I love to cook

Bouquet garni on cookbook

Six of my friends are coming over Sunday, late afternoon, for a Harvest Moon Feast.  I have been toying with several different menu options, but as of now, this is it.  It is getting too late to change my mind again!

Bar opens at 5:00

Dinner at 6:00

French lentil salad in Boston lettuce cups

Rabbit with shallots and pickles, basted with brown stock
Sauerkraut with bacon, potatoes and white wine
Courgettes in olive oil and butter
Leek toast

Apple pie with 7-year old white Cheddar or vanilla ice cream


I am just starting the brown stock, and I went outside with a flashlight and scissors to harvest rosemary, thyme, basil and parsley.  I tied them together with some bay leaves tucked into the bundle.  The scent of the bouquet garni is about to make me faint with hunger!

Are you hungry yet?  I haven't had supper, but who wants to eat plain food when this is on the horizon?  Think I'll just have some homemade chevre on rye crisp to go with my Martini and call it a day.  .

Why I'm tired . . .

It's Labor Day today.  It wasn't a holiday for me.  I didn't even think about it, realized I had scheduled Kayla to come in today and thought I should call her to see whether she really wanted to be here.  About that time, she pulled in, and we got to work.  I had already started a pot of soup and was working on a new batch of sourdough rye bread.  My very dense and sour rye bread has finally taken off - I'm getting a lot of orders for it, in fact I made a dozen loaves last week and they are all gone but one. Most of the people who buy it at my booth at the market have European accents.  It's not for the Wonder Bread crowd.

Beef soup

Sourdough rye- first rise

I sent Kayla down to the garden to pick tomatoes so that I could get on with my canning.  The jars were running through the dishwasher while I was doing bread and soup.  I also had an order for 12 bunches of basil, any type, so Kayla got those ready.

Many kinds of basil - sweet, Thai, cinnamon, purple, lemon . . .

While the pressure cooker was doing its thing, I went down to the garden and dug potatoes.  One of my customers at the market just loves a French potato called La Ratte.  It is a small fingerling, and the French insist it is the tastiest potato in the world.

La Ratte fingerling potatoes

The weather is magnificent today!  Finally the heat wave has broken.  High today was around 65º, and it is quite windy.  What better day to hang out the sheets?  So I threw them in the machine while I was waiting on the pressure cooker to complete the first load.

Sheets drying on the line

Kayla asked about these wrinkled little peppers in the garden, because I had given her some of them.  What should she do with them?  I told her I was going to start some fermenting this afternoon, so she could help me, and write down the recipe to do her own.

Pepperoncini fermenting in Suze Goldberg jar

Between canning and bread making, I picked up eggs and then went down to the garden for a few more pepperoncini so that I had enough to fill a half gallon jar. I picked while the last batch of jars was cooling in the pressure cooker.  By the time I got back from the garden, they were ready to remove.  I love to listen to the jar lids ping when they seal.

Tomatoes and beans ready for winter meals

Then I checked my orders for market baskets and Kayla went down to the garden to get some kale, chard and collards which we will need for tomorrow's deliveries
.

Kale, collards and chard sitting in ice water

It's 6:30 now.  Time to stop.  I haven't eaten since breakfast, and I'm hungry.  So I spent Labor Day laboring, but it was all enjoyable, and I am going to crawl into a bed with fresh sheets that smell like the great outdoors, to dream of eating tomato soup on a cold winter's day, or snacking on sharp and vinegar-y pepperoncini.  It really doesn't get any better than this.

Busy time!

This past week has been very busy.  I met a new friend at a raw milk conference in Madison, WI last spring, and he asked if he could come out to the farm to learn to make cheese.  Bernie lives in Milwaukee, and that is a long trip for a cheese making class, but I said, "Sure, why not?"

One of our shareholders has a lot of excess milk, and he said he would contribute it to a cheese making class if I would have one, so Sunday it was.  Bernie arrived Saturday evening, and we started with his lessons right away.  I decanted a quart of kefir and showed him how to make a new start before we turned in for the night.

Sunday morning, we checked our kefir and he saw just how easy that is.  Then we moved on to yogurt.  Although I am a fan of raw milk, I do heat the milk to 180º and hold it there for five minutes, because I make Bulgarian yogurt, which is really the best, in my opinion.  And if I want to preserve the Bulgarian strain, then it is important to kill off any other bacteria in the milk before making it.  So we got that mixed up and put into the yogurt maker before the other guests arrived for the Cheddar making workshop.

About 1 p.m., we got started making Cheddar.  There is a lot of "wait" time while making hard cheese, so in one of those times, I showed the group how to make sweet cream butter.  The participants all got to help press the water out of the finished butter, which assures that the butter will stay fresh a bit longer.  Leaving any buttermilk in the butter contributes to it going rancid, so it's an important step.  Even if one is very careful about washing the butter, sweet cream butter is only good for a few days.  Culturing the butter makes it last a couple of weeks, but we didn't have any cultured cream to work with.

One of the by-products of cheese making is whey.  If you heat whey to 200º within two hours of draining the curds while making cheese, then add some vinegar to precipitate out the remaining curds, then drain it through some butter muslin, the end product is ricotta cheese.  It is so good!  One of the shareholders turned me on to adding some cacao nibs and fermented walnuts to a bowl of ricotta.  For us "low carbers," it is a dessert made in heaven!  I can pretend I'm having a chocolate sundae, with just a tiny bit of carbohydrates.  (I'll be talking about my low carb diet in another post soon.)

I showed everyone the cheddaring process - yes, that is what makes Cheddar cheese Cheddar cheese! - and then I got some help with my least favorite thing to do when making Cheddar.  This lump of cheddared curds has to be cut into tiny slices, which is tedious at best.  But with five of us there, it was short work.  Then these slices were tossed with salt and packed into the mold.  The mold full of curds went into the press, and the bulk of the work was done.

All of the guests but Bernie left at that point.  No sense watching a cheese press for twelve hours, hey?  But Bernie and I weren't done.  Now we got some cottage cheese started.  I make mine the old fashioned way, using no rennet to set up the curd.  So that means it has to sit for at least 20 hours after heating the milk to 70º and adding some special bacteria to it.  We got that going and turned in for the night.

Monday we enjoyed another farm breakfast of bacon and eggs (no toast - that low carb thing), while Bernie chided me for drinking coffee and I chided him for drinking water out of a plastic bottle.  We foodies do tend to get a bit carried away at times!  I showed Bernie around the farm - first chance we had to do that - then he tended to his consulting business (lap tops and cell phones make portable offices) and I took care of emails and other farm duties.  After lunch, we finished the cottage cheese.  Then Bernie asked, "What next?'

Okay, what next?  I decided to make paneer, an Indian cheese that is pretty quick start to finish.  So we got that done and pressed it lightly.  For supper that night, we had Saag Paneer, a very tasty Indian dish made with cubed paneer sauteed in butter with onions, and then spiced with cumin and curry powder.  Saag - better known as spinach - is then added, but I don't have any in my garden, so we did kale instead.  Very tasty!  So I guess we had Kale Paneer, didn't we?

I hope Bernie enjoyed his dairy product marathon!  I sent him home with samples of most of what we had made.  In a couple of days, he learned first hand how to make butter, kefir, yogurt, ricotta, cottage cheese, Cheddar and paneer.  That should keep him busy with his own raw milk for quite some time!

Winter is still here, no doubt!

It is beautiful tonight, soft snow floating down, near the freezing mark - warm enough that I dashed out to the Moop to close up the girls with no coat, just my hooded sweatshirt.

The chickens are very happy.  I cut into a block of cheese (I thought it felt a little punky while it was aging) and it was moldy - and very stinky, and not in a good Limburger cheese sort of way.  I didn't want to give it to the dogs, since Bear has already suffered a bout of pancreatitis and the cheese is fatty.  I decided to take a bit of it out to the Moop.  Oh, my, did they enjoy it!  Such cackling and discussion over who has the best piece, with much running around from corner to corner with their prizes.

Recently a person wrote me that humans are the only beings on the planet that drink the milk of other species.  I've heard that before and it is one that has always puzzled me.  What are they talking about?  Every critter on this place loves a bit of milk, or the whey when I am making cheese, in tonight's instance, cheese I deem rotten - but the chickens deem a delight.

I am enjoying this evening because tomorrow is not supposed to be very enjoyable - lots of snow, up to 18" over the next two days, 20 to 30 mph winds, four to five foot drifts.  In anticipation of this, my neighbor plowed out my 2,400 foot drive, bless him.  If he waits until all of the snow has fallen, his 25 horse John Deere just ain't gonna make it through the drifts with the plow down.

We will hope that his foresight means that he can make another pass through tomorrow night.  I'm supposed to get chicken feed and minerals for the cows tomorrow morning, but I am pretty sure that isn't going to happen.  Time to hunker down and do "inside" things for a couple of days.  The other stuff can wait.

Hope you are all snug as a bug in a rug this evening, and that you stay warm and dry over the next few days.