Cheese

We’ve been busy! Spring kicked-in with its share of milk, cheese, sunshine and guests.

Some of the highlights and main events:
The bad news first, Frieda’s lamb, Xy, did not survive the separation from his mother. At 1 month we decided that it was time for him to start sharing the milk that he had been thriving on – he was getting really big. Unfortunately he was not too thrilled about the idea: on the first night of his separation from Frieda he was pretty upset and tried to jump the fence, by midnight he had caught his head in the fence and was not with us anymore… Thanks to an emergency intervention of the local butcher-team (aka. Hannes and our neighbour Sonja), he is now resting in peace/piece in our freezer.

My cheese-making talents are developing and challenged every week. I manage to make cheese every 10days but the ladies are already losing some production capacity. This means freezing the milk every day in little bags and thawing these when I’ve gathered enough, which can be really messy and time and energy consuming…
I currently make fresh cheese (crottin) and hard cheese. The fresh cheese has a 1 to 7 ratio, meaning that I need 7 units of milk for 1 unit of cheese and the hard cheese takes 1 to 10! The cheese and yoghurt have been quite well adopted by neighbours and guests but at this moment I am of course not even trying to calculate if my costs are covered

I had almost given up on ice-cream when we developed the idea of having someone else make the ice-cream for us, hereby saving ourselves the costs and risk associated with buying a professional ice-cream machine. We’ve successfully, and a bit coincidentally, found our ice-cream man and have tried our first professional Frieda and Ursule ice last weekend! Now I need to work out some special flavours with the ice-maker and make sure demand meets supply and the other way around :-S
We are slowly reaching the limits of our kitchen and fridge capacity and are currently in the middle of installing the cheese kitchen in the former pantry and of rethinking the way we store our milk and products.

Apart for this pretty dry description of venture developments, our little bunch seems healthy, happy and is enjoying the sunshine, greens and fresh air! We’ve had some trouble explaining to Jacqueline that she should switch from milk to grass: we’ve separated her from her mummy, Ursule, quite a while ago but every time we’ve tried putting them back on the same pasture she remembers very clearly where the good stuff came from. So for the moment Gretchen, (who did not get a lamb after all!) is still baby-sitting Jacqueline in our neighbours’ pasture (and getting really fat) and Pâquerette (master of escape) is safely behind the electric fence with the two productive members of the family, namely Frieda the ewe and Ursule the goat…

Last but not least, a big thanks goes to the aforementioned neighbour Sonja, who spends overtime, after working as a practicing physician, milking with me in the evening and has on several occasions fully taken over when Hannes and I were out for a night in the city! Although she says she does it for Ursule, not for me

“Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles…”