The last cheese......

Upon observing the rather large tummy and 'tight like a drum' udder of Lissie this morning, it came to me that I really ought to get myself moving with sorting out the cheese making equipment. Days are passing, and soon her calf will be here and then I shall be awash with milk. OK, a  bit of an exaggeration, but once Lester starts milking then I shall once again feel two steps behind myself as I try to keep up with the processing of that milk. 'I can do it' I keep telling myself, and of course I can because this is my third (I think) season of milk.

 

 

So in an effort to make a start with the Milk Project, I plucked up the courage to look inside the cheese fridge, whose door had not been opened for many a week / month. I was expecting much mould and whiffy odours, but no, the interior looked quite clean and there were no odours at all.

But sat forlornly on the middle shelf was this:

 

Now I knew that there was one last cheese wheel left, but thought that by now it would have gone 'off', but I had to have a look anyway, so I unpeeled the lard and muslin wrapper, et voila!

 

One reasonably pristine wheel of cheese, but shame about the state of the work surface it is sitting on, which is covered in flour and pastry. Now all I needed to do was get the cheese cut in two and have a taste. Now when a cheese comes out into the air after being wrapped up for a long time it tends to have a strong, sharp, taste, which is almost acidic which immediately has me thinking that it has gone 'off', so Lester has to be the tester for first time tasting. His verdict? That it was a nice cheese. As a reward I then made him a sandwich out of the DIY cheese, DIY butter, and DIY bread.

 

So this is the last cheese from the last milking season. It would seem that lard and muslin work as a good wrap, so nor more fussing with salt brines or cheese wax which should make cheese making less complicated for me.

 

Both cows are due to calve in the next week or so. Meanwhile, Lester thinks that he will have to go to the UK to get another car as ours is due for its French MOT and will probably fail miserably. The cars in the UK are vastly cheaper than the ones here in France, although the steering wheel is on the 'wrong' side. He will be away for at least a week. I shall be in charge of the farm.

 

Bye for now,

Vx

Jus de Raisins

 

 

So what do you do if you are driving along a country road in SW France,

and the road does some twists and curls,

and then you see a warning sign saying

'Jus de Raisins'

.....you quickly slow down, that is what you do,

  because you don't want to drive into a sludge of grapes (raisins in French) lying on the road,

just waiting for you to do a grand skid on,

which will do neither your nerves or your car any good at all.

 

The annual wine harvest is underway, and motorists in the wine region of south western France, which is our region, have been urged to take precautions

due to the unusual hazard of spilled grape juice.

We often come across large spillages of maize grains during the maize harvest,

as the over filled trucks take the maize from the fields to the grain silos,

but they do not present a hazard,

but I do know that driving into a spillage of mushed up grapes from an overladen truck going from vineyard to the wine presses of the domaines, does not bode well

because I heard of someone who did actually drive into such a spillage.

She said that it was not an experience  she would never want to have ever again in her life.

 

And another lovely day today,

and starting to get an idea of what we are going to be doing on the smallholding in the future.

I had a sort of flash of inspiration this morning when I woke up,

which has made us quite enthused about the future here.

We need to earn a living here, but we do not want to be swimming in lots of money,

just enough to pay our way, but we need to be motivated.

Drifting about from day to day is all very well,

but it can become a habit if it goes on for too long,

so the inspiration I had this morning has quite woken us up to new possibilities,

.... a sort of feeling that pieces of a jigsaw were falling into place.

 

Simply put, the inspiration I had was to open a 'Produits de la Ferme',

or 'Farm Shop' here.

 

Feeling excited, but dazed at the same time because there is a lot to do,

I am going to have a little nap to recuperate!

Bye for now,

Vx

View from from my kitchen window........

 

River mists, not cold yet, nor frosty, just gently chilly, telling us that the year is marching on. Yesterday I sat outside on the front door step and did some spinning,

and watched the weather starting to change. It was fascinating to see the minute by minute changes as autumn crept closer. It was nice to take time out. Not that I have been particularly busy anyway, just pottling along at the moment, enjoying the still warm weather, knowing that soon  I shall be wrapped up in woolly winter clothing.

 

And straight from the grape vines......

 

 

........ of the man who provides us with the wood for our Rayburn stove.

We are OK for wood this winter now, but the store for next winter needs to be bought in so it can dry out. We shall be cutting some dead trees from our woodland, but not yet, other things to do first.

So our wood man took us round his vineyard, snipping bunches of grapes here and there, several different types, the smallest grape being the most meltingly sweet grape I have ever tasted.

We were never going to eat all these grapes before they rotted because they do not have preservatives sprayed on them to keep them fresh, so I thought I would a go at dehydrating them.

 

Trouble is, that these grapes have pips in which have to be got out first, and gosh but this was a fiddly job. Took ages, .... had to slice open the grape and then search out the pip (sometimes one, sometimes two) with my fingers. I haven't been playing the piano or accordion lately so my finger nails were quite long, which came in handy for fishing around in the pulp of the grape for the pips, but this was only for the larger grapes. The very small grapes I gave up on. I had spent enough time on the project, and needed to go do other things. In other words, I was getting bored!

 

Into the dehydrator over night. Got up in the early hours to make a visit to the loo, did a side track to visit the dehydrator to see how the grapes were doing, took a morsel of grape to see what it tasted like, was so bowled over by the explosion of taste that happened in my mouth, that I then spend another hour getting the fiddly little  black grapes, which I had given up on, into the dehydrator as well. I eventually ended up will all nine trays filled, after which I went back to bed. It was four o'clock in the morning.

 

I have broken my rule of not using any canned, frozen, or dehydrated produce from this current season until the clocks change in late October. This means that there can be a 'down' time when I don't have much to variety in the larder, although there is a fully stocked larder which I ban myself from using. So the other day I needed to make a cake. Didn't have time to rummage in my cupboard of stored dehydrated fruit and veg ( I am waiting for a rainy day to sort that untidyness out!)

 

A jumbly cupboard of dehydrates!

 

 

..... so I did a raid on the nearest dried fruit I had on hand, which just so happened to be the cooling trays of now dehydrated grapes, thereby breaking my rule of not using newly processed produce until the seasons had changed. Of course I could save the rest of the dried grapes but that is unlikely. They are delicious. They will be used up quickly.

 

Ah, but now the sun has broken through the mist, and the day is calling me. Lester is brimming with frustration about how he is supposed to fix the gate to one of the cow pens, the one which Bonny broke last year, and I had better get on to making the goat meat curry which I was supposed to get going early on this morning so the flavours would all mix and mingle, which they won't now because it is now only an hour away from lunch time!

 

Bye for now,

 

Vx