Perfect Mozarella and Tirzah.

My beautiful Tirzah has been in milk now for a little over 2 months. She has dropped some from the last time I weighed her milk but that was my fault. I separated her son from her because he's a bit of a randy little fellow and was irritating the girls in the pen with them so i began bottle feeding him. But Hope was really only nursing off of one side while the other side was dropping. When I noticed the drop finally I separated Hope off as well and began milking 2X a day. I am slowly bringing Tirzah back up but I did weigh her milk yesterday and the amounts aren't as horrible as I expected. Yesterday she did 1.3 and 1.4 lbs of milk in her am and pm milkings. NOW, to put all that milk to use.......

I stayed up WAAAAAY too late but for good reason.

I made PERFECT Mozarella cheese. Oh my what a rush! I really do enjoy making cheese.

I want to learn to make lots of different kinds of cheese but so far I can only boast 3 - Chevre, Mozarella and Ricotta. I've made Feta twice and it only turned out good ONCE! Lame. It's funny what little things get you excited.

We are 3 weeks away from our next kidding - Coral. Keeping fingers and toes crossed for twin doelings. Still am unsure if Stars is Pregnant or not - she sure doesn't look it but I never saw her come back into heat. I am thinking about sending her blood in (with Corals) for CAE, CL and pregnancy testing. (I'll skip the preg test on Coral though, she is very obviously pregnant!)

If she's not - she's got a hot date with the new buck.....

C is for CHEESE

Like many goat owners, we milk our goats and we make Cheese. We make 3 different cheeses around here: Chevre, Ricotta and Mozarella. Occassionally we will make Feta and we rarely make chevre anymore as we can do any chevre recipe with Ricotta and we like the taste better. We bought Mary Jan Toth's book Goat's Produce Too! The Udder Real Thing which has a lot of Cheese, yogurt, ice cream and (not for the faint of heart/vegetarians) Chevon recipes (Chevon is goat meat). This is our Ricotta draining. We like ours drier than some folks and we like to mix it with herbs to spread on crackers. My favorite herbal/cheese mixes are Garlic and Dill and Mediterranian: Sun Dried Tomatoes, Artichokes, Oregano, Kalamata Olives and Garlic. Also we use our Cheese for making Pizzas and Lasagnes. YUMMO! This post is making me hungry for dinner. If you want any of our recipes - feel free to email me and I'll send you our goat cheese mix recipes for free! I do cheesemaking classes for folks but it's not hard, we taught ourselves to make the cheeses we make - it just takes TIME.
Cheese is probably the most common product we make from our goat milk - along with Soap - but you'll have to wait for that post for S!