In which we eat a lot of squash

This week we found some green grapes while we were visiting the local park. We have standing permission from the elderly couple who owns the grapes to eat anything that grows on the outside of the fence, so we gathered about 5 lbs of grapes in about 1 minute of picking.

We usually wait till the first frost to pick their concord grapes, but with green grapes, it seems that the flavor is good before then. It looks like this year will be a good year for grape juice :)

We also canned more peaches. This time we preprocessed them by boiling them down in a little water mixed with citric acid and sugar (they produce a lot of juice when you cook them down, so a lot of starting liquid is not necessary). So many more fit in a jar if you preprocess them, so we will do that form now on. It really isn't that much more work.

We have also been enjoying squash (zucchini, yellow, etc) from a couple of different sources this week. We personally planted a ton of plants, but we are not harvesting nearly enough ourselves, so we have been supplementing our own production with squash from other sources (co-workers and church members).

How anyone cannot grow enough squash is a subject of discussion in many circles that we frequent, however I have decided that the family of Mrs. True must have angered an irascible gypsy, or something like that in some ancient time, and that the curse still follows them till this day.

To be honest, though, the True family (including Mr. True) does has a bit of a problem with growing squash, which is a pity because we love to eat it. Just this week we made pasta with squash, stir fry with squash, pancakes with squash (sort of like a mixture of Okonomiyaki and pumpkin bread), and we have also had squash as a side dish multiple times. Our goats and chickens would probably also love the stuff, but we don't have any to spare.

Speaking of goats and chickens, they are doing well. We expect to have a new kid soon, as Clarabel visited the stud almost 150 days ago now. Perhaps our next post will be about that.

Also, I finally fixed the bucket bike. I will make a post soon detailing what it took to get it all working well as this post is being posted much too late already.

Three cheers for a pick!

This past week Mrs. True and I mucked out our goat shed. We use a "Deep Litter" method for taking care of the shed, so we only do this about once a year. It took a few hours, but it was not really that bad (and for us it is way easier than cleaning out the shed every week).

For those that have never heard of deep litter, the method is basically this:

Every day you strew straw over the parts of the floor that have visible manure or are wet. The floor slowly gets higher and higher over the course of the year. Once a year you clean it all out.

This works great in a desert habitat, as the upper layers tend to dry out, so you can't really smell anything. We have been using it for a few years now, and it is really easy.

We have always used an ensilage fork (which are made for this job) and a wheelbarrow (which are made for every job) to clean the shed out, but this time we tried a new tool for part of the job and were highly impressed. The new tool is a rail road pick. They don't look like they would do much, but they are perfect for getting the stuff broken up so that the ensilage fork can easily lift it away.

Instead of taking all day like we thought it would, it took only about 4 hours. I am blaming it on the pick.

We also went on a walk to the woods behind the local park, and found tons of old fruit trees (apples, peaches, pears, and plums). It must have been an orchard before it became a forest.

While we were there we found some Oregon grapes. We have made Oregon grape jelly before and loved the flavor, so we will be back later in the year to pick these ones. if they are still around.

Finally, while we were there I saw some berries that my dad told me as a child were poisonous ("Twinberries" he called them). Since I recently learned that a lot of the "poisonous" berries that I grew up avoiding only were poisonous if you ate the seeds, I decided to look these ones up. They were honeysuckle berries, and were in fact poisonous. Oh well :).

Honey and cheese

Our sprinkler drip hoses seem to have much more pressure than they need to. Every so often one or more of the heads will blow off and then water will spray out all over the place. It is sort of annoying, but our house does have more pressure than is good for it, so it is not all that surprising.

This Saturday we harvested honey for the first time. We got a little more than 3 lbs of honey (from one bar alone). It went pretty well, and we also got a decent amount of beeswax too. A lot of the cells in the bar that we harvested were not capped, and tasting the honey, it seemed to be less flavorful than we would have expected. Thus, we think that some of the honey might have not been fully concentrated, so we are going to consume it quickly.

If honey is finished by the bees and capped off, then it has really good storage qualities. If it is too watery, however it can still go bad.

Since I ran out of space in the hive, next week I will be harvesting three or four bars. I am going to have to find a good place to store it, since I don't yet have any plans for what to do with so much honey.

The process that I used to extract the honey was as follows:

1. Remove the honey comb from the hive. First get the comb out of the hive itself, and then get the bees off of it. That took some doing. I kept having to shoo them off, and they kept flying back to the comb. After a while I was completely surrounded by a swarm of bees. After removing all of the bees I cut it off the top-bar with a knife. With a different type of hive you might have to do something different.
2. Mash up the honeycomb to release the honey. Put it in a big popcorn bowl, and use a potato masher, that seems like the easiest way.
3. Pour it all into a straining device. I used some real cheese cloth (not the stuff that they sell at the store as cheesecloth, the stuff that people press cheese in when making home made cheese) draped over a 2 gallon bucket.
4. Wait (it takes forever for honey to drip through your strainer, but it will do so eventually).

Speaking of cheesecloth, I have not made a real cheese in a long time. I have made paneer and ricotta a decent amount, but not much else. We have mostly been eating all of the cheese we made from last time that Lala and Clarabel were producing a lot of milk.

Lala and Clarabel (for those that don't know) are our goats. They are both half nigerian dwarf. Lala is half nubian, and Clarabel is half alpine. When they have just had kids, they produce about 3 quarts of milk a day, so we have to make a lot of cheese, kefir, and yogurt to get through all of the milk, however when they have not just had kids they produce only about 1 quart a day, which is hardly enough milk for our family.

When my wife is pregnant we pasteurize the milk, but other times we just drink it raw. Goat milk is a necessity for our family, since our oldest daughter is not able to drink cow milk.

Lala when we first got her.

We milk our goats twice a day, and feed them and refill their water at that time as well. Goats are about as difficult as taking care of a dog, however with goats you get less companionship, and way more milk (not that I have milked a dog).

My wife wants to add that you can supposedly clicker train a goat, however that never seemed worth it to her.

If you are considering getting some goats to live in your back yard, make sure to look into the zoning for your house. Many areas do not allow goats. Additionally I would not recommend getting a nubian unless you happen to live in a deaf colony. Nubians are quite vocal, and many neighbors might get annoyed with them.

One thing that was really helpful for us when we were considering getting goats was finding Your Goats: A Kid's Guide to Raising and Showing at a local thrift store. It is a book aimed at children, and teaches them how to take care of goats. It was way less scary to read about it in a kids book because they didn't talk about all of the things that could go wrong as much as they offered encouraging advice. My wife adds that we have never had anything go wrong that was not covered in this book (mastitis is the only thing that I can recall the goats ever getting, and that wasn't horrible).

Once you have goats you might want to try out this useful recipe for goat milk paneer/ricotta:

• Heat up any amount of milk to 198 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Add enough acid to curdle the milk. We use white vinegar, but some people use citric acid or lemon juice. It doesn't take much.
• You will know that you are done when the milk starts to turn a little bit yellow, and white curds form in the milk.
• Strain out the curds and salt them to taste. If you are making ricotta, you are done. If you are making paneer, wrap them in a cheese cloth and press with 5 lbs of pressure for a few hours until they are firm enough for you.

My wife adds that paneer is an amazing cheese that can be used to replace shredded chicken breast in practically every dish. It is really what tofu wishes that it could be when it grows up. Another interesting thing about paneer is that it does not melt. It is a grilling cheese. You can literally put it on a grill and grill it like a burger. It will not melt.

This recipe also works with cows milk, however we adapted it from the original version found in Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking, so if you want a cow's milk version then reading  that book would be great. We use Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking for our home made brie, romano, parmesan, and we adapted their cheddar recipe as well. It has a lot of useful information about many common problems with cheese makes, and is definitely worth picking up if you are interested in making your own cheese.

Reading the book also helped us to want to make moldy cheeses for the first time, and we are highly appreciative of the fact that we did (although we have never made a successful blue cheese yet).