One Local Summer #3

Summer Supper

It has been too hot to contemplate eating much of anything--much less cooking an elaborate meal. All that seems appealing some days is salad. Today, though, we managed to have a low-heat culinary adventure: making goat cheese!

After reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, we were inspired to try out a lot of traditional processing--from planting a larger garden, to renewed commitment to canning, to dehydrating, and to cheesemaking.

On her advice we checked out Home Cheese Making and got to work. First we tried mysost, a Norwegian whey cheese--which turned out extremely well. Watching the last episode of Frontier House sold us on trying goat cheese next.



The process is amazingly simple. Heat the milk slightly, add the cultures from the little cultures pack (or you can even use vinegar or lemon juice!), and let it sit overnight. Drain. Season and eat. Really--it is that easy. And the results? Awfully tasty.

For this week's supper in honor of One Local Summer, we ate our own goat cheese (made from local goat's milk), mixed with a pinch of salt and a lot of chives from our garden. We spread it on top of non-local French bread along with garden cucumbers. Cool and delicious!





We finished the meal with clafouti using Julia Child's basic recipe but replacing the sugar with local maple sugar bought at our farmer's market and the wheat flour with locally-milled rye flour sold at our food co-op. The milk and eggs came from our dairy provider and the cherries from the farmer's market.



Next experiment: making mozzarella!