Butter

We churned our first butter.  We got this old Dazey churn off ebay and it's amazingly fast.  Turning the handle requires no strength, it's just stirring milk, and it breaks in 15-20 minutes.  We have learned that it breaks easier if we culture it first.  I pour the cream in the jar, add some mesophilic culture, and leave it alone for 12-24 hours.  After it breaks (holds together in globs of butter), I spoon it into ice water and then knead it to remove the buttermilk.  After it's kneaded nicely, someone sprinkles a little salt on it for me and I knead that in.  You can churn commercial cream into butter yourself with a mixer.  It sure is good to have Christina butter on the counter again.

Zucca lasagna was on the menu.  We have mozzarella left over from before Christina dried off but we were out of ricotta.  I usually make ricotta from the whey left over from hard cheese, but we just made some from whole milk.  Ricotta is so easy.  Just heat a gallon of milk to 185-195F, foamy but not boiling, add about 1/4 cup of vinegar (or any acid), then pour into a cloth-lined colander.  I hung it for a little while to drain off the extra liquid, but you could probably just leave it sitting there too.  When it's done, salt to taste (about one teaspoon).

Our zucca lasagna was all homemade and almost all homegrown.  Lasagna noodles are easy to make using a roll pasta maker.  It's the grown up, "productive" version of play dough fun factory.  We make lasagna with lots of cheese.  I added it up and this lasagna had about 3.5 gallons of milk in various dairy ingredients.  The zucca (butternut squash) gives it a nice creamy flavor and consistency.

Christina update: The milk fever seems gone, but every day is still new.  We are now fighting mastitis.  The milk filtered very slowly yesterday, requiring two filters to get it all done and this morning the cream had already started to sour.  Dang.  This morning's milk was a little better but I still ran to the store to buy antibiotic.  We read that the old fashioned way to treat mastitis is to milk very thoroughly 3-6 times a day.  If we use the medicine, we have to throw the milk away for four days, so we are motivated.  We figured it wouldn't hurt to milk a few extra times, but in the daytime only! 

At 1pm we did our first extra milking and milked each teet into a different pot to see if we could identify which quarter was the worst.  I filtered each one separately and it actually all seemed pretty good.  It's possible we are beating it.  So, we'll milk again at 5pm and again at 9pm.  Christina's production is low, under three gallons a day, but we figure that is from not milking her much through the milk fever.  These extra milkings might help increase production too.