Blesséd are the Cheese Makers?

Cheese Making Kit

...because everyone needs a Monty Python quote in their blog now and again. Making cheese is something into which we had never delved. Years back we went on a goat-keeping course which included dealing with the dairy products of milking goats. The course was excellent but I have to admit we were rather put off the dairying side by all the talk of food grade plastics, spotless cleanliness and perfect maintenance of temperatures. In theory you could make goaty cheese in a 'normal' kitchen but what we were seeing looked more complicated, precise and careful than any kind of kitchen we felt able to reproduce in our tiny 8 feet by 6 feet space.

Pouring the curds and whey through the muslin and colander

Ah well, that was then. Recently we had the Mum-in-Law up to stay and, as a thank you, she bought us a cheese making kit in a box as an enjoyable taster. This kit, the "Big Cheese Making Kit" is by a company called "The Big Cheese" of Tranent, East Lothian, EH33 1AZ (UK) but we got it via Mr Middleton's Garden Shop which is, we believe, the Irish version of Thompson and Morgan. Google any of those names and you are sure to find it. Our kit makes up to 10 batches each of Mozzarella and Ricotta, each batch being based on 4.5 litres of full cream milk and yielding 1-2 lbs of cheese. The kit contains instruction sheets plus all the things you might not have in a standard kitchen needed for the job - thermometer, butter muslin sheets, veggie rennet, citric acid powder and fine organic sea-salt. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Ricotta cheese - small granular crumby curds

So, I was dispatched to the local shops to buy 9 litres of milk while Liz set up the necessary pots and pans and colander. I won't bore you with all the details of method but suffice to say it went really well and worked like a dream. We did the ricotta first as that looked simplest (add citric acid to milk and heat to 85ºC - you will have curds like magic). The mozzarella was a little more complex as there was rennet to add and the curds formed at only 35ºC but more slowly. There is then a repeat microwaving and kneading stage like bread dough but which you do with the Marigolds on as the curd mass is too hot to handle with bare hands.

Portioning up the finished mozzarella

You squish and knead and fold and stretch like someone trying to get life back into old, dried up Blu-Tack. You end up with a much denser (than ricotta) shiny, stretchy lump which you can then portion up into rounds or flat lumps for storage (freeze and/or submerge in brine or whey). The whey can be a bit of a problem, as you get nearly as much whey back as you started with milk but there are recipes on line for using it in stock and soups. I would not recommend chucking it down the drain as it must have an Oxygen Demand (BOD) similar to milk and you may kill all the local fish! You are also not technically allowed to feed it to pigs (as in Danish Bacon) as it is from a human kitchen. For want of knowing what to do with it for the moment we have frozen it in the milk bottles.

How blue do you like your sky?

With rather delightful timing, we had no sooner made these lovely light, Summer salad cheeses than the sun finally came out and has given us 2 days of beautiful blue skies and warm sunshine. All our puddles are gone daffs are coming out all over the gaff and even the primroses have started along our 'Primrose Path'. My quince tree, previously the last fruit type to break bud and not moving till May, is racing out into leaf in a solid first place. All around the local ditches and ponds, frogs are 'at it' and the ditches are alive with masses of frog spawn. Not in our pond though, for some reason. The froggy 'house hunters' seem to have passed us by this year. Perhaps last year's were scouts and when the tadpoles were all eaten by our newts or water beetles, the word went round. Stay away.

Those trees again. Enjoy them while you can.

In the tree felling dept, we have now been visited by the man from the 'tree care' company in a mighty 4 wheel drive. He was calm, professional and completely unfazed by my "mighty" trees, quoted us a very favourable price and promised that, weather permitting, he might be back next week to drop them, slice up the trunks and shred up all the debris. I just have to take down the fence around the bases but as this is a post and rail with no high-tensile wire involved, I can do that with my fencing pliers and a screwdriver. It all sounds very promising.

Coffee in the garden but if you bring cake out, don't
tell the chickens!

All parties are now convinced that our guest-goat, Nanny Óg is, in fact, pregnant. This from the size of her, which everyone thinks is much bigger than when they last looked, 3 weeks ago. Maybe only with the single kid, though, says Carolyn (the owner). Also from the fact that she is definitely bagging up in the udder dept. Everyone is quite calm about this as she is an experienced Mum. Carolyn thinks that it is not yet imminent, anyway. We can all relax. The deal I did with Nanny Óg to hold off till Charlotte came home from college might still work although I told the goat St Patrick's Day (17th) and she is not now coming home till Monday. Hang in there Nanny!

Gimme that cake!

Looking at her today, I wondered whether we might all get a rapid surprise. She was only half interested in lunch (she's normally first in the queue even before our ewe Lily). She did a big solid poo (normally it is all as little pellets like over-size rabbit droppings) and seemed to be quite pink round the vulva. She was holding her tail quite high up and, yesterday, she was doing a weird dance on top of the grassy knoll, swinging her head back and forth from all the way round to her left shoulder blade, to round to the right one and back.

However, when we went back to check on her a few minutes later she was back down in her favourite corner of the field lying on a slew of old hay looking as relaxed and not-in-labour as any goat could look. Chilled in the sunshine enjoying the sun's warmth on her ample belly. Maybe she will hold off to Monday after all. Meanwhile Liz spotted a good website/blog about goat breeding which suggested that if a goat only has one kid then it can start to favour only one side of the udder leading to a situation where the owner needs to milk out the other side so that the poor Mum does not swell up and get painful. Now if only we had a use for all that spare goat milk!

From 'None' to 'A bit of a...'

There is a well used Irish turn of phrase about the evenings getting longer which goes "Ah there's a  grand stretch in the evenings!" We have even seen a spoof website which alleges that there is a NASA department tracking when the country moves from "None" to "A bit of a stretch" and so on. What ever the truth, the evenings are definitely getting longer and nightfall as far as chickens are concerned is now drifting out past 16:30 and off towards 17:00 p.m. (except on miserable, dark, rainy evenings when sometimes it's even as early as 15:30). Spring is on it's way.

For a good while now we have had daffs and narcissi breaking the surface; these in the picture are from a big net of bulbs given to us by Steak Lady on one of their visits. We are hoping for a good show of colour from these mixed species.

Also breaking surface now are the white tulip "Concerto" planted into three big tubs in mid October, now standing on the concrete plinth under our western gable end of the house.

All around the place there are new leaves coming on shrubs and buds expanding on fruit bushes, all be it these have been in the ground since last year and were still fairly active when they either died back naturally in the autumn or were browsed into submission by passing sheep.

It was definitely the sheep who defoliated the clematis shown here but sheep tend to carefully nibble off leaves and there is enough plant left to recover.

We have had no such recovery or bud break yet from the trees delivered already dormant and bare rooted, now sitting in the orchard, but if memory serves, bare rooted trees have to have a few weeks of getting roots down before they attempt any above-ground stuff.

Another sure sign of Spring is that the seed packets have now been delivered, so we can start with that lovely job of spreading the packets out all over the table to sort, plan and stroke them. These ones came from Irish seedsman "Mr Middleton Garden Shop" (Mary Street, Dublin) as part of our joint order with Mentor Anne, mainly (in our case) so that we could secure our Sarpo Mira, blight resistant seed potatoes. I added in my mental list of spring onions, brussels, beetroot, carrot, leeks etc to bulk us up into the 'free delivery' stakes but left beans and other stuff to buy in Spring.

Mr Middleton not only does his own range of seeds, but is also the Irish agent for Thompson and Morgan and plenty of his varieties have already been 'proven' for Roscommon by Anne and Simon whose conditions are very similar to ours. I am doing all my veg in the raised beds which I am currently digging this year, so I hope I will have a season free from too much waterlogging. Wish me luck.

"Here a Year" and Logging Games

With the passing of the 12th Dec, comes the Anniversary of our moving here. It was on the afternoon of the 11th, through to the morning of the 12th, that we made the long run here across UK, on the overnight ferry and then the morning drive west across Ireland to arrive at the solicitor's office in Strokestown (Co. Roscommon) for 09:00 in the morning to collect our front door key. It's probably all here in the blog but I must admit I've not been to check. With the keys clutched in our fist we completed the journey in the Fiat and 2CV plus trailer convoy, creaking open the rusty gates and slithering the cars up the drive, then coated with 15 years of rotten pine needles. It feels like a long time since then and we have certainly achieved a massive amount - more than we ever dreamed we'd be called upon to achieve.

By happy coincidence it was on the 12th that we found ourselves back in that same solicitor's office, but this time making our Wills. We had Wills in the UK, obviously, but these can only cover UK assets, not the Irish house or the now-Irish cars and any other stuff or bank accounts.

After all the frenetic hard work stuff of that first 12 months, we have also now settled down into a more sensible routine, the business of just living here, settling in and making friends. Our main local contact is John Deere Bob, a local guy who has adopted us and we are happy to now think of as a good friend. He calls by once or twice a week and comes in sits down and chats, tells us his latest news and answers our queries (where are local Doctors, who would you see for fencing etc). You can see from this picture that the dogs have also adopted him and consider him a bit of a soft touch on the ginger biscuits. Not so the cats. Bob doesn't do cats, and if any of them try it you hear Bob's superbly accented "Gooworrrn! Get away!" We love his twinkly eyed breathy laugh, which is usually his response to Liz teasing him that he will have the young ladies chasing him at the Dance he's off to tonight, or some such joking.

In the garden, as we approach Winter Solstice (Dec 21st) we have been attacking the seed catalogues. Our mentor, Anne W, has received her catalogues for Thompson and Morgan and for a local supplier who are local agents for same and who can supply the blight resistant varieties of seed potatoes which we probably need to grow round here, Sarpo Mira. Mira is due to be in short supply this year as a result of the poor season, so we are advised to get in there a bit quick. We converge on Anne and Simon's place to rattle in our order (we are combining forces to save postage) and while I'm on spuds, I include the kale and greens, carrots, parsnips etc as well as the nasturtiums and marigolds that I like to grow alongside for pollination reasons. It is good to do this job each year as you start to get a real feeling that there is going to be a 2013 season, Spring WILL eventually come, the rain might ease off and this winter will be history.

In the animals dept, the 'baby' chicks are now 8 weeks old and are out and about all day with the main flock and William the Rooster. They are coping well and doing OK. My on-line 'experts' (the Irish fowl discussion forum) have seen the pictures and have been telling me since these guys were tiny, that they look like roosters, but they do admit it can be a bit hit and miss sexing baby chicks. If they are roosters then I am afraid they will end up in the freezer as William will not put up with them (and we do not want to be paying for food for non-productive birds), so I am hoping that the experts have it wrong, and that these two are in fact pullets who can join the egg-laying gang when they get to 21 weeks or so (mid April).

I have also been out logging again as the wood store has been depleted a bit by our burning wood, especially during the recent cold snap (which lasted a few days but has now been replaced by mild but wet weather). Partly this is in association with John Deere Bob who is convinced we should be harvesting the lovely ash trees growing in the land owned by the Three Sisters (the bit we didn't buy). We have, of course, checked with Vendor Anna for permission to do this and she has let us take wood as long as the tree is free standing and not part of a hedge.

There is a small row of half a dozen coppiced ash trees down in the NW corner of the property, so I have gone down, felled and logged up a first one of these trunks, but I am not convinced Bob will get his tractor down there through some of the very muddy field gateways, so I have stopped for now and started work back 'home' where logs can be gathered up in a wheel barrow. This has also involved me nipping down to Bob's farm to cut up some gnarly, bottom-of-tree bits which are too tough and knotty for him to split with his axe.

In the process, I have badly blunted a 2nd chain-saw chain, so that filing them sharp no longer really works. It gives you a few minutes of 'edge' but what chain saw blades really need every now and then is a proper sharpen with a special angle-grinder disk 'rig'. Now, it so happens, that when I first got the saw and Sparks needed to pay me for some petrol, I got him to pay me with a spare chain but also one of these angle-grinder rigs which good old Lidl's (Supermarket) were doing on special for about £30 to go with their saws. Over the intervening months I had got as far as un-boxing this machine and setting it up but had never actually switched it on or used it in anger. If I'm honest, I was a bit scared of it having seen and heard the screaming violence meted out by Sparks's various angle-grinder-based builder's machine tools (stone cutters, rip saws, the metal-cutters) when we were house-building (demolishing actually).

I needn't have worried! This thing turns out to be so quiet and 'gentle' you don't actually know it's running unless you look, and , because all it was doing is putting the edge back on each 'chisel' tip of the chainsaw chain, there is little drama when grinding, and a tiny 'shower' of sparks a few inches long (see picture). It works though! The saw was like new! When chain saws lose their edge the 'saw-dust' they throw out goes from being coarse wood-chips up to a cm in size, to smaller bits and then finally actual dust. Obviously they also start to take a lot longer to go through the tree and eventually they start to glaze over the cut ends (scorching them) rather than making a clean cut with its normal parallel lines where the saw blade has buzzed through. These things I have been told but was pleased today to prove them to myself. The belovéd saw is now blasting through the spruce and the ash in the Secret Garden, showering me with big wood chips and slicing through foot diameter trunks in seconds. Wish I'd done it sooner!