Heavy Cooking Day

It was a heavy cooking day.  The stove was full culturing sour cream, cream for butter, and milk & cream for ranch dressing.  I had a cheddar cheese going and afterward we made ricotta from the whey. 

We also crock-potted two of our home-grown chickens that we'll make into chicken pot pie today.  Plus, we made cream cheese danishes with the butter layer that's been lounging in the frig for too long.

Sometimes cooking piles up on us.  All of a sudden there is so much to be done, and I often don't see it coming. It makes me feel ADHD to have so many things going at once, things that need constant care and watching.

And then God soothed me this morning. The sunrise, glowing out our back window, was a gentle warmth to my shivering brain...

Thank. You...  Thank. You...  Thank. You...

Christina hasn't shown us any signs of heat.  Well, she seemed a little restless yesterday, but we can't use that to tell.  We'll watch closely again today, but we may miss it.   If we don't know when she's in heat, we can't breed her, and we want her bred in about three weeks.  We called a lady who knows what she's doing and she said there is another way.  We may have find out more about it.

No sameness

I've read that milk production is related to how much food the cow has.  Since Christina has been giving so much milk, we've been experimenting with giving her less food.  Yesterday morning it all caught up with us.  She only gave one-and-a-half gallons — we're used to getting two-and-a-quarter gallons each morning (that's in addition to jerky getting his share).  Ack!  And then my husband remembered that Christina has been digging into stuff she normally doesn't get into.  We've decided that we'd rather have more milk and a content cow, so he gave her extra food.  

Here is this morning's milk in the same pail. That's a lot more milk — two-and-a-quarter gallons, just like normal.  Christina gave us a look like, this is not a complicated deal, you feed me and I give you milk.  Simple.

So, I'll keep doing lots of cheese-making.  We have high hopes that the cheese will be wonderful.  And we know that her production will go down over the year and there will be less for cheese.  Say, I wonder if cheese-making will get me out of some weeding this summer...  :-)

We had chili and cornbread for dinner last night. We pulled out the sour cream and discovered it was thicker than we've ever had it.  It was beyond perfect.  I racked my brain trying to remember what I had done differently but I have no idea.  I used the same culture, kept it warm the same amount of time.  It is just a happy surprise.  Store-bought eating is so much sameness.  Our eating has wonderful nuance and differences from week to week.  It's true that we work hard, but we eat so good.  So good.

Things Have Gotten Easy... Not!

Just when we thought things had settled down, they got complicated again.  When we tested the milk last Friday, it looked like the mastitis wasn't improving so we used an antibiotic that you squirt into the affected teet.  That seemed simple. We've been milking out that quarter separately and throwing it away, along with an extra milking for that quarter in the afternoon.  So we only lost one quarter — one gone for four days, jerky got one, and we got the other two.  Then we talked to the lady from the diary and she said we should have thrown all the milk out for four days.  Dang.  Today is the four-day mark, so our blunder is almost behind us, and we haven't had any problems.  The good news is that when we tested the milk this morning, it looked really good.  I think we have beaten the mastitis.

We talked to the vet about getting some regular stuff done and he asked about the calcium we gave Christina when she had milk fever.  He said that the way we gave it to her can be really irritating and give them abscesses.  We had noticed something on her neck, but today when we looked closer, it looked nasty.  Hard lumps at the bottom of her neck and possibly even an open area in the skin.  Ack!

I've got to tell ya, I am an educated person and I'm used to feeling competent.  This learning curve with farm animals is humbling.

Our grain corn has dried so we ground it up and made cornbread.  We used our same old recipe, but it tasted noticeably different.  The flavor was more pronounced and it was sweeter.  Normally I like lots of honey on my cornbread, but I prefer this bread with only butter.  It has a distinctive corn flavor, not strong, but perhaps more complex. We have declared it a winner.

Our first sour cream this freshening.  Now we are completely stocked in dairy stuff.  This sour cream is thick, but isn't as uniformly smooth as the store-bought stuff.  I warmed up some cream to 86F, add a "fresh" starter, and let it sit for 24 hours.  At 12 hours, it still seemed kind of liquid, so I put it in a water-bath in a crock pot, warmed it back up, and gave it a good stir.  The next morning it was thick.