Eight Acres

As well as crying over the lack of milk while Bella is dry, I was also worried about not having whey.  Whey is an essential ingredient in so many of my new-found fermented foods  (from sauerkraut to ginger beer, and soaking brown rice before cooking) that I didn't know what I would do without it.  As an experiment I started freezing small batches of whey each time I made cream cheese, and it seems to work perfectly.  Each batch of cream cheese makes about half a litre of whey (from one litre of milk), and for each fermentation I only need about half a cup of whey, so I just pour a little whey into small snap-lock bags and freeze them.  When I need the whey I just get out the bag and either defrost, or just run the bag under water to so I can get the whey-block out and put it straight into rice or whatever I'm fermenting.  frozen whey ready to use for fermenting things I also often substitute kefir for soaked flour recipes where whey or yoghurt is in the...

Last week I started to review the introduction to Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig.  This week I'll start on the first real chapter of recipes, called Mastering the Basics, which includes cultured dairy, sprouts, stocks, sauces and salad dressings. Cultured Dairy The strange part here is that we got Bella , our house cow, before I read this book and before I knew anything about the whole raw milk debate .  We drank raw milk sometimes when we visited our friends on a dairy farm, but we never really valued it as we should have.  My husband really wanted a cow because he liked the dairy lifestyle, and I couldn't see a problem with it, as I described previously , it will make it easier for us to get steers for beef instead of having to buy them locally.  Our friends told us they'd found the perfect cow for us, small, tame, already with a calf and used to being milked in the dairy, so even though we weren't totally ready , we brought home Bella...