Cheese making at home

A~ and I took an opportunity to attend a cheese making class the weekend before last and had a great time. If you're following me on Facebook you may remember me posting something about it. (If you're not, don't delay, I'm making an effort to get more regular posts up there in a timely manner.) Well we had a great time.

Demonstrating the process of making mozzarella

The class was being taught by a man that started one of our very favorite local cheese companies, Beehive Cheese, and was covering the obvious first timer cheese of choice, mozzarella. This was perfectly fine with us since, with summer knocking on the door, we wanted to get a few tricks as to how to make this family favorite so we could add it to our repertoire to enjoy with fresh garden tomatoes this year. The class covered the basics of course, but we did manage to learn a couple of good tricks too. For instance, did you know that even just a couple of drops of milk in normal tap water is enough to negate the effects of the chlorine in it? That's nice to know. Another good tip was to mix your citric acid into a 1/4 cup of water (with a drop of milk in it...) to dissolve it before adding it to the milk. You should also do the same thing for your rennet. The reason for this is to allow the ingredient to be introduced to the milk more gently so to speak. Rather than the shock of a direct hit of citric acid, you can ease it into the milk this way.

Prepping all ingredients. Milk & diluted citric acid and rennet.

Since we were newly educated and wanted to put our new info to use to really reinforce it into out minds we went ahead and made ourselves a batch of fresh mozzarella and ricotta this weekend. We learned a couple of things during this process. 1. If we're going to be making cheese, even just the basic mozzarella and ricotta, we need to get some specific equipment. Namely a large fine meshed strainer and some good quality cheese cloth. (The kind for actually making cheese with, not the flimsy crap from the mega-mart.) 2. The final step in making the mozzarella is to heat the curd and "knead" it until it turns to the silken texture and stiff dough-like consistency of good mozzarella.During this part of the process, there is a time to stop when the cheese has formed... I passed that point slightly and the dough was a little on the rubbery side but still very tasty. I'll chalk this error up to simple inexperience. Overall, I really enjoyed the class and the cheese that we made as a testament to having learned something at it. now I'm looking forward to the lasagna that we'll be having with our fresh cheese! Here's a few pictures of our home cheese making process in the works. Buon appetito!!

First, heat milk slowly to 55 deg... then add citric acid and stir...

Continue heating to 88 deg (F) then add rennet..stirring in.. then let sit while curd forms and increase temp to 98

strain off the whey leaving only curds...

heat curd, continue pouring off whey and knead till silken and dough like...

Separate into serving sizes if you'd like and store in fridge. (or eat right away)

We also made ricotta from another half gallon of milk. The steps are even easier:

Heat milk in a microwave safe bowl until it reaches between 190 - 200 Deg (F), then stir in 1/4 cup vinegar per qt of Milk. This will separate the curds off almost immediately.

After lettin the curd separate for 20-30 minutes, strain off whey and store the ricotta.. BAM! that easy.

The leftover whey from both processes is still a very high nutrient supplement. If you have chickens or livestock they will love it! Waste not want not.

Till Next Time.

The Big Weigh-In 2008 7/28 (83 lbs)

OK, so the numbers aren't as impressive as 6000 lbs per 1/10 acre, but I think their pretty good considering so far we haven't yet really pulled any of the big crops such as cukes, tomatoes and zucchinis from the garden. (Yeah, I've gotten a few zukes but not too many yet.)
The grand total to date is just shy of 83 lbs of food. (82.87 or 1326-oz's to be really geeky) Most of that has come from strawberries and the heavier spring veggies like carrots and beets, but a good bit of lettuce and greens were brought in as well.

So, how about some numbers then eh? These are by no means all inclusive, but they do give a good idea of what's been producing around here.

• Strawberries.....................................................330 oz's - 20.625 lbs

• Baby Lettuce (mesclun).......................................46 oz's - 2.875 lbs

• Greens (kale, collard, spinach, chard)..............134.5 oz's - 8.406 lbs

• Kohlrabi............................................................60 oz's - 3.75 lbs

• Carrots..............................................................197 oz's - 12.31 lbs

• Peas (shelling)..................................................107 oz - 6.687 lbs

• Peas (Sugar Snap).............................................60 oz's - 3.75 lbs

Well, that gives you a good idea of what's been coming in this spring/early summer. Like I said, the numbers aren't huge but you never really notice how much baby lettuce it actually takes to make a pound of it until you keep track of the actual numbers; another benefit to keeping accurate records. Besides, we aren't vegetarians and the things that we've had come in we've able able to really enjoy on the table and have even put up a few things too.(More to come on that.) We've also had a total of 37 eggs so far since the three mature hens started laying on the 12th of July. The other girls should start around mid month next month, so that'll really help too. Every little bit goes toward our own food Independence, and is a welcome addition to the pantry. You can find my updated totals in the left column under the Big Weigh-In icon. I'll be doing my best to keep that Qty updated even if I don't have a chance to make a big update post.
I Hope all your gardens are blessing you with bounties as well.
Till next time.
P~

P.S. Thank you to Anais at PTF for the nod today. I owe much of my inspiration to you guys!

Bags-O-Flour and food storage

I posted a while back about Food Storage. It's something that is very important to us. We are not yet to a point where we could go without commercial stores, but we are moving that direction. I'm not talking about being free of them for everyday needs, although we are certainly reducing our dependence on them, I'm talking instead about getting to a point where if there were a catastrophe, or food shortage, or monumental rise in food costs for a prolonged period we would be less impacted than we would if we were like every "normal" family out there. I don't want to scare anyone, and honestly I'm not scared myself, but I am cautiously pessimistic. That is to say I don't have enough faith in the current economy and global stability to not hedge my bets.

One of the primary things that goes hand in hand with having food storage is eating it. If you store a basement full of whole wheat, beans, rice, oats, etc. but you live daily on wonder bread, take-out and Big Gulps, your setting yourself up for failure in my opinion. We eat a lot of the foods that we store on or in our regular diet. Beans and rice are regular dishes around our house and many of the other foods like oats, flour, sugar and the like are of course regular additions to almost everything. We spent a little time with a borrowed wheat grinder this weekend grinding about 40 lbs of whole wheat flour that A~ will be starting to incorporate more into our diet as well. We placed it into 10 one-gallon zip lock bags and are going to store it in the chest freezer for later use. This is not the optimal way to use your flour just for the record. It will have some minor nutritive loss from sitting ground rather that grinding fresh, but it will be minor, and since we don't yet have our own grinder, we are at the mercy of the kindness of our neighbor.

Another component to this food storage formula will be a our 100ft diet. That's right, the garden! What better activity can we all incorporate in our homes than some sort of freedom garden. Grow things that you know your family will eat through the year, and preserve what you can for later. Try a couple of new plants too, but in limited quantities. Biodiversity is a necessity in a healthy garden, but you don't want to take up a lot of your growing space with something that you may not like. Particularly if your on a small suburban lot such as ours. Next year you can expand if you like it enough.

I began this post with a little bit of doom and gloom; a necessity, I thought, to make my point. I hope you get the point that yeah there may be some instability in the world, and yeah there's a good chance it'll get worse before it gets better. But this blog isn't about the bad things that might happen, it's about the possibilities that we CAN make happen. It's about making the possibilities...Realities. They won't happen overnight, but they will come if we decide that they will, and truly believe in them. One thing is certain though. Do nothing, and you will get exactly that in return.

Be well all. Tomorrow should be a very good post for you chicken lovers out there. Ooooo... the suspense...Till then.

P~

Food Storage guide. - A fairly comprehensive guide to starting a family food storage program.

Web Ringers.

I just wanted to take a second and say hello and welcome to all the new readers that have been popping in from the Urban Homesteading web-Ring. I am so happy to have you here. I hope you're able to learn something from what I do, and more than that even, I hope you'll share with me so that I can learn from you.

For one reason or another, we've all started walking down an uncommon path. Let us be company to each other as we walk it and talk and share and see where we end up.

Take a look around, leave a comment if you like and please, hurry back.

Namaste.

P~

2008 Garden update

The sprouts have been sprouting slowly over the last week. Here we have a tray with a few cabbage, broccoli, and some cucumber stouts. The brassicas (cabbage and broccoli will go into the garden probably in another week or two at most. The cuc's not until near to mothers day.)

Things aren't coming up as fast as I had hoped; some of the other trays we have aren't nearly as full of sprouts as these, but I do have some tomato's coming up and some of our annual flowers have sprouted as well.

As I was saying the other day about never mastering gardening... well there you go. We get a little better every year. I just keep waiting for the year to come when I don't have anything to do in the late winter / early spring besides plant sprouts. Next year right? Always next year!

Glad to see so many of you are doing well with your sprouts this year. Looking forward to more updates.
P~

Urban Chickens Update.

The kids are getting big!

I took these pictures today. They are fully feathered now with the exception of a few "fuzzies" left around some of their necks.

I thought I'd share a few pictures of them for any of you that are curious.

As you can see I'm still using the circular feeder that I got for them when they were chicks. It works alright I guess, but they really need to get a bigger one since they eat like it's going out of style. You should see them when I bring the feeder up and out of the coop. They jump and flap and squawk like their starving. One of the Barred Rocks actually got up on the ledge of the coop one time and on another missed it and soared right down to the ground. Luckily he came to me when I called him and I got him right back in their with his sisters.

And guess what other trick they've learned? I can't remember if it was last weekend or the one prior that I added a couple of roosting bars to the "Chicken Condo" but they've finally figured it out. They get up there and fluff up their feathers and stare at each other. (Or sometimes check out the bottom of each others feathers obviously.)

This Tuesday should be the City planning commission meeting where the chicken proposal gets it's initial vote. If it passes, and it should based on the comments from the chairman, then it goes to the city council the next week. If all goes well, the kids should be leaving their outlaw status behind in a couple of weeks. (Keep your fingers crossed.) That being said, I need to really get going on the coop. They need the space, and I need to be able to hang an adult size feeder for them.

p~