First attempts...

Today we cracked open Bill's first aged cheese. It was a farmhouse cheddar that was aged for 4 weeks. It looks like this:



It tastes yummy but is a bit wet. This has something to do with undercooked curds...or so it seems from Bill's mumblings as he was searching the internet for clues.

We have another cheddar that he cooked the day after this one that is still aging. That one was pressed longer so more of the whey was squeezed out. It looked a lot more compact and a lot drier when he waxed it. That one won't be ready until May. But in the meantime, we'll be spreading this first attempt on bread and happily eating it all up.

We also brewed our first soda - a ginger beer. Brewing soda is like brewing beer, but you stop the yeast before it eats all the sugar. We mixed grated ginger, lemon juice and sugar, cooked it up, let it cool a little and added yeast. Then we plopped it in bottles and expected to wait 24-72 hours for the yeast to make enough carbonation that we could call it soda.

Yeast work faster or slower depending on the temperature. We know it's a bit cold in our house, so we were thinking it would be closer to 72 hours. It's a bit nerve-wracking because if we waited too long the yeast would make so much CO2 that the bottles could explode.

After 48 hours...and again after 72...we opened a bottle and found our soda was still a bit flat.

Today - a week later (162 hours) - our ginger beer has a delightful sparkle.


Next up...we'll be brewing beer, more soda and making some Parmesan cheese. We're happy with how we've started and are excited to build on our experience!

It's Super, I guess

The Super Bowl is here. It's...whatever. I'm not gonna be a downer about the BIGGEST MOST AWESOME EVENT EVER TO COME TO INDY OMG!!!

But, I'm not gonna pretend to like it either. Bill and I went down to the Super Bowl Village earlier this week to see what it was all about.


This is what Bill thought of it:


There was a zipline. It went a whole city block.


And a couple of Indy cars.


And a lot of people sort of standing around and drinking Bud Light.


That thing in the center of the road is like, a Fire and Ice lounge or something. It's the only food available in the village and I think it's actually all beer. I don't know who runs those. I heard a rumor it was the Indianapolis tourism board perhaps. But until it's confirmed, I'll assume the money goes to the NFL. And Budweiser.


There was also the NFL Experience. You pay $25 a person to stand in a really big line so that you can get inside a building and buy the official NFL gear (which is only sold inside that building). There were like games for kids and stuff too, I'm told. Apparently there are more checkout lanes in there than in a Super Walmart (I'm beginning to think the word "Super" ain't all that great), and they were all full constantly. Presumably all that money goes to the NFL.

But look at how much fun everyone is having.


Us too!

After about 20 minutes, we were just spent from all the fun, fun, fun, so we walked the 8 or 9 blocks back to my office and our car. We walked up Mass Ave, the center of awesome, independent Indianapolis. Lots of restaurants, shops, art, the best cupcakes, yummy truffles, an independent toy store, bars, (passable) pizza.... It's usually hopping every night of the week. These were the small, local businesses that would benefit so greatly from the unparalleled AWESOMENESS of the SUPER BOWL.


Or not. Where are all the people???

Oh, right.

Heard this evening at Saw-whet Manor...

Bill: We have, like, every size of cast iron skillet that they make.

Me: Does that make you happy?

Bill: YES! I mean, what other measure of a successful life could there possibly be?

-------

Some boys want big TVs or fancy cars or expensive watches. My man wants a well-seasoned 20-year old pan that costs $5 at a garage sale.

Love it.

It's cold here now...

We have snow:

...but just a few months ago it was so hot that our popcorn popped on the ears:

Cheeeeeese, Gromit!

We've recently acquired some exciting infrastructure which will greatly expand our food (and drink) making capabilities.

Bill has been making mozzarella for a while and decided it was time to step it up a notch. Today, following the recent purchase of a cheese press, he's going to start our first hard cheese - a farmhouse cheddar. I think he's a little discouraged that cheese making doesn't have an instant payoff, so he's starting with one that only has to be aged 4 weeks (instead of 4 months or 4 years).


I believe there will be wax involved. On Tuesday, apparently.


More to come!

We may have also acquired the tools and instructions for making beer and soda...but that's another weekend.

Happy Solstice from Indiana

We are in Indiana.

"Well, duh" you're thinking. "It says that right up there in the header ^."

Well, we're supposed to be in New York with our families for the holidays. But events have conspired and we're not. I'm not gonna lie. It sucks. It sucks a lot.

But we're trying to have some holiday spirit anyway. Today is the solstice and we celebrated with a Yule Log. The log must be cut by us on our property, so Bill picked out a great locust round.

We decorated it with a turkey feather for our birds, a (spouted) potato from our garden, and a bit of wool - all things we hope will be prosperous and abundant in the new year. We also included a cough drop for Bill and a bit of tape from my finger splint incident to keep us both healthy. Finally, on the very right is a bit of wrapping paper with a heart drawn on it - for happiness of everyone we love. We chose wrapping paper because the wrapped presents we won't be taking to NY this week are the most tangible reminder of our families right now.

Don't they look pretty??

The orange bobble ribbon is for my sister because she is funky and fun and her present should be too.

(sad face)

Ok - back to the Yule Log. We lit this year's log with the shard we kept from last year. Apparently keeping a bit of the Yule Log all year protects your house from lightening.

It totally worked for us.

Though, we did get hit by a tornado.

But it was a little tornado. It menaced our neighbors much worse than it did us.

So, anyway...that black coal in the center - that's last year's log chunk.

We saved a much bigger piece of this year's log - like half of it. Bill seemed to rather enjoy taking a flaming hunk of wood out of the stove, placing it on the ground outside and throwing water on it.

Boys.

We also cracked open the Rumtopf. We put this up with fruit leftovers from throughout the summer and fall. There's not a lot of drinking going on here this week, but we each ate a (very potent) peach slice.

We hope you all had a lovely solstice.

Things that come in the mail.

This morning Bill ordered our 2012 chickens. A bunch of them are dorkings.

Dorkings are dual purpose birds that originated in Italy during the Roman Empire. How awesome is that?? (When they come, I plan to show them my Roman oil lamp and see if they know where it came from or who it belonged to.)

They look like this:

(Photo from Wikipedia)

They should not be confused with what my sister calls Dork Birds - little plovers that we'd watch on vacation at Long Beach Island.

(photo also from Wikipedia)

We've also got some laying hens coming - a few more australorps (they lay like champions), a Rhode Island Red, and some Araucanas (aka Easter Egg Chickens).

The extra layers are because we had to order a minimum of 20 (25?) birds (it's a hatchery rule, I swear!), and the dorkings are limited availability (and it's possible we have a slight addiction to poultry). Dorkings are listed as threatened by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, so I'm guessing even the breeder doesn't have a lot of them.

We also ordered three hens for one of Bill's coworkers. We tried to give her some of the Hobbits we hatched this spring. She did some reading, built and coop and picked up three mostly grown chickens. We thought they were all hens. But, every single one of them was a rooster. Every one. They all started to crow and she brought them back. They're in our freezer now.

So, expect photos of new baby chickens that will come in the mail in mid-March.

In the meantime, we had some other cool things come in the mail. I participated in a swap on Ravelry where we picked odd holidays and sent presents to a partner to help them celebrate. My holiday was Lost Sock Memorial Day (a day to move on and and realize you are never going to find the lost mates for those single socks that you keep in the back of your drawer) and my partner sent me an awesome package. Everything was wrapped and decorated with single socks. So cute.


We also had an enormous, mysterious package waiting for us one rainy night.

After much excavation...

...we discovered it is an awesome, Billy-sized rocking chair from Bill's parents.

(That's not my living room...)

It's currently next to our wood stove and is quickly becoming my favorite spot to knit socks.