It is a rare occasion (lately) for me to have 4 days straight off from the library and I have tried to make the most of them. I am currently on day 3 and, after two days of getting up to speed, I feel like I got a ton done today!!
Originally, we planned to go to Kalispell and pick up some brewing equipment and bulk foods but we decided to stay in the Libby area and track down as much as we could locally. The aim was to make some pasta from scratch, use my giant old-fashioned cheese press (see picture) for the first time, and get a load of sawdust for the garden since the weather was reasonable. We managed to do all three.We hit up Homesteaders' Ranch and Feed Store first and I, again in attempts to shop locally, put in an order for thermophilic cheese starter, calcium chloride, and Star-San sanitizer (the sanitizer we use for both beer and cheese). We can't get any of these things locally and so I'm interested to see if Homesteaders' can get them and, if so, how much it will run us. Homesteaders has been carrying brewing equipment for about a year and it has really been nice. At Naturally Good Things we picked up some local eggs for $2.25 a dozen to use in the pasta and I picked up some yogurt culture, which they do carry. I have been trying to track down a local source of cow's milk to no avail so we had to buy it at the regular grocery.
Errands done, we let the 4 gallons sit out to warm up while I learned how to drive a truck. Really, I have never driven a truck. And since we bought an old one last week, I really need to be comfortable driving one. Since our other car is a Toyota Prius, the 1988 Chevy Silverado feels really, really big. But you know what's nice? Taking your own truck to the post yard to pick up a truck load of sawdust without conniving friends with trucks into helping you. So we did that.
On getting home, Nate started the pasta with a recipe from The Backyard Homestead while I washed the past maker. We bought this book even though the libraries have it because it has a ton of information on a lot of things we do regularly. What caught our eye in particular was the sections on backyard grain-growing, overviews of livestock, and basic directions for things from scratch (for example, pasta). We made a pound of fetuccini in under an hour and had some for dinner while the milk was warming up in a hot water bath in the sink. We are hoping to do what we did with bread: slowly work our way toward making all of it from scratch. We eat a lot of pasta and bread, so having both of these items made at home would be just awesome. We don't buy any bread anymore, so I think we can make it work with pasta, too. We figured out that a pound of pasta costs about 65 cents made at home and it will be even cheaper when we get chickens in the spring since most of that cost is eggs. We also figure that we can slowly mix in wheat flour to the white recipe to make a good whole grain mix past somewhere in the middle.
The cheese is still in progress as I write this; the curds are cooking. We are making Derby cheese from the 200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes. It is another book I will probably have to buy--great information, although she wants to put calcium chloride in everything. It is supposed to increase yields but if you don't have any and you did not read closely you might think that you could not make cheese without it. Other than that, the recipes are great and there are many new and interesting recipes and recipes for non-cow kinds of milk, like buffalo mozzarella and many sheep and goat cheese recipes. We are making a three gallon batch and I will be using the whey for ricotta and the 4th gallon of milk for a soft cheese, probably an herbed cream cheese. We will get it into the press tonight, probably around 11pm. Then we'll see the old cheese press in action! I will blog about that separately once I have seen it working.
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