Hazels winter wonderland

Hazel never misses a meal she's always the first one to the hay when Brian puts out a new bale. She is nice an and fuzzy right now with her winter coat.

I think she's really starting to show that she is going to calf this spring. I'm hoping it's a heifer. If it is the new little girl will be going to Kentucky to become the future family cow for my son and his growing family.

Home dairying

Oh the joys of having our own cow! So far I've made gallons and gallons of yogurt. Brian has perfected ice cream in at least 4 flavors and he's plotting his next creation as I write. I've made baked custard and Rennet custard. And there are several one gallon bags in the freezer filled with lovely yellow butter balls.

So for my next trick I decided to tackle cottage cheese. I read the directions in the Rennet package. It didn't look all that difficult. I thought I sort of remembered the process from when I was little and my mother made cottage cheese. So after the morning milking I strained the milk into a big stainless steel pot. Added the required number of Rennet drops and buttermilk. Then I placed a linen towel over the top and placed it carefully on the counter to wait.

Wait. Oh yeah how long did it say I had to wait? 12 hours... let's see it's was 11am by the time I got everything in the pot... so it should be curd by 11 pm. No big deal I thought. I have to work tomorrow so it will good to stay up tonight and get "flipped".

So at 11pm I was cutting my curd, heating it to 115 degrees slowly in a water bath, stirring every 5 minutes so the curds didn't stick together. Then straining off the whey. Plunging the curd in ice water. Hanging it to drain. At 2 am I decided it was just going to have to be drained enough because I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. I tucked it in the fridge and crawled into bed.

This morning I added salt, pepper and cream. Yep that's right cottage cheese is supposed to be swimmin' in cream. Then I tasted it. YUMMY! It's going to be great with fruit and for stuffing pasta. Thanks Hazel. :^)

Butter day

One day a week I clear the milk refrigerator. First I skim off all the cream, then I re-bottle about two gallons of milk into one quart milk bottles. The smaller bottles fit in our inside fridge better and they are easier to handle for my mother who has arthritis. After all the cream is skimmed, I start making butter.
No I don't sit in my rocker and churn like granny on the "Beverly Hillbillies". I use the blender. While the butter's in the blender I empty the excess milk into a "Pig Pale" to be carried out to the hogs. Then I wash all the empty one gallon jars and put them back on the shelf for next week.
You can hear the change in the blender sound when the butter starts to rise. Then I run it through the strainer to remove the buttermilk. I save a little for cooking and send the rest to the piggies. Then it's rinsed with clean cold water and put into a bowl. When all of the cream is butter, I "work" the butter to get as much liquid out of it as possible. Then I add salt, shape it into butter balls and drop the butter into ice water to firm it up.
One butter ball goes in the butter dish and the rest in the freezer.

I'm hoping to have enough butter put by in the freezer to keep us through the time when Hazel is dry this winter. 
Here are some of my buttery creations swimming in their ice bath.

When did people start being afraid of real food?

As I do most every night that I work, I took a quart of our nice fresh, unpasteurized skimmed milk to work to drink. I was getting it out of the fridge as another nurse was looking for non-dairy creamer. I offered her a little real milk for her coffee.
"Eeyew I can't drink that. I looks like breast milk."
"Technically all milk is breast milk," I replied.
Another nurse heard our exchange looked at my milk bottle in abject horror and asked, "That came from your cow." Well duh! Where did she think milk came from a laboratory somewhere? Or maybe it just appears on store shelves late at night like magic?
I took a swig of deliciously cold fresh milk and went on with my day, but it's really been bothering me all evening. When did we start believing that the more processed, the more removed from the source, the more depersonalized our food was that it made us somehow better off?
I was fortunate to have been raised largely on rich fresh unpasteurized milk from our family cow and pork and beef and vegetables we raised ourselves. And I know this is anecdotal, but my siblings and I were healthier than our friends growing up. My sister and I didn't "blossom" while we were in grade school like girls do now. It distresses me when I see 8-9 year old girls with developed breasts. They are ill prepared for the changes in their bodies and the change in the way that people regard them. This early puberty has been linked to hormones in our food. Why is it that when people talk about contaminated foods they think only of bacteria? They don't think about hormones and antibiotics passed along and concentrated in our commercial food chain.
Another of my friends asked me how I could eat animals that I had raised myself. It never occurred to me that you shouldn't name your food. Each animal on our farm has a name. A personality. And a purpose. We are kind to our animals while they are with us and grateful for the food they provide us. We take responsibility for their welfare and we take responsibility for what we eat.
Come on! Food doesn't start out  dismembered, depersonalized, plastic wrapped and sealed. We had a European couple stop by the farm for a tour last summer. They thought it was weird that in the U.S. you can't tell what animal the meat at the market comes from unless you read the signs. In European markets, they said, you an tell what the animal because you can recognize the parts.

All beef starts out as a living breathing calf in the spring and if it's lucky it grows on pasture until it's two years old. Then it is humanely processed into delicious grassfed beef. If it's not lucky it is raised in an overcrowded CAFO with a lot of other unfortunate animals. It's fed on grain it was never meant to eat and kept alive and growing on antibiotics and hormones. All pork starts out as a cute little piglet not a whole lot bigger than a man's hand. On our farm they are fed on excess cows milk, grain and all the pasture they can eat. They have lovely mud holes to play in  and a large pasture to root around. Less fortunate pigs are raised on slatted floors in crowded conditions and fed sub therapeutic antibiotics and growth hormones. They cut the pigs tails off so that when the pigs become stressed from the overcrowding they can't bite one another's tails.

Which would you rather eat: food from stressed animals grown in crowded conditions? or food lovingly raised by a caring farmer?

Think about it. Know your farmer, know your food.

Of Dairy Maids and Dairy men

It is my considered opinion that the advent of the milking machine was when the family dairy moved from the domain of women to the realm of man.


When I was younger I milked a cow by hand. Resting my head against the warm side of Bossie the cow as streams of steaming milk splashed rhythmically into the pail was ... a Zen experience. When the cow was dry I'd turn her out and carried the bucket of warm frothy milk to the house. Simple, uncomplicated, relaxing.
 
 Now my husband uses a milking machine to milk our cow, Hazel. The machine involves a vacuum pump and its idiosyncrasies, lots of mechanical parts, enough hoses to confuse an octopus and a stainless steel tank. Brian finds the whole contraption fascinating. He actually enjoys fine tuning the connections and settings. He talks constantly of finding the perfect length for the hoses and whether or not the sling is really necessary. When he starts talking mechanics and physics my brain turns off and I find myself "Uh Huh" ing him. You know - nodding and making little noises of agreement while not really paying much attention to what he said. I tried using the milking the machine once. By the time I was done I was a frustrated, nervous wreck.
 
To add  insult to injury, when the surge is full of milk I can barely lift it. Even Brian uses the little trailer pulled by the lawn tractor to haul the milker to and from the barn, but he can at least lift the stainless steel surge up into the wagon.

So there you go... when milking started involving machines it became man's work. Because men, in my experience, like machines and those doggone milk cans are HEAVY!

Hazel is MOOOving to Indiana

This is Hazel soon to be our family milk cow. We can hardly wait. I'm reading up on cheese making!