If you were to look around our kitchen lately you would see that milk is taking over - milk filters, cheeseRaw Milk in Fridge presses, butter dishes, ice cream makers, etc.  Honey, our milk cow, has been back from the artificial insemination farm for about 2 1/2 weeks now.  We had her AI'd this year because we wanted to implant a Murray Gray embryo from another cow in our herd.  This way, Honey will have a Murray Gray calf and will help add to our beef herd.  Before she left Tim was milking her once a day and letting her calf, Cocoa, have the rest of her milk.  We would get about 1 to 1.5 gallons per day and never really seemed to have more milk than we could handle.  If we didn't need any more milk that day, then Tim would just let Cocoa have it.  But after Honey and Cocoa returned it was time to wean the little fella which means that all of Honey's milk is ours!

Before we knew it our fridge was filled with milk.  We get about 3-4 gallons of milk per day!  There are only three of us drinking the milk, so we have an abundance.  This lead us to find other uses and ways of preserving milk.  Raw cows milk is not homogonized so once the milk sits in the fridge for a bit, the cream will separate to the top and you can skim it off.  I have been skimming this cream by the quart full.  First, I made butter.  Then, Tim made ice cream.  But we still had more cream, so I ventured on to make cream cheese.  Wow, was this easy!  Now we make these things on a regular basis and are experimenting with different flavors of ice cream and making cream cheese dips.  All delicious! 

But once you skim off the cream, you are still left with gallons of milk.  Since Honey is a Jersey cow with a little Swiss, her milk has a very high butterfat content.  If the milk has sat for more than a day before skimming, the heavy cream on top is as thick as paint.  Even with the cream skimmed, her milk is not like skim milk.  It is even thicker than 2% milk, but not quite like whole milk.  I've been drinking LOTS of chocolate milk...YUM!  But we needed to use up this milk, so I've been dabbling with cheese making. 

I've made some simple cheeses before, but it uses a lot of milk and can get expensive.  Now I have all of the Farmhouse Cheddarraw materials, but not the know-how.  It always seemed so complicated to me to make cheese, especially hard cheese which needs to be aged.  But I've been reading and decided to jump right in.  I made the cream cheese and mozarella first.  Easy!  Then I made Queso Blanco.  Easy!  With my confidence up I decided to try a Farmhouse Cheddar.  Easy!  I couldn't believe that it worked - at least I think it did.  I won't actually know until it ages for two months.  We had a small dormitory fridge that we set up and turned it all the way up so it's at 50 degrees - good enough.  One of the cheddar wheels I waxed and the other I left to develop a natural rind.  Ok, I didn't intend on this, but I took too long to order the cheese wax and by then it was too late to wax the first wheel.  This wheel had grown some mold already and I didn't want to wax this in so I decided to try a natural rind.  I have been washing this cheese with cider vinegar to wipe the mold off and I will continue this for at least 2 months.  To be honest, I don't really know if this is proper, but I intend to ask some experts before we eat it!  Even with this little hang up, I feel like making cheese is easy - although time consuming.  I'm excited to try other varieties and I'm so grateful to Honey for giving us such a wonder gift that we can use in so many different ways.