April

This post is completely backwards...oh well...you have a perfectly good scrolling finger, scroll down to the bottom and read your way up :)

Last night we had visitors for supper - they helped us celebrate Trevor's birthday and we had a nice visit! Here is me and Lorelei with the youngest of the E family! Lorelei wasn't so sure that I should ever hold anyone but her...so we had to compromise by holding both on my knee at once!
Here is my rigged up hitch - this took me about half an hour rummaging in the shop and testing out ideas - first is a good sized bolt put through a small triangular hole in the frame near the back axle of my bike - I had to take the wheel off to get it in there, then I added an oversized nut that was large enough to slide over the smooth neck of the bolt as a spacer to clear the nut on the actual axle. Next I added a big loop thing (Trevor called it a lifting link...I dunno where it came from I just found something in the shop that looked like it would work!) that had a hole at one end for my bolt to go through and a loop that angled back from that. I added a washer and a nut to hold the whole assembly tight, then I started on the trailer part of the hitch - I eventually found an old hitch pin, which, once I sanded off the rust, fit perfectly inside the hollow arm of the hitch, currently there is a bent nail through the hole in the hitch and the pin, but I need to get a cotterpin to replace that. To connect the two pieces together I found a cable clamp that was the right size and connected the handle on top of the hitchpin (which conveniently pivots) to the link on my bike - Voila - now we have a bike trailer which Lolo loves! Thanks Tannys! Here is my "new" to me bike trailer, courtesy of a friend who heard I was looking for one and said she had one that the hitch had broken off of that I could have for free if I wanted to rig up some sort of a hitch.

Other than making cheese, we've celebrated several birthday this month, mostly culminated in one party at the cousin's house last weekend in conjunction with Easter. Lolo and her cousin worked off their supper by riding bikes!



Mmm, beautiful smooth, moist cheese!


2 of the three balls I ended up with, sitting in salt brine to get some salt flavor!
According to the book - I let the mozzarella curd sit in the fridge overnight and then the next day I tried to work it in hot water as directed....nothing worked! So - internet to the rescue, this is the first set of curds before I microwaved it - it worked very well! I now read on the internet the way to make it more stretchy is to add citric acid at the beginning, then you don't have to let it sit overnight...
Here is the finished product I came up with....I wish I had boiled it longer, it only got as thick as peanut butter and I would have liked to have it harder, oh well, it made good dip!


"when the mixture thickens, pour into a blender carefully and blend until it is a smooth consistency - be careful because the liquid is very hot" Really?? Lets make it easier - I love my immersion blender!Its starting to thicken, YAY - its almost bedtime!
Its slowly boiling away - see how much more opaque it is and how it is getting a nice bit of brown to it?
Time to bake more cookies while the whey boils!
Next step was the Mystost - you basically just boil the whey down until it is reduced to a VERY thick "sludge" Here is what it looked like at the beginning - a pot full of fairly transparent liquid whey...
We finished making cookies! Lorelei was very happy to clean the paddle for me!
After cutting the curd, I turned it into the cheesecloth and let it drip...meanwhile...
Here is the mixture resting at 90 F, the curd is just forming, you can see the whey coming to the surface.
The recipe I started with was the Mozzarella cheese recipe out of my older edition of the Cheesemaking book by Ricki Carroll - I ended up not following all the method described though, because I couldn't get it to work! I ended up coming online and finding several videos and recipes that said to microwave the curds and work them that way, and it worked quite well.

One Thursday I decided that it was time to make cheese...after much deliberation I decided to make Mozzarella and attempt to make Gjetost - actually Mystost (because it was made with cows milk not goats milk) with the whey. We started with 2 gallons of milk (three days worth of milk from Daisy), some plain balkan yogurt for starter and some rennet.
Lorelei is learning and changing and imagining so much more lately, one night while I was cutting something into a pot on the stove and she was playing with playdough, I looked behind me and saw that she had taken a big lump of playdough over to her pot on her play stove and was breaking it into little pieces. It was quite cute, and I had to snap a picture!
The weekend of the 16th brought a trip to Regina to attend my Uncle's auction sale - he was the last of the Aunts and Uncles that was still farming, so quite a few of us cousins made an effort to come. It turned into a bit of an impromptu family reunion with 11 of the 21 cousins there and 10 of the 21 grandchildren there at some point during the day! Above is Becky, sporting the winter gear needed to stand the day - it was cold and snowy, but we still had a good time. Becky and Amy and Luke had driven up from Idaho to be there and to help dad celebrate his 60th birthday which was actually yesterday. We got to visit with Harriet and her family too and spent a bit of time with Trevor's Grandma.
Here is CeeCee the adopted heifer calf from Uncle Jack.
Daisy had a calf on the 6th of April - BeeBee is his name...he's a really pretty chocolate color, but he is blind. So far he's doing ok, but we had gotten another calf from Trevor's uncle because we didn't know if he would make it, so now Daisy is feeding two calves plus giving us 2-3 litres a day of milk
The chickens continue to hang out inside their house....


April started with a snowstorm the first weekend - yucky wet, heavy snow!