(no subject)

[which_chick]

I had another busy weekend in this, the summer of the year. I have no idea where the time has gone, but it's flown by this year. I keep thinking it's still May. *sigh* This weekend I spent Friday night and on into Saturday morning destroying a set of clean sheets. That was nice but it meant that I was starting the weekend down about four hours of sleep.



Saturday I got up at six, took a badly-needed shower, had breakfast at La's, and spent a lot of the day at the local 4-H roundup. (This is a horse show. For children.) Cass (child of the Horse People) took 2nd in Hunter Under Saddle (no jumps) and also 2nd (out of two) in Hunter Hack. Horse got correct leads, framed up, stepped out well. The second in Hack was because she refused the first jump. *sigh* We're working on it. Cass jumped the practice jumps at the show just fine and also at home. She just gets nervous in the ring. It's her first year going over jumps. Practice will totally cure this.

While waiting through the interminable stretch of not-very-interesting (no kids I care about in them) classes, I played hooky from the horse show and went to see Up with BTY and his kids and Heather and Tess. The movie was great. I really liked it, particularly the bird. (In my world, with my brother's kids, there is an imaginary bird. It consists of my thumb and first two fingers, like a sock puppet without a sock, sort of. The imaginary bird goes "Nom-nom-nom" and takes soft, quick bites out of kid arms. It does not leave marks or use fingernails. It just goes "Nom-nom". Great fun, really. I can play Nom-nom and wind the kids up like little energetic frenetic tops to where they collapse into giggles when I look at them in a Nom-nom sort of way. This is particularly amusing just before bedtime. Then I leave. :) I am a bad, bad aunt. Anyway. The Nom-nom bird, which I'd never imagined in a corporeal sense before, now looks just like Kevin only smaller.)

Following the horse show, I stopped by at Joe's and watched Land of the Lost episodes with Joe and the kids until I could no longer prop my eyes open. Land of the Lost sucks just as much as I thought it did when I was a mere pup. Possibly even more. I still hate the furry kid. I still hate the Sleestak. While the bulk of the thing was soundstage drivel that would have to ascend several staircases to reach mediocrity, I was unreasonably amused by the episode where they got "Corny" the unicorn. Corny was clearly a long-suffering Shetland-sized pony. I thought it was absolutely hysterical that a prehistoric-ish unicular equid responded properly to the same !click noise that makes (for example) Nicknick accellerate.

Sunday morning I got up early and made curry for La and BTY, then went over to La's (with curry) for Sunday breakfast, which is the egg-n-tortilla thing that I can't spell. After that, Trys and Cass and I hauled Mariah (Cass's 4-H horse this year, also Trys's "make a jumping pony and sell it" project animal) down to Kat's to spend a month being trained by a pro who will also school the kid (our kid) on the horse over jumps. We would really like the pair of them to do well so that we can sell Mariah for obscene amounts of money. (Trysta had her for sale last year, in the DC/Virginia market, with flyers all over. She got quite a few calls. To a caller, they all asked the same question: "She's a very lovely pony, but why is the price so low?" Buh? We were asking five fucking grand. Pony's probably worth about six hundred up here. We thought five grand was aiming a bit high. However, it appears that five grand ponies have something wrong with them. So, we took down all the ads and are waiting a year and putting more show experience and professional training into the pony so that we can relist her for ten grand. At least people won't ask why she's so cheap then.)

We dropped Mariah off and drove home. I took a spin on the red idiot, who did surprisingly well. I'm still working on the whole notion of contact. Not the horse. Me. I'm not good at it and not used to it and not... *sigh* It's an issue. Issues take practice. We don't suck at the walk but add speed and everything falls apart. Bending, however, is coming right along. I also sidepassed her over one of the ground poles (both directions), not the cheat walk-over-and-stop-halfway sidepass thing either. We walked up alongside it and sidepassed over the whole thing and then did it again, the other way, on the next pole in the series. Goof didn't even give me any shit about it. She was like "Oh, all right." That was surprising to me -- the last time I'd tried that, she gave me a ration of shit and refused all over the place. It has, however, been several years since the last time I tried.

I also took Ceres out for a short ride. I wound up towing Fred on Roxy. Ceres leads other horses just fine but she has a huge, gigantic walk and didn't manage to find a good way to rate her while leading Roxy in my left hand. I don't lead other horses from horseback as well as La does. I wound up getting high and tight and so Ceres got high and tight a couple of times. Her feet never left the ground or anything, she just got pressed and we ground to a halt and reorganized and started again. Fred got worried over this. He frets a lot. Horses are not his thing, really, and I'm not sure why he wants to be on them in the first place. (He's Cass's little brother, about eight or so.) HIS horse was fine. Roxy didn't get pressed at all about anything so I'm not sure why he was so worried. (Fred's train of thought: "If your horse bucks then she'll run into my horse and my horse will buck and I'll fall off and hit the ground and it will hurt..." This I know, because he shared it with me. We were so far from any of that happening that it was along the lines of "If your horse turns into a mess of balloons and lifts us up into the air and we float all the way to South America...")

Got done with horses, went over to Joe's for dinner and a walk, then home to my house for laundry. Busy weekend. During the walk I scouted for sassafrass trees, the which I found. Not sure why anyone would want to smoke a turkey with sassafrass wood (mom's boyfriend Rod's old friend down the street would like to do this), but I can provide the sassafrass, probably by midweek here coming. Check for updates before making the drive, though. Wood will be delivered in a square plastic cat litter bucket, labled in sharpie, so easily portable and tidy.

Also on the evening's agenda, the butter project has amassed enough cream to proceed with the making of butter. Since other things made-from-scratch (like bacon and perfect gingersnaps and eclairs) are surprisingly more tasty than the store-bought items and since I already really like butter, a lot, I was really tempted by the article about making butter in the June-July issue of The Mother Earth News.

In the article, the magazine says "Jersey cream is widely regarded as the ideal cream for butter making." Now, the horse people have a cow. (Just one, at home. They have other cows loaned out around the countryside in sort of a cow-rental program the details of which I do not pretend to understand. However, at home, there is one cow.) The current home-based cow is named Horns. She is more-or-less a Jersey cow. She's more Jersey than she is anything else. I enlisted the help of the horse people in the butter project by promising them a share of the resulting butter. So, for the last week, the horse people have been carefully saving me milk from the cow (usually it goes to feed calves from the loaned-out cows) and putting it in the fridge so that the cream rises to the top. When the cream has risen, they've been skimming cream off (there's about an inch of cream on a gallon pickle jar of milk from Horns the mostly-Jersey cow) and saving it for me. The skimmed milk is then heated up (so that the calves will drink it) and fed to the calves so it's not wasted. The magazine kind of pimps the idea of tasting varietal butter from a single breed of cow. If this whole thing actually works as advertised, I will have butter that is single-sourced from a fucking cow with a name. Now that's small-batch artisanal flavor, there. This had better work.

I am currently waiting for the cream to warm up to sixty degrees. It's fridge temperature right now and the magazine says it will do butter better if it's warmer so it's sitting on the counter and approaching room temperature in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. When it gets warm enough, I'm going to make it into butter by agitating it. For that, I'm going to use a mixer instead of the kindergarten class "shake the jar" method. I am interested in making butter (which I have never done before) and not interested in entertaining a bunch of wriggly five year olds.

Special for NYR and all fans of germ theory out there: This project uses raw milk from an actual cow. The milk has not been homogenized. It has not been pasteurized at all, not even the flash high temperature-short duration thing that leaves milk tasting uncooked. The milk is hand-milked from the cow into an open bucket and then poured through a coffee filter (gets the big hunks out) into a glass pickle jar.

Fun fact: If saving cream from your own cow, you get a better yield if you just keep the first half of the milk for cream. The second half of the milking has less cream in it and may be fed to calves forthwith. I'm sure this will be trenchant and immediately-useful information for many members of the studio audience. :) After the 'pocalypse, remember, you heard it here first.

Comments

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Everyone right now go buy a pint of heavy cream and whip it until it breaks and makes butter. (Use a mixer.) This is educational AND fun.

The cream whips like for normal for whipped cream. Just keep beating it until it breaks. The texture gets all grainy and wrong and it's freaking sudden and magical. Very cool stuff, that. This is the educational part -- if you learn what cream looks like just before it breaks, you will never unintentionally make butter when what you really wanted was whipped cream.

Once the whipped cream has broken, keep beating it until it looks like scrambled eggs. (The jersey cow cream I am working with is very yellow. It's so yellow that it looks fake, like I dyed it.) It is not done when it looks like whipped butter for making cookies or something. Keep beating it until it looks like dry scrambled eggs, all clumpy.

Stop beating a minute and mash the butter with a spatula. Does white liquid ooze out? If yes, you're pretty good. If not, beat another couple of minutes and try again. Once you have the white liquid thing going on, mash and fold and re-mash the butter. Drain off white liquid (buttermilk, can be saved for baking) and repeat the mash-n-fold thing. Beat a little more, maybe. You want the white liquid to drain out. It's bad for the butter.

Then, put it in the fridge to chill again (if doing this in spring/summer when it's warm). After it's cold again, put the butter bowl under cold (COLD) water and fold/mash the butter until the water runs clear. Finally, remove bowl from water and fold/mash the butter again until the water is all drained out. Now you're ready to salt, mold, and chill your butter. Salt is not very much. Molds are to make your butter prettier. I skipped that step. Chill, well, the fridge, yo. Eat within the week.

This is really kind of nifty. It's amazingly nifty.

The butter, which has excellent mouth feel and dissolves readily and easily at mouth temperature and looks like it would be amazing to cook with -- it tastes like cow. It really reminds me of the way that raw milk tastes like cow. (Bought milk, shelf-stable organic or regular grocery store milk (whole fat, skim, two percent, or whatever) or calcium-enhanced does NOT taste of cow like raw milk does. You do not know what "cow" tastes like until you've had raw milk from a cow. If you've ever hand-milked a cow and gotten cow milk all over your hands, "cow" tastes like your hands smell after that.) The home-made butter is stickier than "real" butter, the bought kind, probably because it contains less water.

The home-made butter is bright yellow, so yellow that it looks like oleo instead of like real butter. I swear, it's the same color as fucking Parkay. I didn't put food coloring in it. This is what came out of the thrice-damned cow. Really. I am going to take a picture here so that you can all see what it looks like compared to storebought butter. It looks totally not-real in color. (I'll need daylight for that, so probably tomorrow.)

Now, this is butter made from a real cow that goes outside and eats actual grass and stuff. It is not a cow on super-quality pasture or a cow eating a scientifically-approved diet of sileage, alfalfa hay, and grain. It is a cow that, in the summertime, wears a fifteen-foot chain so that she can be tied to large pieces of immobile machinery across the road where the grass and weeds grow tall. (This does not particularly upset the cow. She's used to it and she has a water barrel and gets relocated twice a day to fresh grass/weeds.) She also gets a fair amount of grain twice daily when she is milked, but so do "real" cows in pro dairy operations.

My question here is how come the butter made from industrially-farmed dairy cows is so pale and not-yellow? Don't those cows go outside? Don't they get to eat actual living plants? What's the deal here that the pros can't have cows that make yellow butter like the yellow butter that comes from Horns, a cow who is currently chained to a rusty manure spreader with a flat tire?

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

It's because of carotene in the milk. It's a sign there's plenty of yummy Vitamin A in the milk. Because Horns is a Jersey-ish beast, the yellow color is particularly noticable.

Source: Auburn University (http://www.ag.auburn.edu/aaes/communications/bulletins/bull266/cover.pdf). ("The dairy cow depends entirely upon the carotene in her ration for her supply of vitamin A. She converts a part of this carotene into vitamin A for body use and for secretion in the milk. A part of the carotene eaten by the dairy cow, however, is secreted unchanged in the milk. In the case of the Jersey and Guernsey breeds especially, this unchanged carotene imparts a yellow color to the cream and butter and accounts for a significant portion of the total vitamin A value of these products.")

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised to hear that the foremilk is creamier from a cow, as I would swear I read that the reverse was the case for a human.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

The foremilk is creamier according to my cow milking experts. Maybe their cow is defective?