Butter and Buttermilk

Since we weaned the calf from Brownie, the volume of cream we're getting with our milk has increased significantly.  It becomes so thick and rich that if we don't scoop most of it off, it forms lumps in the milk jugs and looks as though you have melted butter in your coffee.  I don't mind this in the slightest, but it can be off-putting for others.

I finally understand the "double-cream" that I see in usually British recipes.  This is no good for a cream sauce as it splits and melts and looks quite disgusting.  So I make butter.

Butter is really simple to make. Put the cream into a cake mixer and beat it until it's butter and buttermilk.  With my cream, it doesn't take long.  In fact, it's quicker than whipping cream with store bought cream.

Cream

Nearly there, but not quite - note there's no liquid

Now we have butter

Once you have butter, press it together lightly and strain it through a sieve, making sure to catch the buttermilk in a jug.  Then run the butter in the sieve under the tap until the water runs clear.

Buttermilk.  You can see the tiny butter blobs around the edge of the jug.

Put your butter into a clean bowl and beat it quite firmly - more liquid will come out and more rinsing will be needed.  If you want to salt it, add 1 tsp of salt to 500g of butter and beat it through at this stage.

From there I turn it out onto baking paper, shape it into a block, wrap it and freeze it.  It doesn't keep as long as store-bought butter.  I don't know if this is because I don't always get all of the buttermilk out or if it's because I only pasteurise and do no further heat-treating.  Freezing has the added bonus of being perfect for making pastry.

The latest attempt at spreadable butter on the left.  A block for freezing on the right.

Several times I've tried to mix it with olive oil or rice bran oil to make it a simple sandwich spread - my mother used to do this when I was young, but it's hard to tell when you've added enough oil as it's soft and spreadable when it's freshly made.  So far, all of mine have been rather firm.

Many people ask what do you then do with the buttermilk.

Anything you like!  Choices are endless.  Miss Ten likes to drink it as it is.  It works nicely in my cheesemaking.  I've used it making bread and baking.  There's nothing particularly unpleasant about buttermilk, except maybe the odd tiny globule of butter that may be floating in it - and even then that's only if that is unpleasant to you.

Summer Abundance

While my kitchen is being rebuilt, I've been finding things to occupy Mum and keep her busy.  Fortunately, this summer has been abundant so far.

I picked the broccoli sideshoots and blanched them.  For some reason I'm getting huge sideshoots this year.  Normally, they're about bite-sized, this year, they're getting to the same size as the original head of broccoli and I'm getting at least ten per plant.  I currently have several kg of frozen broccoli in the freezer and there's no sign of them slowing down.  I've also missed picking lots of them in time so there are several that have gone to seed.  I don't consider that to be a problem though, I should have plenty of broccoli plants next year.  I was also told recently that after November, you might as well pull your broccoli out because you don't get anything useful from it.  I beg to differ.

The cauliflower was a bit of a bust though.  Out of 18 plants, I've gotten four caulis.  Two bolted because I wasn't quick enough, the rest turned brown and black before they were fully grown.  Luckily the pigs like them and Brownie the house cow assaults anyone who goes into that garden and won't let them leave without giving her some cauli leaves.  The entrance to the garden is right next to the gate for her paddock.  

We found a local fruit and vege shop selling sauce tomatoes 4kg for $4.  20kg bought so far has become 10 litres of tomato sauce, 10 jars and 9 ziplock bags of spaghetti and 5 ziplock bags of pasta sauce.  The ziplock bags are in the freezer.

Tomato sauces cooling on the bench.

I have two favourite recipe books for various preserves, both from the 1960s.  One is the New Zealand Country Women's Institute Cookbook and the other is 575 Recipes by the Good Housekeeping Board.  Their recipes for tomato sauce are different and each year I face the dilemma of not remembering which one I used last time and which one I prefer.  So this year, I made the tomato sauce in two batches - one from each book - and labelled them with which recipe book.

The spaghetti is a recipe from my father-in-law.  Hubby remembers him making it when he was little and went out of his way to get the recipe for me to make for him.  I did it a year or so ago, but it went off in the jars.  This year I sterilised the jars more carefully and followed up with a water bath.  We'll see how this lot turns out.  

Wild plums.

A glance down the gully showed that the wild plums are coming ripe.  Hubby, Miss Ten and I spent about an hour picking plums after it cooled down enough to be bearable outside.  I explained to them both that the best way to tell which were ripe was that the ripe ones fall off when you touch them.  It rained plums on all of us for a while.  The terrain around our wild plum trees is rather steep, with the added bonus of plenty of fallen plums making for treacherous footing.  At one point, Miss Ten slipped and went down several metres of slope on her backside - stain removal on her shorts will be fun.

We didn't get very far through the gully before it became too dark to continue safely.  We came back with 7kg of plums.  Not bad considering they're only slightly bigger than the average cherry.  I still have several jars of plum jam made a few years ago.  I've decided to stop making jams until we actually get through some of what we have in the cupboards.  Just how much was in the cupboards was fully revealed when we had to move them for the kitchen rebuild.  This time I've made plum sauce so far and used maybe half of that picking.  My issue now is that I've run out of bottles for sauces, unless I resort to using soft drink bottles.

Spaghetti and sauces on top of the fridge for now.

I've been looking for recipes for plum chutneys and relishes.  Maybe some that can also utilise the frozen rhubarb my neighbour gave me.  I've found a few, but none that keep for longer than a few weeks without refrigeration or freezing.  I want recipes that will keep in jars for as long as I need them to.  I'll have to keep looking.

I thought about drying some, but given how small they are, I'm not sure if the result will be worth the work.  I may try it with some and see how it turns out.

Meanwhile, we've also had more rainfall this month so far than we had all of last year!  Not enough to officially break the drought, but certainly not the worst El Nino summer and drought that was predicted (so far - touch wood!).  I went for a wander yesterday to see if the combined rain and heat had provided any field mushrooms and came back with over a kg.  They were sliced, sauteed in butter and frozen in single serves.  This is the only method I've found for preserving a glut of mushrooms that we'd actually use.

Even with my kitchen still in partial disarray, I'm using it flat out and making jokes about how this pantry will be full by the time it's finished.  In all honesty, I greatly doubt it, the plan for the pantry is to make the shelves the size of what will go on them.  I find current pantry styles frustrating.  The shelves are spaced so widely apart that what looks like a full pantry actually has a lot of wasted space or double stacking which isn't always safe or practical.  A friend sent a video to me that showed a practical pantry built for a woman by her husband.  It looks like the video was purely shared to facebook so I think the only option to share it for others is a link and not embedding - it can be found here.  I found the video truly inspiring and showed it to anyone who would watch it.

Now the kitchen is usable again, I also had a mad cheese-making day.  It was a bit hectic but I got cream cheese, quark, edam and (blue) stilton made.  Christmas present vouchers paid for a vacuum food sealer which I'm now using for cheese.  I enjoy the look of waxed cheeses aging on my shelf but on a more practical level, I can't tell if there's a tiny hole in the wax until it's leaked everywhere and I've effectively lost that cheese.  This can also be more challenging if when it leaked it's dripped onto other cheeses - it means I can't be sure which one is the leaker.

Vacuum sealed cheese.

Coming up probably in the next few days are mustard pickles.  I chopped up the stalks trimmed from the broccoli (no point in wasting them) and will be having a look around to see what other bits I can put into them.

Rebuilding The Kitchen

Most of our time lately has been devoted to redoing our kitchen.  The floor was rotten and there were spots that you'd feel seasick if someone walked past you while you were standing there.

It has been a long and slow process.  The kitchen is a room that five other rooms are only reached through, three of them from a small hallway. Because our house is an old farm cottage that has been added on to and rearranged several times over the last 90 years, it is a bit like a rabbit warren.


One of the first things to do was to take out one of the hall cupboards and cut a doorway through the back wall to meet that other little hallway.  That was always part of the plan and it was something that needed doing first so that the toilet and bathroom were safely reachable.  Part of that little hallway is going to be the new big farm pantry.

Hall cupboards

From the other side

Doorway cut

From other side.

The dining room can be reached through the lounge, but that took some rearranging of both rooms where various kitchen stuff and removed cabinetry were being stored.

I have found it interesting that there are several places where it seems we are restoring the original design, rather than making huge changes.  When we took the wall covering (mdf not gib) off in the old small hallway, we discovered wood paneling that showed that where my new big pantry is going to be, was previously a pantry.  Old water pipes that had been left partially in place - although they were just metre long lengths sitting inside the walls - showed that we're putting the sink and taps back closer to where they were previously, Some of the power points in the house are in the old steel pipe conduits, not all of the conduit pipe was removed when power points were moved, this made it amusing to be cutting a hole in the wall for a power point and finding a conduit pipe right next to where I'm putting this one.

I think the paint missing in lines shows where pantry shelves were previously.
It's also interesting that restructuring it for food storage was at least planned.

In a pleasant change from the lounge, not all of the joists or bearers were rotten this time.  Although the outer wall is going to need a lot of work in the near future.  One window had been framed properly and done well and was structurally sound.  The other, well, an attempt had been made to do it properly, but that was as far as it went.  In all honesty, with this house, I am more surprised and disbelieving when I find something done well than I am when I find corners cut or shoddy work.

Removing the old floor

Working out the new joists

Nearly done.

Floor down

So after a week and a half, that included my housecow coming on heat and jumping a gate to run with her steer calf, the pigs becoming serial escape artists, Miss Ten going on Girl Guide Jamboree and needing to entertain my Mum who has vascular dementia while Dad and Hubby worked on the kitchen, we're close to the finish I think.  Hubby has gone back to work today and the kitchen is almost usable.

The external walls have been insulated and when I was covering them, I sealed everything that could be sealed.  Hopefully that will work to keep drafts and rodents out and warmth in.  Hot water pipes have been lagged, underfloor insulation is coming.

External walls - I hadn't removed the lining from the one on the left at this point.

Insulated wall.

Gibbed, roughly stopped, and sealed.

Painted.

The floors are in, except for a few small spots that will require some tricky bits - doorways joining to other rooms etc.  I'm looking at a laminate flooring that looks like wooden floorboards.  I found one that even with the foil underlay stuff will cost approx a third of what all others do.  It seems too good to be true though, so I will investigate further before buying it.

The stove has been moved to a more sensible position - one that will allow a rangehood.  The cabinets that we pulled out have been reconfigured and put back in.  This time, the stove and dishwasher are in line with benchtops and cupboards and are not sticking out.  No drawers are blocked from opening fully by the stove, and the dead space beside the old stove has gone.

We were going to reuse the old benchtops, rearranged somewhat to suit the new layout, but Mum and Dad offered to take me shopping for new ones, far better ones and they just asked that we keep them in meat for the year.  I didn't need to hear that offer twice, I leaped at it.  Especially as it included a new double sink and sink mixer.  They'd found some great specials that meant it cost less than half of what we'd thought when we originally looked at the possibility.

Getting the benchtops home made for a nervous drive - that was sitting almost on my shoulder.

Joining benchtops and waiting for silicon to dry.

Bench fixed in place.  Sink and mixer fitted.

Cutting and joining the benchtops was challenging, but I think we've done well.  Dad thinks that at one of our joins is less noticeable that his (professional job) at home.

Now that Hubby and Dad have gone back to work, we're down to evenings and weekends, not counting the little bits that I potter around with during the day.  The new hallway and linen cupboard is coming along and the new farm pantry is this weekend's mission.

Where we're up to with the kitchen.

Knitting a Homespun Woolly Jumper

Since I have a mountain of coloured wool that was given to me, I thought it was about time I started knitting more than socks with it.  My self-taught spinning has reached a point where I'm a lot more satisfied with the evenness of my thread, although it's still not to a stage where I'd enter it in the A&P show.

I decided that Hubby needed a nice warm jersey.  He gets a bit snobby about handknit jerseys and would never consider one for "nice going out" wear, they're for home use only, but I can live with that.  There's no way he'd wear one in white or the silvery grey that I've got, so it had to be the dark brown.  I was quite curious to see how the colour would come out once it had been spun and knitted.  There is a mix of greys in with the brown and the gold coloured ends were intriguing.

The fleece before carding and spinning.

We had several discussions about how thick and heavy he wanted it.  I made the choice to make a 3-ply yarn for it.  Now when I say 3-ply, I'm not talking about anything close to commercial 3-ply.  A single of my spinning is probably similar in size to that.  I mean three of my singles plied together.  It's come out something similar to a commercial triple-knit or 12+ply.

A ball of my triple ply homespun.

The next issue I run into is seams.  I hate sewing seams on my knitting.  I have a fear that regardless of how well I pin it or mark it (unless there are stripes to match), I'll end up with puckers and stretching and uneven seams.  I also have a thing about measuring each side right.  Because just smoothing out a piece can change it's measurements, I'm rather paranoid that my sides won't truly match without a creatively uneven seam.

So this time, I chose to knit an entire jumper circular.  This took out any chance of uneven pieces and messy seams.  The only seams are at the top of the shoulders because there was no avoiding that no matter how hard I tried to come up with a solution.  I even knitted the sleeves circular.  I picked up stitches along the armholes and reduced down the length of the sleeve finishing with the wristband, rather than the other way around as is usually done.

At times, especially as I reduced down to the wristband, the sleeves were extremely challenging.  Having a long circular needle meant I had to get creative with where I pulled the excess and still be able to knit effectively.  Towards the end, I was needing to adjust it every 5 or 6 stitches, but it worked and worked well.

A sleeve almost at the wristband.

I used threads of different colours to mark the start point and halfway (or the other side).  Those threads continued down the sleeves to mark where I was reducing.

One of my markers.

Knitting an entire men's jersey this way certainly raised some interesting challenges, but I'd do it again, overall I found it far easier to do and work with.

I didn't work to a pattern as such.  I measured up his favourite but battered sweatshirt and worked to it's measurements.  I had to redo the sleeves as they ended up far too baggy and too long as this seems to be wider at the shoulder than his sweatshirt although both seem to have the same straight drop shoulder cut.

More Milk and Cheese!

Last week we finally separated Handsome the bull calf from Brownie my house cow.

We'd left him with her to keep him friendly and tame enough until he was castrated, but with one thing and another, we hadn't castrated him yet.  He was 'feeling his oats' and starting to challenge us at every opportunity.  Putting him into a pen at night (so that we could have milk in the morning) had become a dangerous two-person job.

The wonderful neighbour came down to put a ring on him when he was much younger.  At that time, we thought he was friendly enough that he could safely be pinned against the side of the pen by two people while the third did the job.  Unfortunately, while he was friendly for me, he was less familiar with hubby and didn't respond at all well to the neighbour climbing into his pen and managed to make a hole in the fence and ran around our garden.  We discussed running them down into the yards at the neighbours so that he could use the head crusher and do it safely.  But between him working and going away on holiday and us working and having other commitments, we never quite got it done.

Now he's 9 1/2 months old, far too old for a rubber ring and he's a stroppy little gobshite.  So the vet is coming this week to 'cut' him.  That was quite challenging working out when the vet was available, we were available and the neighbour was available to work his challenging crusher.  Meanwhile, I've had enough and we put him into the next paddock over from Brownie.  They spend a lot of time at the gate together.

For the past week we've been serenaded by him, first it was angry calls, then it was sad sounding.  Over the weekend, there were fewer but it just seems like "don't forget I'm here" bellows.

Now that we're not sharing Brownie's milk with him, we're getting twice the volume.  It may have been more but I've decided to stick with once a day milking.  We were getting more than we needed before, so doubling that has meant that I was keeping a bucket in the fridge for the excess once I'd filled the jugs for our use.  We have plenty in the freezer for when we dry her off - although we have to get her in calf again first for that - so there's no need for more to freeze.

I spent the weekend cheese making.  I've made cheese in greater quantities than previously and different varieties that I hadn't tried before.  Instead of my usual 4 litres of milk to make two blocks of feta, I used 8 litres and made four blocks.  Two have been given away to people who like my feta and two are currently in the fridge.

I was also given a lot of frozen cream.  Miss Nineteen's boyfriend works in a petrol station and brings home the cream that doesn't sell, which goes into my friend's freezer (Miss Nineteen boards with one of my friends).  She gave me a bag with about 8 litres of frozen cream in the usual 300ml and 600ml bottles.  I thawed some of the cream out and tried my hand at making cream cheese.

I don't know if it was because it had been frozen but the cream and milk mixture was a little grainy even before I added culture and rennet and the resulting cream cheese is a little grainy and not the smooth spread that you buy from the supermarket.  However it tastes great.  Next up, I'll be trying some of the flavoured cream cheeses that you can buy for cheese boards.

My grainy but tasty cream cheese.

I also made a real cheddar for the first time yesterday.  I've previously made a farmhouse cheddar which didn't involve the proper cheddaring procedures, so I wasn't really prepared for how labour intensive cheddar is and how long it takes to make.  I'd thought it would be like most cheeses, a couple of hours and it's in the press.  This required an hour of turning the cheese every ten minutes to condense it into a brick-like mass before cutting it into fingers.

I liked the thought of a port cheddar, but lacking port, I used the elderberry wine that I had in the barrel waiting for me to bottle.  It's sweet and smoky and has distinct port-like qualities so I've used that.

Elderberry wine cheddar.

One of the issues we've been running into is making Edam cheeses the way I usually do, I end up with a 1.2kg block and now there's only three of us at home, it takes forever to get through it all. Making it in smaller quantities meant that it didn't press as well and I was running out of blocks for my cheese press.  So instead I decided to make it in the same usual quantities, but just before the brining and drying part of the process, I would cut my cheese into smaller pieces.  Let them brine and dry that way and wax them separately.  I'm going to do this with the cheddar.

The added bonus to doing it that way is that a smaller wedge could make a nice gift too.

Changeable Spring Weather

About six weeks ago I was excited.  For the first time in a year, we'd gotten enough rainfall to actually have mud in the paddocks.  Not a lot of mud, but enough that in the places where my cattle congregate, they were squelching around and leaving their footprints behind.  I have never in my life been so excited about mud as I was then.  I never thought I'd ever be excited to have mud.

We still had puddles on the surface, but they were fewer and the ground around them was softening.

The paddocks have greened up and the grass has more than doubled in a week.

Then the gale force Nor'Westers started up.  For those unfamiliar with the Canterbury Nor'Wester - it's a foehn wind.  A hot dry wind that doesn't just dry up the land, it also causes all sorts of problems for people in it's path.  From migraines to increased suicide rates.

It got very hot very quickly.  What was supposed to be Spring gardening, became trying to find a shady spot that we could work in and still be following our plan.  Any work done out in the sun was in short bursts punctuated frequently by cold drink breaks and excuses to get in the shade.

Thanks to El Nino, we're forecast for another hot dry summer.  Local farmers are already getting nervous about paddock growth and making silage and hay as fast as they can.  Hay is becoming like gold.

For several weeks, we were seeing forecasts of a cold front and wet weather coming just a couple of days away.  Like last year though, that always seems to be a few days away and we just don't quite get it.

We had several days of 30 degrees Celsius.  All my gardening plans went out the window.  I shifted two wheelbarrow loads of stones and that was my limit.  I found myself almost making excuses to hide out inside.

The weather seemed to settle down and become consistently warmer with only the odd oppressively hot day.  I started to plant out the corn I'd started inside from seeds, I planted out my beans and I've planted out my potatoes.

Then I was excited about the rain this week.  We needed it and it was very welcome.

I wasn't half as excited about the snow that covered the mountain or the - 3 (Celsius) frost we got this morning.  So far my corn seems to be okay, but the beans are looking a bit sad.

At least the gales have stopped.

For now.

Trees!

Repeatedly, we've tried to plant more trees on our property.  We spent quite a bit of money on Tagasaste seedlings and planted them in bare shelter belts.  I went for tagasaste (tree lucerne) for it's wide range of uses - not only is it fairly quick growing shelter tree that won't destroy the paddocks around it like poplars do, but it is also a good tonic and fodder tree for livestock.

Unfortunately, naughty calves got into the shelter belt and ate them down to ground level.

Hubby spent $100 on pine seedlings and spent many hours working out where was the best place for them, digging the hard clay and rock soil, planting them with little stakes and seedling protectors and walking around regularly to water them.

They all died in a nasty hot summer anyway.

We bought several native plants of various sizes from Trade Me and from a garden centre.  We carefully planted them beside the creek, above the usual flood level, carefully staked them too. They got watered daily.

Then we got about two years worth of rainfall in a week.  This actually lifted the entire plants out of the soil and washed them away - I found a couple hanging precariously (with stakes and protectors still attached) on the edge of the bank.

I was given a small mountain of weeping willow switches by some friends who'd been trimming theirs.  I planted them all around the creek.  I watched them and tended them and they were doing well.

Then the same rainfall that took out the natives washed not just them but the land around them away down the creek and the few that survived were eaten by my naughty steers (at the time) who escaped from their paddock.

I have my moments when I truly despair trying to plant anything to hold the banks of the creek together and stop the erosion or provide shelter for my animals in extreme weather.  We've spent ridiculous amounts of money buying trees and taking the time and effort to treat them right and they die anyway.

I've taken cuttings, I've transplanted small trees, I've encouraged the odd crack willow that washes down the creek and takes root - even though I know them to be a pest in the waterways.  My thought is that it could work to stabilise part of the bank and allow me to plant other (better) things around it.  Even crack willows don't stay long enough to grow past a metre tall.

We do have plenty of wild plums and elder trees around the property though.  I've gotten to the point where I'm quite tempted to try encouraging their spread.

I've been told that gorse can work as an effective nursery plant.  It will shelter, feed and protect a young tree growing in it's midst and then when the tree is big enough, it tends to kill off the gorse.  Most of the elder is growing amidst gorse which is frustrating when I'm wanting to collect berries and flowers as I can't get to them, but also in that gorse and elder is honeysuckle, which strangles and buries everything.

We're going to try planting in amidst the gorse next.  I'm sprouting cuttings at the moment.  Wish me luck!