Late Christmas Visit

Christmas lasted a whole month this year. Lucky for us! Meg, Pam and James came last weekend to continue our holiday celebration, now that the holidays are over for Meg's Cheese to You customers. We spent a whole day making cheese curds. It would be hard to beat that for fiesta-style entertainment in our family. Hours together in the kitchen, followed by days of feasting on our own handmade cheese.

2 gallons of fresh goat milk

Adding the culture

Checking the recipe

Letting it rest after adding the rennet

Just the right consistency. The slit stays after the spatula is inserted.

Cutting the curds, horizontally, vertically, diagonally.

Separating the curds and whey.

James stirs the curds gently for 45 minutes.

Ready to press by hand

Pam pressing the curds

Russ and Meg drain the curds

Cheddaring the curds

Cut, salted, squeaky as can be, ready to eat!

We also took down the tree, enjoying again at all the mementos we hang every year. And James treated us to dinner at Ichiban...a favorite for all of us. Now we need to start planning birthday visits :)

The Amazing Cheese Story, Preparing for Day 4

Tuesday, February 8 is the final night of our mini-course, The Amazing Cheese Story. Follow the link for photos and thoughts about preparing for the big finale!

Curds and Whey

In the last couple of photos in the post below this one, you see the curds and whey we produced in our cheesemaking. Well, here they are again. First are the curds after they have been pressed into a farmhouse cheddar, bandaged in cheese cloth, and set aside to age. And then is the whey, transformed into a home made cabbage and whey soup...yummy!

Making Cheese at Home

Had lots of fun, and only a few frustrations and gasps of concern, making farmhouse cheddar today. We made a video too. Maybe we'll try YouTube.

Cheese and Random Ferments!

Drum roll, Please!!!! Today we are rolling out a new blog...Cheese and Random Ferments. After The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses was published last June, we thought our cheese journey would be essentially complete. Wrong!

We keep meeting new cheesemakers, finding new cheesemongers, trying new cheeses, learning new ways that America's cheese revolution is contributing to, and building on, new food attitudes among Americans. Until it is time for a second edition of the book, or a new book, we are sharing these people, places, and discoveries on Cheese and Random Ferments.

What fun it has been to get started. We are eager to hear your reactions to the posts...and to the design (colors, text size, placement of links, tone of voice) of the blog.

As it turns out there are some stories fermenting in our lives that are not about cheese. Those are the "random ferments" referred to in the blog's title. We love them too, and so have given them their own sub-blog called Random Ferments. It is easy to link from any of our four blogs to the others. Comments are more than welcome, they are eagerly sought!

The Festival of Cheeses, Mt. Rainier's Longmire and Paradise Trails

The Festival of Cheeses was amazing as always. We went to the awards ceremony this year…the first time for us. It was held in the Symphony Hall in Seattle and the Festival followed in the lobby areas. I especially enjoyed seeing the awards announced after having volunteered during the judging. The crowd applauded robustly. One of our favorites from The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses…Kunik, from Nettle Meadows Goat Farm and Creamery…won in its category. The Best in Show was won by Uplands Pleasant Ridge Reserve, made by a cheesemaker couple everyone admires. It was touching to see them receive the plaudits.

Off to the Wilderness

Now that the conference is over, we are off to the wilderness. The drive was not too hard, about 3 hours. The last hour was rural, although the rest was through suburbia.

We stayed Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning at the National Park Inn in Mt. Rainier National Park. There are no cell towers, so we will be delayed in posting this until we emerge again into civilization. The lodge was built in the 1930s and has not changed much. There is a lovely living room with a big fireplace. Our room is modest in size and amenities…but large enough for two happy campers to sip some wine and chill out before our dinner downstairs.  The bathrooms are shared…both the men’s and women’s are down the hall with a couple of stalls each. There are only 2 showers for all the rooms. They did give us big plush robes to wear and slippers too. We will probably tolerate being a bit dirtier than usual. Russ is recording a description which I’ll post if I can figure out how to do that with our new laptop.

Our lodge is about 10 miles into the park. On Sunday, when we arrived via rental car that we picked up at the Seattle airport, we had lunch here and then drove in about 15 more miles to another area with a lodge, Paradise Inn. That lodge is much larger and we are happy with our cozy one. We took a great hike in the Paradise area. It was in the 40s and cloudy…quite high elevation. The wildflowers are spectacular. We also saw an elk, a fox, a Clark’s nuthatch (big as a jay), a family of quail-like birds (Ptarmigans?) we haven’t yet identified, and a marmot. I’ll post a few photos. We got our hiking feet under us, with about a 4 mile up and down…good practice for Florida flatlanders. We hope to hike a lot Monday and Tuesday, but rain is threatened. 

Monday at Mt Rainier

Despite promised clouds and showers, the morning was spectacular. We awoke to a view of the volcano out our window. The shared showers had no waiting line and we hit the trails pretty early. Unlike Sunday afternoon, we had our backpacks and walking sticks this time, thank goodness because we picked another steep trail. No meadows today, huge tall trees climbing straight up a mountain side with us. Really beautiful. The sun stayed with us. Temperatures was in the low 50s. We hiked about 2 miles up in about 2 hours and then back down in about 1.5 more. Going up we sweated and breathed a lot; going down we wore jackets against hypothermia and our knees complained a bit. All in all, it was great. We were back only a short while before the clouds came in and showers started.

Meeting Cheese Lovers in Seattle

At the Pier for the Opening Reception

We have met some great cheese people. I volunteered to help with the judging of the cheeses and was assigned to the "verification" team. I worked with a French woman and got to practice my French all day! We reviewed all the scoring to be sure the numbers were in the right places and to correct any errors flagged by the computer data entry system. the best part was being in the room where a dozen or so teams of two judges...one technical and the other aesthetic...judged over 1,000 cheeses. Seeing how the process worked and just seeing and smelling all that cheeses was a great experience. There were about 40 volunteers in addition to all the judges. A smooth and lovely process leading to wonderful feedback for the cheese makers who submitted their cheeses to be judged. Tomorrow night we'll learn which cheeses got 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in each of the 100+ categories of cheeses and which was Best in Show.

After a "How To Taste" Session

Before a "How to Taste" Session

The sessions have been informative, and filling. I have been to far too many "tastings." We've seen people we knew through the book research and many new folks too. Tonight we are off to a party and tomorrow, after a day of more sessions, is the grand finale...the Festival of Cheeses. We'll post photos of that for sure.

The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses At the Book Event

Tasting Cheese in Dallas

I spent last weekend in Dallas celebrating Aunt Pat’s 89th birthday. The cool weather was a nice break from our hot Florida October. Better yet was all the partying. And we visited Scardello Artisan Cheese and bought some nice bloomy-rind and washed-rind cheeses for an impromptu cheese tasting with Carol, Vic, and Karen.

Beyond the Adirondack Crescent

Last Tuesday, Russ and I did a presentation about our cheese project for Prime Time, a program at Santa Fe College here in Gainesville. About 25 people attended. We talked about how we decided to start researching "The New American Cheese", what we have done so far...our visits to museums, cheese conferences, cheese festivals, cheese farmsteaders. We were a bit surprised by how much we have already learned, and how some it was quite different from what we had expected. For example, we have yet to meet anyone who went into the cheese business because they loved cheese...but several have did because they loved the animals. And...who would guess that you could carve the skyline of Chicago out of cheese?

We ended the presentation with a sampling of six American artisan cheeses. That may have been the part that made us a hit and got us asked to do another presentation in the spring...that time about our Camino experience.

Dinner at Longview Farm

Dave and Liza were the most wonderful hosts. They fed us at the end of a long day of learning about cheese farmsteading. We feasted on a chicken from their farm and salad from their garden. We had a marvelous dinner table conversation about the growing and consuming of food. We met their goats, learned about their cheese, and hated to leave.

Visiting 3-Corner Field Farm

This was the largest farm we visited so far, and the first sheep farm. Hundreds of acres, pastured-fed sheep, cheese, meat, wool…an amazing enterprise to see.

Visiting Nettle Meadows Goat Farm

I never knew how much fun a porch store could be for browsing. You have to have the right porch, which we found at Nettle Meadows Goat farm. The goats and cheese makers were fantastic hosts. You should try Kunik and Honey Lavendar Frommage Blanc for sure, and Crane Mountain Chevre is hard to pass by.