It's Thursday Again!

It's Thursday again!  Thursday, if you don't remember, is the crazy cheese day where I wash moulds for hours.  But since Tucker's working now, it was not as crazy.  My fingers still got pretty pruny though.  

Daily Blue Ledger:

I woke up at 7:00 and did all that morning stuff like eating breakfast (I ate leftover samosas...yum!), getting dressed, etc., and went out to the cheese house at 8.  I was about 5 minutes late because I was downloading some Sufjan Stevens.  I had an urge.  We salted the chévre from yesterday, washed ALL those moulds, and sanitized the camembrie moulds.  Then we had a nice long lunch break, during which I ate salad and swung on the swing set.  Back in the cheese house, we cut the curds, poured the camembrie, and cleaned the bulk tank.  Then it was 4 and we were done!  Time passes so quickly while I'm working.  It's almost frightening.  I made a quick dinner...

Barn Swallows:

Potato Tomato Salad

Potatoes of any sort, boiled

Tomatoes

Basil leaves

Olive Oil

Balsamic Vinegar

Paprika

Salt

Slice potatoes into 1/4-1/2 inch slices.  Put in a hot pan with oil.  Sprinkle salt and paprika on top of each slice.  Cook until brown on one side, and flip.  Sprinkle again with salt and paprika, and let brown on other side.  In the meantime, slice tomatoes slightly thinner than the potatoes.  Layer potatoes, tomatoes, and basil leaves.  Drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Sprinkle with more salt, if desired.  Enjoy this light dinner.

After dinner I babysat for Livia and Hayden from about 6:30 - 9:30.  We watched Howl's Moving Castle (that animation in that movie is so gorgeous...everyone should see it and read the book) and read 101 Dalmations.  I've never had such an easy time babysitting.  Those kids are awesome.  And now I'm going to sleep!  Goodnight.

Sweet Cecily, Samosas, and Starters

Daily Blue Ledger

Today was a Wednesday, so it was my day off...yay!  I slept until 7:30 and then got up and made quinoa porridge, which was really quite yummy.

Barn Swallows I

Quinoa Porridge

1/2 cup quinoa

1 cup rice milk

Banana slices

Maple syrup

Ginger powder

Flax seeds

Put quinoa and rice milk in pot and bring to boil, simmer for 15 minutes until liquid is absorbed.  Put in bowl and add sliced banana, maple syrup, flax seeds, and ginger powder.  Stir and eat!  

Then I spent about 2 hours downloading contemporary folk music off Limewire...should I not say that on the internet?  Whatever...the RIAA already caught me once.  I'm a bad girl.  I got some great stuff, though...it's cool, the iTunes store gives you a whole playlist of suggested artists that they think every modern-folk-lover should have.  So it's like, David Gray, Lucinda Williams, Beth Orton, The Weepies...and I downloaded a few top songs from each.

After that, I felt like I should probably go outside or something, so I went to visit Molly at Sweet Cecily, where she works.  Sweet Cecily is a store on Middlebury's Main Street that is probably the cutest thing I've ever seen.  It's similar to Blue Tulip...but just much better.  It has all these fairy knick knacks and soaps and cards.  The best part is the view; there's a balcony the overhangs the waterfall.  It's gorgeous.  So after I visited her, I went to the co-op and got a multi vitamin, just to make sure I'm getting all the right nutrients, and some fruits and veggies.  Then I came back to the farm and looked up a recipe for samosas, which I had never made before.

Barn Swallows II

Vegan Samosas

Dough:

2 cups whole wheat flour

2 Tbs oil (I used 1 T sesame and 1 T olive)

3/4ish cup warm water

3/4 tsp salt

Mix together until forms a ball with a "pie-crust texture" (that's what the recipe I used said, interpret as you will).  Let rest for 30 minutes.

Filling:

3 potatoes, peeled, boiled, and mashed

1 small onion, diced

1 cup peas

A medium-spiced chili pepper, minced (I didn't have one, so I used a red bell pepper)

Garlic

Oil or Earth Balance

Spices: Nutritional yeast, curry powder, garam masala, paprika, salt, cayenne pepper

In the meantime, saute onions, pepper, and garlic in oil until soft.  Add peas and mashed potatoes and combine.  I added a little Earth Balance at this point.  Add all spices, blah blah blah...

Ok.  Preheat oven to 375.  Divide dough into 8 pieces.  Flatten each piece into a square a 1/4 inch thick and about 4-5 inches across.  Put some filling in the middle and fold diagonally to make a triangle.  Pinch edges together firmly.  Place on greased baking sheet and put middle of oven.  Bake for about 20 minute?  The recipe said 40-50 but I think that's incorrect.  Just make sure they're not burning.  Let cool a bit and enjoy.

Greg knocked on my door tonight to ask if I wanted to make sourdough starters for bread.  And of course I did, because cooking's my thing and I love bread.  It's a 14 day process to grow a culture, and it starts very simply.  You sanitize everything, then mix together flour and water in a big container.  To start off the fermentation, you use some type of organic fruit...we happened to have apples.  So you put apple slices in cloth bags squish the juice into the starter and put in the entire bag in the mixture.  Then the lid goes on tightly and it sits until the next step.  It's really a growing thing, and it has to be fed like an infant.  It's sitting next to my bed and I'm going to sing to it every night so it feels loved.

It's getting late and I have to go to sleep...night night.

Another Tuesday

Picture # 1: The sky in the Simpson's opening theme

Picture # 2: The sky in Salisbury, VT

Starting off with a story...so Greg's stepdad found my blahg online somehow (impressive and slightly creepy) (Hi Greg's stepdad, if you're reading!) and told Hannah and Greg about it, and apparently sent it to some of his family (Hi extended family!)...so my audience has grown.  It makes me feel slightly famous, and slightly nervous.  I'm just going to continue on my merry blogging way, though, and try not to censor too much.  Because then it would just be boring.

Today was another one of those crazy Tuesdays, although it wasn't really that crazy for me.  I went to bed late last night because I was up blahgging (late means 10:00), and then I woke up at 4:30.  So I was pretty tired all day, and consequently I had one of those days where I just annoyed myself to death.  Almost everything I said made me want to punch myself in the diaphragm.  So then I tried to stop speaking, which was almost as bad.  Oh, well.  I really must get more sleep.

The Daily Blue Ledger:

Woke up at 4:30 and did morning chores.  We just had a new girl freshen (I believe this means when a goat starts giving milk after having a baby? possibly?  Hannah?  Greg?) and she was so good for her second time being milked (first time being last night).  I was excited during the 2nd to last group of goats because I'd done the whole thing by myself and there were no problems.  Then during the last group I realized there were only 6 girls instead of 7, which meant one girl broke out while I was milking.  So I ran all over the field looking for a girl that hadn't been milked but I couldn't find her!  I'm really hoping there will be a day when none of these crazy things happen (milk spilling on the floor, goats jumping off platforms, missing girls, etc).  Ugh, what can I say, I'm a recovering perfectionist.  I worked in the cheese house after that.  I learned how to coat hard cheese with wax, which I'm really not very good at.  I think it might be easier if my hands were bigger and I was taller.  You dip a wheel of cheese halfway into the melted wax a few times and then spin it around so there aren't any drips.  Then you dip the other side, and then repeat the whole process.  It's really important to make sure that there aren't any pinholes in the wax, or bad molds will grow in there.  I also poured some chévre and tasted the new cranberry walnut chévre (SO YUMMY).  I think that was it...I gardened after that.  I weeded for about an hour and then Hannah and I planted corn!  I love the garden.  Oooo the spinach was ready to eat so I picked some, even though I already have a ton of spinach.  You can never have too much spinach, I always say.  I know Popeye agrees with me.

Barn Swallows:

Veggie Fried Rice

Cooked brown rice

Garlic

Fresh spinach

Button mushrooms

Red bell pepper

Peas, fresh or frozen

Sesame Oil

Flax seeds

Sunflower seeds

Flavorings: Soy sauce, Maple syrup, Nutritional Yeast, Red Pepper, Ginger Powder 

Saute garlic and red pepper in sesame oil until soft.  Add mushrooms, cook until soft, add peas and spinach, cook until spinach is wilting.  Add rice, saute until hot.  Add sunflower seeds, flax seeds, and all flavorings.  Healthy Chinese food!

Tomorrow is my day off, but I think it's going to rain.  We'll see what I do!  Your guess is as good as mine right now.

Sorry, Guys...

So I've been a pretty terrible blogger lately...but I have been really busy.  So where did I leave off?  Oh, yes.  Sunday.  Oh, it's only been one day since I posted!  That's not so terrible.  So my Sunday schedule is lovely, because I work in the cheese house from 8-12 and then I'm done!  I can wake up late and get out early.  I didn't know what I wanted to do with my half day off, and I was determined not to sit around by myself, so I decided to finally contact the one person I know up here, Molly.  And she was a good friend and invited me to hang out with her and her friend Abby.  Wooooo people my own age!  We went to get ice cream (which I don't eat, sadly) and walked around Middlebury.  Oh, fun fact about Vermont!  Not only are they the state with the largest number of western Buddhist converts, but they also call soft-serve ice cream "creemees."  It's like, "Hey, I'm bored.  Wanna go get a creemee?"  I think it's cute but I'm pretty sure I sound ridiculous saying it.  So I'll stick with good old soft serve.  Then Molly and her mom (who I really love) and I went to see the Narnia movie, which both Molly and I had already seen.  It's so epic, everyone should see it at least twice.  But it was really nice to not be sitting alone on the farm.

Daily Blue Ledger:

My sister Rachael has cleverly come up with my daily summary title...apparently the name of the newspaper in Superman is the Daily Ledger?  Anyway, very cute, I'm a fan.

This day started out normally, 8-12 in the cheese house.  It's June 2nd, Tucker's first day!  He seems really cool.  He's going to be a senior at Middlebury, and he's an environmental science/geology major.  Anyway, I flipped and wrapped some Crottina, put together some Lake's Edge, packed restaurant tubs of chévre, and rolled chévre in herbs.  They just came up with a new chévre!  We already have plain, pepper, and herbal.  Now we're going to have walnut cranberry.  It sounds so good, but I have yet to taste it.  I've heard that there's a place that makes chévre with chocolate...I think it sounds really interesting.  In a good way.  So after my cheese duty I went to the co-op, bought some yummy food, and came back to do evening chores.  It was the first time I had to bring the goats in from the woods (they graze in all sorts of different terrain: woods, wetlands, and open fields).  It was a crazy experience.  It's actually hilarious...you call the goats, and they just come trotting along in a double file line along their little goat trail.  Getting them all in the barn took about a 1/2 hour, because some of them break away and you have to drag each back separately. 

A Goat's Tail:

When I started milking, in the very first group (the groups usually start out being well behaved and by the end are absolutely stupid) a goat jumped of the 3 foot high milking platform and ran out the barn door.  My worst nightmare had come true.  Remember when I'd written about my vision of me running up the road in spotted rain boots?  Yeah.  It happened.  Minus the roadkill.  Scariest thing ever, though.  I caught her eventually and brought her back, and that was my exercise for the day.  And after that, the rest of the goats were just their usual stubborn selves.  Once I was done milking, I had to clean up and feed the pigs (also very stressful, because of aforementioned Miyazaki film). 

Fun fact about me:  I'm dumb.  Today I got shocked by an electric fence.  The end.

Barn Swallows:

I was so tired after that milking that I just made a salad...

Mixed Greens

Black Beans

Avocado

Goat Cheese

Carrot

Sunflower Seeds

Annie's Goddess Dressing

Combine ingredients, toss, and eat.  So simple.

Sorry for the lack of pictures...they wouldn't load for some reason.  Hopefully it'll work tomorrow.

Rutland Market

This will be a short post because I want to go to sleep...

Today was Saturday, which means market day.  I woke up early to milk the goats, and then got dressed in my Blue Ledge Farm shirt and squeezed into the truck.  It's about a 30 minute drive to Rutland, but the views were gorgeous, so it seemed to take no time at all.  The morning was very misty and damp, and the mountains were just blue-grey silhouettes in the distance.  I think it's actually more lovely when it's rainy than when it's sunny.  We were worried that the market would be slow because of the bad weather, but it was bustling!  We sold all the cheese except for a camembrie and an herbal chévre and I got to keep them, which is freakin' awesome.  The Rutland market is a lot bigger and busier than the Middlebury one.  The Middlebury market generally is more about quality than quantity...Rutland had it's share of vendors offering crappy t-shirts and generic jewelry.  However, the best bread in the state, according to Hannah, is available at this market.  It's called Bear Mountain Bread and, although I have not tried every loaf in the state, I would not be surprised if this was the best.  It has a crackly crust and a chewy interior and it's absolutely delicious.  And the guy selling it is probably the most adorable old man I've ever seen.  Hannah told me he's a former Jesuit priest but he fell in love with a nun and they left and got married.  

I got paid!  Even though I spilled milk all over the floor, they paid me $60 dollars.  I got a raise!!  Now I'll be able to buy food and possibly gas!  Wowie zowie.  

There was a little festival hosted by co-op on the green in Middlebury tonight, and I went with Greg and the kids.  They had asked us to bring a goat with us, so we loaded up a tiny kid (baby goat) along with the kids (baby humans) in back seat of the truck.  This goat was the cutest thing ever...you could just pick her up and carry her around.  Livia named her Sarah.  Once we got back to the farm and put her back with the other goats, she kept trying to follow us around and wagged her tail like a dog.  I wanted to put her in my bed and pretend she was a teddy bear.

Now I'm tired and it's late...I have pictures of the bread and the goat but I'll put them up tomorrow. 

Night night.  

Stupidity

Picture 1 My Blue Ledge Farm shirt...they come in also sorts of really adorable colors...this lovely rust/orange is my other favorite.

Picture 2 Vegetables from the co-op!

Picture 3 YUMMY SOUP

Picture 4 A Barn Swallow (I did not take this picture...I give credit to www.wildphotosphotographry.com)

So guess what?  I'm getting tan!  Working in the garden and eating most of my meals outside is starting to turn me a shade browner.  Excitement!  I never get tan.

What I decided today is that I'm going to pretend that my blahg is like a daily newspaper.  And it will have columns, or maybe sections, like a newspaper.  The cute animal story (if I happen to have one) will be called "A ____'s Tail" (insert species).    I'll always have an overview of my day, but I can't think of what that should be called.  I could just call it the Daily Summary, but that's boring.  Or maybe "A Summer-y Day."  Anyway, the food section will be called "Barn Swallows" (that's my favorite).  If I ever wrote a farm cookbook, I'd call it Barn Swallows, and have a picture of a barn swallow on the cover.

A Summer-y Day

My scheduled hours today were from 8-12 in the cheese house and PM milking (4:30ish-6:30ish).  Third day in a row that I could get up late!  The day started out well enough; I worked in the cheese house salting camembrie and wrapped cheese for the farmer's market tomorrow.  Then I went to the co-op to get some vegetables for dinner...god I love the coop so much.  Spinach was on sale!  Joyous day.  I got back from the coop and got ready for evening milking.  The goats were being so obnoxious!  You have to open this little door and let in 10 goats, but sometimes they just refuse to come through and it's so frustrating.  So that put me in a really bad mood.  And then when I was done, I wasn't concentrating, and I turned off the machine without pumping the last batch of milk into the tank, so it all spilled on the floor.  Probably like, $50 worth of milk or something.  Who knows.  I felt so terrible...I'm probably the worst intern ever.  I can't believe they pay me.  I should ask them not to pay me this week.

Ok, and the angst is over.

A Pig's Tail:  This isn't really a story, I just wanted to use the title.  I fed the pigs today!  That's it.  I guess I can say more...there's nothing that makes you feel more like a farmer than feeding the pigs.  Something about climbing over fences carrying buckets of grain and pouring it into a feeding bin while 3 pigs and 10 piglets are squealing and fighting to get the food and then carrying six full buckets of whey and pouring it over the pigs heads because their faces are still buried in the grain in the bin makes you feel like you're really in touch with those colonial farmer roots.  The whole thing is a frightening experience, however, because while I'm feeding them, all I can think of is Princess Mononoke and those huge boars with those worm things coming out of them....that movie was scary.  Amazing, but scary.  

To comfort myself after the milking mishap, I made myself some soup.  Soup is the most soothing food ever.

Barn Swallows: Vegetable Quinoa Soup

Vegetable broth

Asparagus

Spinach

Mushroom

(Potatoes would be good but I didn't have any)

Peas, fresh or frozen (at the co-op they sell local organic frozen peas)

Quinoa, cooked

Flavorings (I am the queen of spice so I used ginger, red pepper, curry powder, nutritional yeast, soy sauce, and sesame oil)

Put vegetable broth in a pot, add asparagus, bring to boil, add mushrooms, boil for a minute, lower to simmer, add spinach and quinoa, simmer until spinach is wilted, and turn off heat.  Pour into bowl, add flavorings, and eat!  But don't burn your tongue.

So, if anyone has any ideas about what my Daily Overview should be called, post them here.  Or email them to me, if posting is not an option for you.  Or any ideas for other sections would be good.

Thursdays

So I know that I said Tuesdays were the crazy day, but Thursdays are even crazier!  The problem is, we are producing so much milk right now and making so much cheese that there's nowhere to put it.  Greg is trying to make all these cheeses that require all these different moulds (it's funny, because cheese deals with both molds and moulds...moulds are the containers that the curds are ladled into), but there isn't enough space.  We're trying to make chévre and camembrie in the same day...it's so complicated that I can't really write it down without boring people to death...sorry if I already have.  What it comes down to is that today I washed moulds from 9AM-3PM (6 hours).  With a 15 minute break for lunch.  

So it's this absolutely insane day and it turns out that there's another tour!  It's a group of 40 older people from an assisted living place.  Greg was saying how when you get old, it's just like college again (he once worked in an assisted living home)...you're put in one place with people who are the same age as you and they have all these activities set up for you, field trips and classes and such.  Anyway, we're trying to wash all these moulds before we have to pour camembrie, but we have to give these old people a tour around the cheese house while we're doing it.  Story: Greg HATES flies...understandably, because they bring contamination into his perfectly clean cheese house.  So he is this master fly killer.  He can just catch them in his hand.  It's crazy.  And he's giving the tour, and the whole time he's talking his eyes are just following this fly around, and the fly lands right over this tiny old lady's head, and he stops talking and just suddenly slaps the wall over this woman's head and kills the fly.  She was scared to death.  Thankfully, this incident did not stop them from buying about 200 dollars worth of cheese and shirts.

After I was freed from the house of cheese, I gardened a little bit and made dinner.  Dinner tonight was a quinoa salad.

Rainbow Quinoa Salad

1/2 cup quinoa

1 cup vegetable broth (or water + salt)

Tomato (red)

Carrot (orange)

Yellow bell pepper (yellow)(duh)

Avocado (green)

Onion

Sunflower seeds (or any sort of seed/nut)

Balsamic Vinegar (or any acidic liquid)

Olive Oil (or any other oil)

Maple Syrup (optional, but yummy)

Combine quinoa and broth in pot, bring to boil, let simmer for 15 minutes/until liquid is absorbed.  Chop vegetables into bite sized pieces.  Mix balsamic vinegar and oil in a 1:3 ish ratio and add some maple syrup, if you like (I like).  Mix everything together, add sunflower seeds, and I added nutritional yeast because I put it on everything.  YAY

I didn't take any pictures today because I was so busy : (

Deal with it.