First Caramel

When people ask me if I'm working, I say, "no, but I keep really busy." I talk about raising our own food, the homeschooling, the cow, the cheese-making, but as it comes out of my mouth, it sounds like fluff.  It sounds so optional, just keep-me-out-of-trouble work.  I realize that I still harbor some lack of respect for this life-style.  But we are working hard and it is real work!  Long days with lots of time on my feet, lots of planning and figuring things out. And a tiny little grocery list.

Our three squash a week diet is already falling behind.  It's very possible we skipped last week; I honestly don't remember.  Today I grabbed the three sorriest looking fruits to cook up before they get any worse. 

Last year we made lots of caramels to give away and eat.  Caramels are easy to make and they just taste like Christmas to us.  Our regular recipe starts with butter, cream, and milk.  We decided to try with just cream and milk and see how it goes.  It saves us the step of making butter.  Figuring that a pint of cream makes a half-cup of butter, we mixed it up and got it cooking.  It cooked down in about the same amount of time as regular caramels. 

The texture isn't perfectly smooth, but the flavor is good.  The girls descended upon the pan and licked it clean.  As soon as we get the recipe worked out, I'll post it.  My family loves it when I'm working out recipes like this because it means I have to make a lot of them.

Today I'll try my first Monterrey Jack cheese.  It doesn't need much pressure so I can use my mold with just weights on top, rather than that nasty spring thing.  These cheeses use whole milk, and it's hard to let all that cream go.  In the three gallons I'll use for the cheese, there is at least half a gallon of cream that could go for caramels!  But hopefully it will become really good cheese (please God).

We got out the advent wreath and candles.  Counting down advent has become so much more fun since we got this wreath.  Every night this week at dinner we'll light one candle.  Next week we'll light that one and another one.  The week after that we'll light those two and the pink one.  The last week of Advent we'll burn all four.  On Christmas we light the white candle and all five will burn through the Christmas season.  By the end we'll have five candles at different heights witnessing to the time we have waited, the steps we have taken to be ready to meet God face-to-face, and the anticipation we savored in it all.