Cream Cheese Danishes

My 13-year-old keeps saying... we need donuts... we need cookies... we need cake...  Today, when I said, "then why don't you make some," she acted.  It was cream cheese danishes.

We found a recipe on the internet.  It wasn't for whole wheat but we quit worrying about that a long time ago.  The first step was to mix butter (homegrown and homemade) with a little bit of flour (home-ground).  She rolled it out between sheets of wax paper and chilled it until it was hard.  She held it up to show me how firm it was.

Then she made a dough from flour (home-ground), milk (homegrown), and sugar, yeast, salt, and almond extract (store-bought).  She kneaded it up like bread and let it rise.

After an hour, she rolled the dough out and put the chilled butter inside.  She folded the sides over and then rolled it out big again.  She folded the sides back over and rolled it out again.  Back in the refrigerator for an hour and she did the whole process again.

She rolled the dough out and sliced it up into squares.  In the center of each square she put a mixture of cream cheese and sour cream (homegrown and homemade) with sugar and vanilla (store-bought).  She pulled up the corners and let them rise for a half-hour.  They baked only fifteen minutes.

We decided there wasn't quite enough cream cheese mixture, so we added some more.  Then she drizzled each one with butter and milk (homegrown and homemade) mixed with powdered sugar (store-bought).

They were very good.  Very good.  The crust was light and flaky.  The cream cheese was smooth and delightful.  The only improvement is to roll them out thinner because the dough got heavy and thick in some areas. Definitely worth doing again.

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.

Repeats

Today we're not doing anything new.  We're doing things we've done many times before.  We're putting curds into the mold and pressing another block of cheese.  We're grinding wheat and making another loaf of bread.  We're churning butter and cooking squash and curing pepperoni and doing laundry.  We're making dinner, washing dishes, and milking the cow.

This lifestyle has lots of repeats.  When spring arrives there will be new things — soil to turn, seeds to plant, new things to eat — but for now we're eating the same old things and doing the same old things.

A friend of mine asked me if I enjoyed all the repetition.  It got me thinking about other repetitions in life — eating, showering, reading stories, cuddling babies, celebrating holidays.  There are many things we do over and over but impart great happiness.  I've just celebrated my 43rd Christmas and it was very similar to previous years, but it was still wonderful and magical, and it was different than any Christmas before.

There is something about this lifestyle, with all its repetitions, that imparts happiness.  Each cheese is not exactly like the one before it.  Each loaf of bread is slightly different.  Each batch of butter is unique.  Just like each kiss and hug is not exactly like the one before it.   Like each experience of God is unique and feels like a new ah-ha.

Yes, this life is full of repetition, but aren't all of the best things in life?

Stirring, Stirring, Stirring... Sore Arms

Our lives are constant stirring, stirring, stirring, interrupted by eating and sleeping.  We decided to make some mozzarella for the local homeless shelter — getting enough protein isn't easy on the street — so we started with an hour of stirring to pasteurize the milk.  We drink our milk raw and make all our cheese from raw milk, but I figured there might be someone there with a compromised immune system, so the milk should be pasteurized just to be sure.  This hour of cooking and half hour of cooling in a sink of ice water sure did strengthen our commitment raw milk.  Plus, we could see the milk foaming and changing as it cooked.  It really is different.

Every day is full of stirring.  Each cheese I make, about every two days now, is about an hour and a half of stirring.  After the curds have shed a lot of whey the girls can help, but the first hour I really have to do.

Caramels are an hour of stirring.  The girls can help at the first part of caramels too, but at the end they aren't quite complete enough.

None of this stirring is hard, but there is a cumulative effect from lengthy stirring every day.  When you add in daily milking, laundry, kids, and middle age that makes all healing take longer, it takes a toll on my body.

My arms get sore.  I don't notice it much during the day, but at night I have a constant dull ache and my arms often fall asleep.  I wake up in alarm and work the feeling back into my flesh. It's a nasty feeling.  Massaging Mama's arms has become a daily chore of my nine-year old's who are amazingly good at it.

Up until a year ago, my life required little arm strength.  I am growing stronger but the progression is slow.  Last fall, after Christina came, I grabbed a few ten-pound bags of sugar and noticed how easily I could lift them.  My arms don't hurt as much as they did last fall before Christina dried up.  But I'm not there yet.  Maybe next year my poor children won't have to massage me every day.

Zero-Carbon Flour

My family got me a hand-crank flour grinder for Christmas.  I'm resisting grinding up every grain the house.  This mill isn't so easy to turn as liquid, but it's not so hard that our nine-year olds can't do it.

The best part is that the flour we are getting is noticeably finer than what we were getting with our KitchenAid grinder.  The bread kneads easier and holds together better.  Pie crusts roll out easily at whatever thickness we want.  It's fully adjustable so we can still do a course grind for pizza and cereal.

We set the timer so each person takes a one-minute turn and then the next person jumps in.  The four-and-a-half cups of wheat that we need for two loaves of bread took each of us about three turns.

I think I have finally figured out caramels.  These turned out smooth, rich, and perfectly firm.  Mix 2C sugar, 3/4 C corn syrup, 1/2 C butter, and 1 C cream in saucepan over medium heat.  After it starts boiling, gradually add another cup of cream.   We brought it up the point that it held together when dropped in cold water, which was only 221ºF.  Pour it in a buttered 8x8 pan and let it cool completely.

We have discovered that cleaning out the cow shed is much faster with Christina out of it.  Our teenage daughters take her for a walk in the pasture while we get it cleaned.  When it's done they unhook the rope and they all walk in.  Christina knows her candy is waiting for her and she usually makes it back first.

She goes straight for her stanchion and we milk.

I've noticed that we rarely have to ask Christina to move her legs anymore when we're milking.  She used to have a leg forward often, which made it impossible to milk the back quarter.  Every single milking one of us would be pulling on a leg to get her to move it.  Now, she may have a leg forward, but as soon as I swing the pail under her, she backs that leg up out of the way.  What a good cow!

Different Christmas

As we clean the house and do the final wrapping, we prepare for a different Christmas.  Our tradition has been that Christmas begins with Mass at 6pm on Christmas Eve.  Our evening is filled with the sparkle of the decorated church and the energy emerging from a packed church.  We come home and collapse in bed, waiting for the night the come.  Early the next morning, the kids wake us up and we our home is filled with the joy of presents.  Dinner is fancy but not intricate, although eaten on Grandma's beautiful china.  The day ends in watching a movie and eating candy.

This Christmas will be different.  A homestead Christmas means no cans or plastic wrap in the trash, no candy wrappers laying around the house, and lots of work to get a nice dinner on the table.  The sabbath law about no cooking makes a lot of sense to me now.  Without it there would have been no sabbath rest for women.  We will get as close as can.

We will go to Mass this evening as always, but when we get home, we have to milk rather than relax into bed.  We will get up early, as always, but after stockings, we'll take a break and go milk again. We'll skim milk for cream and figure out how to get all the jugs in the frig.  And then back to presents.

Without bags of commercial candy, today we'll make caramel and maybe fudge.  Today we made a pecan pie.

Rather than fresh rolls, we're making them today and we'll heat them up tomorrow for Christmas dinner. 

And today we'll thoroughly clean the whole house.

Christmas Eve is filled with more work, but a simmering expectation.  Last night my nine-year old said, "I'm glad we have so much work to do tomorrow.  It will make the waiting easier."   What a wonderful and healthy sense of gratitude.  I aim to follow her.

Christmas Candy

Since we're not buying candy, we have to make it.  I found a recipe for old fashioned fudge in my mother-in-law's 1952 cookbook.  The first time I followed the recipe to the T, heating it up to exactly 234ºF, but the candy was too hard.  I tried again today but only took it up to 227ºF.  I left it on the counter to cool and was supposed to beat vanilla in it later.  When I came back, the kids had already gotten started and hadn't left much, so we'll just finish this out of the tuperware.  Maybe tomorrow we'll try again.

We found a recipe for Almond Roca in that old cookbook that doesn't look too difficult.  We might try that too.

After a day and a half, that cheddar cheese did meld together, but there are little cracks on the top.  It probably goes better if it's warmer than 60ºF when it presses.  I saw somewhere to put it in 100ºF water and then press again for an hour, so I did it.

Next Cheese

With fifteen cheeses under my belt, I no longer consider myself a beginner, so I attempted a difficult cheese — traditional cheddar.  After the normal culturing, cutting the curd, and cooking it slowly, there is a lengthy process that I think is called cheddaring where the curds are left in a pot kept at 100F by sitting in a water bath.  After they have spent two hours in the pot, with regular turning, they are ripped into grape-sized pieces.  Sure enough!

It took a while to get them all ripped up.  My arms thought that the chunks got tougher as time went on.  After adding some salt, it went into the press.  The first turning didn't look promising.  Hopefully it will mold together tomorrow.  It'll sit in the press for a day and a half — there goes my plans for making a colby tomorrow.

I'm worried that it won't knit together, another disaster.  But, I'm also worried that it will turn out so good that we'll be compelled to make a lot more.

Yesterday I made a romano for the first time.  These hard italian cheeses are made with skim milk.  After being in the press overnight, it spent the day soaking in a brine solution.  I put a plate on top to push it down into the water.

I'm trying to get lots of cheese made before Christmas comes.  There will be several days when I won't be able to make cheese and the milk will quickly overwhelm the frig.

Homestead Birthday

Our oldest daughter turned sixteen.  Her birthday cake was her own design.  We made chocolate cake (with home-ground whole wheat) in a spring-form pan and sliced it in half.  After fully cooling, we put the bottom half back in, filled it with fresh vanilla ice cream and then put the top half back.  After spending the night in the freezer, we set it out to soften and poured a little fudge sauce on top before we lit the candles.

The slices came out beautiful.  Each one we covered in fudge sauce as we served it.  Some also had whipped cream on top.  Our nineteen-year-old said it was the best birthday cake we've ever had.

Living off the land in the winter involves regular trips to the cellar.  Our nine-year-old went down for some potatoes.  The birthday dinner included french fries and they wanted *lots* of potatoes to work with.

Christina's milk production is inching up.  She's at 4-1/4 gallons a day.  With all that milk and cream, we are making extra butter for the freezer, which means lots of buttermilk for the frig.  I found a recipe for "buttermilk cheese," which is basically ricotta made from buttermilk.  You just heat cultured buttermilk up to 160F, pour it through a cheesecloth, and hang it.  The flavor is a little tangier than ricotta, but it's very similar.  We need to find more things to cook ricotta into.

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the turning point back toward another growing season.  As I look back over the last growing season and all the food God stocked away for us over the winter, I feel especially grateful that we got Christina with her calving schedule.  Her dry season from mid-September to mid-November is at the height of harvest and canning.  Thank you God that we weren't also trying to fit in regular cheese-making.  Now, at her highest milk production and lots of cheese-making, there is nothing to be done in the garden expect wait and plan.  The annual schedule couldn't be more perfect.  Christina was one of those coincidences that comes with a wink from God.

Three-Person-One-Cow Milking

It takes three of us to milk.  Jerky is so big that one of our nine-year-old daughters is assigned to put some weight on his neck so he doesn't butt so hard.  Sometimes it seems he lifts Christina off her feet.  I don't think he does, but a hard hit goes right through her and almost knocks me over.

After five weeks we are getting our milking muscles back. I can go two handed at a clip for half the time now; then my hands take turns to rest.  Her udder is warm on my cold skin. 

Our butter churn jar broke.  Dang.  I searched the internet and found replacements for $50 and up.  Ack!  We found that with a little trimming, these old plastic jugs work.  The churn doesn't screw on, but still works.  The big secret is culturing the cream before we churn it.  We warm the cream up in a water bath to about 85F, add a few frozen cubes of the culture, and wait a day.  It's not quite sour cream consistency but close and the churn gives real resistance.  It breaks in only fifteen minutes of pretty lazy churning.

A batch of cottage cheese uses up two gallons of skimmed milk and the kids love it with applesauce.

There are four-and-a-half gallons of skimmed milk hogging up space in the frig.  Today I might try my first romano.

Dang Mice

Our grain corn was in the garage in boxes with air holes.  Apparently they were also mice holes.  My husband knocked the stack of boxes and saw a little mouse face stick out.  When we investigated, we discovered a mouse haven in the lower boxes — full of corn power and mouse droppings.  The upper boxes were cleaner, but still contained evidence of mouse presence.  The whole batch got thrown to the chickens.  Dang.

You had to know it would happen sooner or later, losing food to little rodents.  I'm trying to be grateful that they weren't in the house — because that's creepy — but I'm feeling pretty snarly about losing all that corn.  We still have some that we already cleaned off the cob, so it's not a complete loss.

It's the middle of December and we are finally getting to the leaves.  In our defense, the first frost was really late, into November, and the first heavy snow was less than two weeks later.  The kids begs us to leave them so they can play, and we're pretty agreeable to not working.  Another big snow storm is predicted, but we got some up.

The Christmas story has taken on a new depth for us as we enter our first Christmas with a barn and manger.  It's a warm place, milking with only a jacket in 20F weather is fine, but not very clean.  Every manger scene I've seen has clean yellow bedding, but in real life, fresh straw quickly becomes pee-soaked and smeared with cow pies.   What a place to sleep, forget about birthing.  But the animals are gentle and sensitive.  Do you think the cow moo gently for Mary as she was in labor?  Did the calf give little nudges that feel like loves?  Did Joseph get strength and comfort from the animals as he helped Mary?

Only In Magazines

I've read about how a compost pile is supposed to work.  It seems so easy in the magazines, but it never works for me.  It doesn't warm up like it's supposed to and the stuff either doesn't break down or gets an icky smell.

Until now!  We have a hot pile!  That big pile of stuff that we clean out of the shed every day is steaming.  It's amazing!  You can see frost near the bottom and steam coming off the top.  It really does work!  I feel so affirmed for being lazy and just piling it up.  So the secret is vast amounts of manure and pee-soaked straw... he-he-he... we are going to have such a good garden next year.

We got eight eggs yesterday.  That's a lot for this time of year!  We'll probably get hardly any tomorrow, but we're still taking it as a message from God that we show make a pecan pie.

Christina's mastitis has disappeared.  The milk filters so fast that it seems there's a hole in the filter.  We are getting about four gallons a day, and jerky must be getting about a gallon and a half.  She's almost nine years old and still producing like mad, it seems to me.  The owie on her neck looks nasty, but it's dry and not pussing, so we figure she'll recover on her own.  With the snow gone, Christina goes out on the pasture every day and seems to find a little grass to eat.  Good for her!

In the other pasture, beefy and jerky go out regularly.  Beefy stood at the back by the fence but jerky just ran and ran.  What a goofy baby.

Dirty Dishes

We dirty lots of dishes.  Lots.  Every day.  We have all the dishes from cooking all our food from scratch, plus milk jars, cheese pots, and milk pails.  This is a normal sink-full.  Sometimes it's much worse.  Our daughters take turns doing dishes and it's a constant responsibility.

The dishwasher runs about six times a day, two of which are for milk pails, pretty much all day long.  There is much to our life that is replicating the way people used to live, except dishes and I'm so grateful.  Even better, our dishwasher is energy-star and water-wise.  It actually uses less water than if we did them by hand, by a lot!  So this work savings is guilt free.  Praise God!!  Praise God!!

When people tell me they're amazed at all we do, I just think how amazed I am at what women did a hundred years ago without dishwashers or washing machines (of course, they didn't fool around on blogs every day).

Moving toward a self-sufficient lifestyle includes a ban on disposables.  The disposable kleenex has seen the last of our house.  We switched to hankies about a year ago.  At first it was weird blowing my nose on fabric; I had grown up on kleenex after all.  But after a while it became quite natural.  We have about twenty hankies for our family of seven and they get cleaned with our regular laundry.  Most of them we found when we went through my in-laws things after they passed away, many brand new in their originally packaging.

An unexpected, but logical, outcome of this life-style is that we generate little garage.  Our trash bin is rarely more than half full.  We just don't have much packaging to throw away.  It is another example of the way God takes good things and spreads the good to unexpected areas.

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.

I Could Never Do That ... or... The Morality of Butchering

Beefy is our six-month old steer.  Next year about this time he will be ready to butcher.  We've butchered chickens, but we probably won't butcher beefy ourselves; he's just too big.

Nothing gets more diverse, or stronger, opinions than when people hear that we are raising animals for meat and butchering. Some people are just grossed out by the whole thing.  They say things like, "I could never do that."  But these same people eat meat, which seems like a contradiction.  They're just making somebody do their dirty work.

Other people have raised animals but couldn't eat their meat.  One fellow said they raised beef when he was young but they never ate it because they were pets.  They all went to market.  But there is still a contradiction, because all those animals were still slaughtered regardless of who eats them.

I understand that aversion, it is a little creepy to know "who's" for dinner.  But I have a stronger feeling underneath, that it's the most right thing we could do.  In the end, beefy will still be slaughtered, but if his meat is for us, we will appreciate in a way that others won't.  We will remember the work we did for his health and safety and the good life he had.  We will give thanks to the Creator who made us present to the whole life and death of our animals and feeds us personally with this land.  The meat raised on our own land feels like a personal gift from God, not a mass feeding that we just show up to, but that the meat was specially created just for us.

It will hard next year when the time comes.  It will be really hard.  Raising our own meat makes us look directly at things we have spent a lifetime avoiding — our meat-eating is the result of killing. It will require compassion and hardness all at the same time.  But it will be real and it will be honest and it will be humane  ...but I'm glad it's not today.

Cutie Calf

Jerky has grown so much!  Here is a picture of him the morning he was born.  He was so little.  It was easy to pick him up and he was still getting his legs under him.  Notice the level of his back compared to the board along the wall.

Here's a picture of him this morning in the same spot, on the right.  Look at how much he's grown in only three weeks.  His back is almost up to that board on the wall. 

We are not dog people, but it seems to me that jerky acts like a dog.  He's energetic, easily distracted, and very affectionate, rubbing on me to get hugs.

Beefy, our six-month old steer, wanted in the picture too. They are buddies together over on the side of the shed away from Christina.  Several times a day they go out on the pasture together and run around.  Beefy has completely changed since Christina was so sick.  He used to stay far back, but now he comes up for hugs and rubs on us.  I'm surprised how comfortable I am hugging on the cows.  I never expected that, but are pretty endearing creatures.

Our attempts to keep Christina from peeing and pooping while milking have had moderate success.  My husband cleans the shed out before milking instead of after so that she'll get up and do her business.  He even takes her for a little walk in the pasture to get all systems up and running.  It's funny as he walks her out, she looks at him like, um, the candy's over that way. But she goes along anyway.  She is goofy for that molasses covered grain that we give her at milking time.

The cream cheese we made the other day has been assigned to cheesecake.  So far, it looks pretty promising.  If it's anything like the other stuff we make from Christina milk, it will blow our socks off.

Chemistry Fun for Adults

We finally got a test kit for mastitis.  You squirt some milk from each quarter into the little pot, add some fluid, and swirl it around.  If any mucousy stuff forms, you've got a problem.  Only one quarter showed a problem (the upper right) and it matches the "weak positive" description.  So we've got a mild problem in one quarter. 

Of all the vet stuff we've had to do, this is the funnest.  It's chemistry set for grown ups!

Those days of wondering if she really has mastitis and which quarter it is in, is over.  With such a weak infection, it was never obvious.  It's nice to know exactly where the problem is.  Each test takes 12ml of fluid and we have a gallon of the stuff.  We can test willy-nilly whenever we want to! 

Because the problem is mild, we'll add an extra milking for the next few days and see how it goes.  It's nice being able to test regularly to see how things are doing. 

My kids have grown used to, "everybody drink some milk, I want that jug finished."  Last night with spicy pepperoni, they drank lots, even without being told.  So that's the secret.  Just give them spicy food.  We're thinking of chili with homegrown cornbread for dinner tonight.

It's time to sterilize some milk for culture again.  Sterlizing milk is easy, just fill jars with skimmed milk and boil in a water-bath canner for 30 minutes.  After they cool down I'll use them to re-culture the cheese starter cultures.

We have more skimmed milk than we can keep up with.  This sterlized milk used up two gallons, but we have three more sitting in the frig.  I could make cottage cheese, but we have plenty.  I could make yogurt, but we have plenty of that too.

Our youngest will be three in a few months and we are hoping to be at the end of his diapering time.  Yesterday he sat on his little potty in between diapers and had his first pee.  It was probably a mistake, but it's still pretty exciting. 

We used a cloth diaper service with our oldest (now 19 years old), then disposables with the girls, and went back to cloth with the youngest.  In hindsight, I wish we had done cloth all along.  Cloth diapers are so easy now adays!  There are no pins to get you and the diaper covers are easy to put on.  Washing diapers is no more effort than dragging diapers home from the store and then out to the trash.  And, to our surprise, they don't smell as bad.  With disposables we were constantly doing battle with smell, even with fancy things like DiaperGenie.  With cloth diapers, we shake the really smelly stuff into the toilet before tossing the diaper into the pail, so we have less smell with just a plain covered trash can.