Makin' butter

For numerous reasons that I won't get into in this blog, our family was on the search for *REAL* milk for quite a while. We joined a food co-op in the hopes of having access to fresh, raw milk, but the co-op was just starting out and didn't have enough people at that time to make the minimum order from the farm. We're still in the co-op, but just couldn't get our milk through there, so our search continued. Then I ran across a family who owned a single jersey cow and was setting up a small cow share program. I was interested in two shares and she happened to have two shares left. We went up to her small family farm to visit "our" cow. I wanted to see what kind of conditions she lives in and how the milk was handled. Elsie is a well taken care of cow with access to plenty of clean pasture. While we were there we also got to meet their barn cats and their chickens (which they ordered from the same place we're planning on ordering our chickens in the spring, so I also took the opportunity to ask her about that). Everything looked great! So now we travel about an hour away from our home once a week to pick up our "Elsie milk", as Catherine calls it. (She calls everything else "other milk". lol)

Several people have asked about the milk and what we do with it besides drink it, so we thought we'd blog about it a bit. When our co-op order comes in this month it will include the vegetable rennet and kefir starter we ordered. We've made yogurt and soft cheeses in the past, so now we'll get to try our hand at kefir and other cheeses. We've made some of the yummiest ice cream we've ever tasted. We'd like to make some sour cream and cultured buttermilk too, but we only have a couple of gallons a week, so we have to stretch our experiments out a bit.

One of our favorite things to do is make our own butter, which we do once a week.There is absolutely nothing like fresh, raw butter! And it is so simple to make. Someone always asks, and no, we don't own a butter churn. Quite honestly we don't need one. We are only using the cream from about 1/2 to 1 gallon of milk, but that's just about the right amount for our family. As you can see from the picture above, Elsie's milk has quite a bit of cream. That's a half gallon jar and the cream has separated from the milk. You can see the line between the bluish milk on the bottom and the yellowish cream on the top running right through the top of the "B". If we were going to drink it we'd just shake the jar, but for butter, we skim off most of that cream and put it in a separate half gallon jar. I use a large jar to make butter even though it will be less than half full because the butter seems to come faster if there's lots of extra room for it to move in the jar. We let the cream sit at room temperature until it starts to sour (about 12 hours). I usually take it out of the refrigerator at dinner time and make butter the next morning. Once the milk has soured slightly, we sit down and shake the jar. That's it. Just sit there and shake the jar. After doing it a few times I figured out that shaking the jar in a certain way brings the butter faster, but it's difficult to describe exactly how I shake it. Within a few minutes the cream will start to feel a bit "heavy" and you'll see tiny bits of butterfat starting to collect in the milk. Keep shaking! Quite suddenly it will look like this:

At this point we drain the liquid. This liquid is "old fashioned" buttermilk. (Not the same as the cultured buttermilk you find in a grocery store.) We save the buttermilk to use in pancakes, baked goods and other recipes, then we put the butter into a small bowl. We rinse the butter in cold water several times as we work all the liquid out of the butter. When we're done it looks something like this:

At this point we have to go through the ritual of *tasting* the butter. I don't know why, but every single time we make butter we all have to stick a finger in and taste it...and proclaim it the best butter ever, of course. lol Then we salt it and put it into a small glass bowl that we use just for our homemade butter. That's all there is to it! I'm sure spelling it all out makes it sound more time consuming than it actually is. It probably took more time to type this all up than it takes to actually make the butter.

Pirate boy!

My pirate name is:

Iron James Kidd

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. Even though you're not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
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Ready...Aim...

FIRE!!



How often do you get to shoot *your* mom and get away with it? LOL Cameron wanted to see if we could actually capture the foam dart coming out of the gun on film, so guess who gets to be the target? He shot me in the forhead a dozen times or more before Cameron decided that maybe we should switch places.




MY TURN!! (insert evil laughter here: mwahahaha!)

Unfortunately I only got about three shots in before Cameron actually managed to actually capture that dart coming out of the gun. But guess what. Mom (that would be me) accidentally deleted it from the camera. :-( Way to go mom. Things got ugly after that and it turned into an all out dart gun war...until we ran out of ammo. Who ever thought that shooting at your family could be such fun! And to think I used to dislike toy guns.

Fairy Crowns for Catherine

Catherine was having a bit of a rough spot yesterday. She was trying to dress up her animals and the darned clothes just wouldn't cooperate! It was quickly becoming meltdown time. I spent a few moments helping her get the stubborn fairy dresses on her cats, but I could see that a change of pace was still needed in order to help her transition, so I opened up the craft closet to see what we had to mess about with and she instantly perked up. From the uppermost shelf I pulled down a pile of wire decorations that we had left over from a kid's craft booth at a festival a couple of years ago and we spent quite a while making crowns for Catherine and all of her favorite stuffies. If Catherine could read this she'd be correcting me at the moment because they aren't just crowns, they're *fairy* crowns! They simply *must* be *fairy* crowns because EVERYTHING is fairy related at our house right now. lol

Thanks to an RPG called Faery's Tale that several of the kids in our homeschool group have been playing, my kids have been fairy crazy for the last couple of months. We've had fairy movie marathons where we watched any movie we could think of with a fairy or fairies in it. (Labyrinth, Fairies, Fern Gulley, The Last Unicorn...) We've read several books, both old and new, about fairies and while looking for new ones at the library we found a cute little series called The Fairy Chronicles. It's about a group of young (mortal) girls who find out they have fairy powers and can use them to create change in the world. My 10 year old was elated to find that one of the characters is even homeschooled! (Not unschooled, but we'll take it.) I pulled out my old copies of Brian Froud's fairy book and other books that had been in storage until now nad got to share some of my favorite fairy stuff from when I was a kid with my kids. We've also been reading lots of fairy lore and myths, looking up information on "real" fairies and other little people, searching online for places around the world where people claim to have seen fairies and other such creatures, and more...all because of an RPG. Just one more example of delight driven learning in action!

Monarchs

We're raising monarchs again this year and it's the first time we've ever had any trouble with them. A couple of them died just as they were changing into chrysalids and several of the smaller caterpillars just didn't seem to thrive. We've done this several times in the past and only had one that didn't make it in all of that time. I can only guess why so many of them have died this year. I can rule out things like pesticides because we harvest them from our own land and we don't use pesticides, so I suspect it has something to do with the unusually hot, dry weather we've had this summer.

These pics are of the first two that emerged from the latest batch. We could tell that the first one was ready to emerge, so we sat around with the camera in hand waiting to catch it on "film". (It's a digital camera but you get the idea.) I got up to answer the phone at one point and just as I hung up my son started yelling "It's out! It's out!" I can't turn my back for a second. lol Then as we were sitting there watching the first one dry we looked over just in time to see the second one crawling out. You can see in the second pic that it's wings are still crumpled and wet. Missed capturing it on film again. The others since then have all emerged while we weren't at home or while we were sleeping, so we haven't managed to video tape a single one. We're down to two now, so it's not likely that we'll document them emerging this year either. But that's okay. We enjoy it nonetheless.

I think it's interesting how we can "raise" so many of them yet never tire of watching them. We sit around them for long stretches of time, watching them eat, sleep, grow, change and emerge. It's just so darned fascinating! One of the most amusing moments was when I got up one morning before everyone else was awake and heard a strange crunching sound. I looked all around downstairs for the source of the odd sound for quite a few minutes before I realized that I was hearing the sound of the caterpillars *eating*. It was odd to hear it so clearly all over the downstairs portion of the house. It also illustrated all too well how *UN*quiet it is around here most of the time! We've had monarchs several years and that was the first time I could recall having heard them munching and crunching away like that. It reminded me of the first time I *heard* snow falling. It was very late at night and I was out walking alone when the snow started falling around me. All of a sudden I realized that I could hear a faint tinkling sound when the flakes landed on the snow that was already on the ground. I stopped and just *listened* for several minutes. Definitely a *WOW* moment. Watching the monarchs has kind of the same effect on me.