding by next spring. This spring has been a bit of a carry over from our late start in 2012.

It's an exciting time for us. It has looked mainly green for months and we look forward to being able to see different plants and some hot colours as we come up the drive or walk about. These 'Concerto' tulips are admittedly white, but they are a start - they were grown in tubs so have gone into action faster than the orange and red ('Triumph Princess Irene' and 'Ballerina') bulbs planted straight into the keyhole bed. We are also taking care to plant plenty of bee-friendly flowers among the veg and in productive areas - nasturtiums, calendula marigolds and the like. I will keep you posted on our new delights as they happen.

Rubber eggs and BIG trees

Our friends and mentors, Anne and Simon have been having some fun trying to dissuade their local magpies from stealing the eggs from their chicken house. At first this was just by fitting a 'pop hole' through the main, human-sized, door so that they could shut it, but the magpies had developed such an obsession with the eggs in that house that they soon worked out that they could nip in through the pop hole and steal them anyway.

We know, obviously, that you can buy 'dummy' eggs from poultry specialists - made of pottery, they are used to train young hens where they should be laying (i.e. in a nest box! Are you listening, Wandering Wendy?) and can be used to help a broody hen get settled while you accumulate a size-able clutch of real eggs, which you then slip under the hen all in one go, retrieving the dummies. They are also used to teach any hens who might start egg-pecking that this is not a good plan. But Anne and Simon were poking around in our local Aladdin's Cave general store, "Wispy's" of Castlerea, when they spotted in the toy section, these rubber eggs. They supposed that if you put rubber eggs in the boxes, the egg-pecking thing might also dissuade the magpies.

They bought a couple and put them in the box and sat back to wait. They vanished! We guess the magpies had them but took them away elsewhere to try to break them open. Anne and Simon never saw the eggs again, so that was some Euro-cents wasted but undeterred, they nipped back to Wispy's for some more and this time fixed cords to them using screws and washers to stop them being stolen. At last the problem is solved, so Anne is amusing herself with thoughts of a confused magpie with a sore beak wondering why eggs suddenly got to be unbreakable and un-thieve-able. Anyway, they've not been back and Anne thought we'd also be able to use these eggs at some stage so they bought 3 for us as a Christmas present. Thanks very much, Anne and Simon!

With the return of the windless dry (and frosty) weather, I head back out into the field out west of us to have a go at the big ash tree which John Deere Bob wanted felling and logging up. I was not at all sure that this big old thing might be too big for my little, fairly cheap (Lidl's special!) chain saw with its 16 inch "bar" but Bob thought I'd be OK and he's got a lot more experience at these things than I have. Anything too thick, he said, you just attack once from either side. In for a penny, as they say. My top picture shows how thick was the trunk but also shows that it is now felled.

My hike across the frosty grass this morning left me with clown-shoe toe-caps 'swollen' with slushy domes. Incidentally, the dogs do not come with me when I am chain sawing (not a good mix) - these pics were taken in the afternoon when Liz came out to see the tree. We took the dogs and the cats came too. Blue is pictured here in a yellow circle.

I cut out my 'wedge' on the falling side of the tree without difficulty and then tried to do the cut in from the back. Here I hit the short-bar problem - I could not get the back cut to go right across the tree - I had to climb into the hedge a bit to get round to the other side. The tree was so reluctant to fall that at one stage I was almost convinced that I had cut though it and it was balancing on its stump but, no (obviously not!) eventually it did that bass-y crunching deep crack noise which you know means it has started, imperceptibly to move, and it's time to get the hell outta there. It is wise at that point to get clear a bit quick, because the trunk can bounce on the branches as the top end hits the ground and the bottom end can jump several feet in any direction, 'down' the fall line, back 'up' towards the stump or to left or right. You need to stand clear till everything stops moving and only then start assessing which branches to log up first.

My third picture shows the small stand of coppiced ash which I have been attacking prior to felling Bob's big tree. Deefer is down there bottom right - she's the only dog we trust off the lead at present, not to vanish through the hedge and over the hills and far away. The light was a bit low and slanting, evening style but you may be able to make out the pale coloured stumps, down by Deefer where I have been already and explaining the lack of tall stems in the right hand side of the stand. I have deliberately left the thinner, young trunks to take over and supply future logs years hence.

 And finally, just a shot of the 'Take Liz to See' walk this afternoon. Lis is following Bob's tractor tyre tracks out to the site and Blue, in his yellow circle again, joining in the fun. He tends to tread carefully over the poached up, cow foot printed bits of grass but then seems to lift up his skirts and scamper good distances, bounding across the turf with his big, broad tail up like a mad raccoon

Topp Logging! as Molesworth might have said.