Summer SupperIt 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
!