High Cheese Season 2020 (Making Do)

            A middle stage in the making of cheddar 

In last week’s post on preserving, I forgot to include cheese. Cheese is kind of the whole point of this farm - a desire to milk goats and learn how to make cheese was one of the driving forces in moving up here in the first place. After ten or so years, I have developed three or four cheese recipes that serve me well. As in many endeavors, it is pretty easy to achieve a basic level of competence, and then quite difficult to move on to a level of expertise that allows for consistent, high quality results every time. 

Being who I am, I have more or less decided that I’m happy with my level. I very seldom have an abject failure - all the cheese I make tastes good and is usable for one application or another. But I often have to decide what that application is AFTER I see how the cheese turns out. 

Today I am making chevre and cheddar. Chevre is easy - you just culture the fresh milk and wait 24 hours, then drain it through a clean pillowcase and salt it to taste. Once in a while, especially in very warm weather, the chevre will develop some off, goaty flavors that nobody is fond of. When that happens, I incorporate the cheese into a highly flavored recipe where the goaty flavors will be outcompeted,  like spicy eggplant Parmesan. 

Cheddar is more difficult. It requires several steps, and my recipes include instructions that are patently impossible to follow in a home kitchen, such as “hold the milk at exactly 99 degrees for four hours.” Much of the “cheddar” I’ve made is actually just “plain semi-hard cheese.” The most common defect is that it stays crumbly instead of melding into a single, smooth textured mass. But hey, goat cheese crumbles are a delicious addition to many dishes. Luckily, my Mexican husband is totally used to a dish of cheese crumbles on the table as a condiment, with a spoon, for sprinkling onto everything from refried beans to scrambled eggs to green salad. 

Making do with what you have is a philosophy, one that I’m fond of. I’m not going to waste any time lamenting over a “failure” to produce perfect cheddar when what I’ve actually produced is a pretty delicious piece of cheese. Instead, I’m going to incorporate that cheese into the larger, creative task of taking stock of what I have on hand and weaving disparate ingredients into something new and satisfying. 

This morning, I opened a vacuum sealed package of cheese from early this spring, expecting to find a nice, mild, melting cheddar. Instead it was a sharp flavored crumbly cheese. But it still worked well to make squash blossom goat cheese quesadillas for breakfast. I got no complaints. 

Preserving Log (Early Summer Edition)

I’ve fallen behind on my blogging, I’m afraid. Since the stay-at-home order was lifted early last month, I’ve been busier than a one-armed paper-hanger (as my mother used to say). 

Mostly, I’ve been working a lot. All the procedures and routine checkup and vaccination appointments and dentist appointments that were canceled during the lockdown have been rescheduled, and all the doctor’s and dentist’s offices are full. My agency is down by at least three interpreters. Two of them are elderly and not in great health and so are not taking appointments at the moment, and o e of them got stuck in Spain way back in March and hasn’t been able to come home yet. This means there is a ton of work for me, more than I want, really, but if I turn appointments down they often go unfilled.

In my free times, this is what I’ve been doing as far as preserving goes: 

 - several small batches (3-4 quarts at a time) salsa ranchera, as the gleaners pantry gives me the ingredients

- a gallon of kosher fills that is almost gone now. Yesterday I bought more pickling cucumbers and later on today I will gather grape leaves start a new batch

- a gallon ziploc of dried cherry tomatoes. Haven’t done this before and it’s really good. I season them with a little salt and garlic powder and then dry them till they are very leathery or even crisp. Nice for snacking and they add great flavor to a stew or soup.

- froze about a dozen quarts of strawberries. Went to the u-pick with friends when they were up visiting. 

And today I am breaking out the big stockpot to deal with this:

That’s about 25 pounds of mixed stone fruit from gleaner’s. After I separated the fruit that was too far gone and picked out the fruit that was still perfect for eating fresh, I was left with about ten to twelve pounds of slightly overripe fruit. The last hour or so has been devoted to bleaching, peeling, and chopping and my kitchen looked like a couple of murders had taken place (red plums!) but now I have this simmering on the stove:

Spicy stone fruit chutney. It has cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, red pepper flakes, a TINY hint of garlic, brown sugar and apple cider vinegar. It smells like heaven and it ought to be delicious with pork chops, chicken breasts, or maybe a hearty fish like halibut. It’s super pretty, too. 

But man there’s gonna be a lot of it. I think this may be my Christmas present to a few people this year. 

Still sitting out on the front porch: a crate of corn on the cob to be shucked, shaved, and frozen; and about ten pounds of jalapeños to be turned into rajas en escabeche. I might get the peppers done today, but he corn is gonna have to wait.