A Love Story

Bonnie & Junie B. Jones.
It is cute how the kids look like their mom even if their coloring is completely different.
These two are inseparable. 

We made the decision to allow the kids we keep to stay with their mothers as soon as we got goats and saw the amazing closeness among families. This means we get less milk at evening milking since the kids enjoy drinking throughout the day, but it is worth the trade off for us to see them all together. At night all the kids go in one pen together and the mothers enjoy a break. That leaves plenty of morning milk for us. 

This was the arrangement until this week when our little goat Junie B. Jones, now eight months old, decided she had a different plan in mind. Just recently she has developed the trick of jumping out of her pen in the morning and evening as we are delivering grain. Because she was the smallest of our kids, she is spoiled and feels she should get her breakfast and dinner first! The other night, she did not go back in with the other kids after she ate. I was a little worried she would get stuck out in the barn so later in the evening I went out and found that she had jumped into the pen with her mom and Don Pedro (he is a wether who has been Bonnie's friend and stall mate since we got them as kids). They were curled up together in a little ball, enjoying the visit. Every night now she does the same trick of sneaking in with her mother after we have shut off the lights and closed the barn door. 

As I prepare to let my oldest daughter head off to college in six months, I must admit I found this especially touching. There is a pull between mother and daughter that defies any walls of space or time, a connection which no one can sever. Because I think part of the fun is that Junie thinks she is being naughty, I will still put her in with the kids each night and delight each morning when I find her stretching into the day next to her mom. Why not keep kids close for as long as they want to be with us? I am savoring each moment I get with Lila for sure! Animals provide the simplest reminder of what is right and good in the world. 

Snowy Day...perfect for making caramels.

Snowy day made for cranking the music in the kitchen and making caramels. 

Our goat milk, butter and salt.

There is a simple beauty in simple ingredients. 

What a luxury to get to watch the mixture caramelize...and it takes  about 3 hours less than our cajeta.

This year, after 21years of full time teaching, I am trying a new schedule - teaching 4 out of the normal load of 5 classes - which allows me to cram them all into one day of our alternating day schedule and have the other day free for farming and cheese making. This has been a lifesaver all fall as we adjusted to the demands of being a licensed dairy and found ourselves often busy each night until 11 and waking up to do it all again at 5:30 a.m. Although a bit of a financial pinch and tiring at times, the change in schedule and the natural energy which comes with following a dream made our new enterprise possible. 

Then January hit and the world finally slowed down. Today is the first day since May when I feel completely calm and unrushed. We are drying off the goats which means I am only milking every other night, and since there is very little milk, that means it is time to close up the cheese kitchen until April when we will be eager to start up all the excitement again. The days I am not teaching now take on a unfamiliar calm which I have a few weeks to learn to savor! It is amazing how we (especially in New England I think) become so used to busyness that we forget how not to be. The race comes to define our self worth and even when we could have a quiet day we fill it with running around. I am talking myself out of this insanity this week...it helps that snow has settled again over Maine and I have a delicious goal I have been waiting for a long time to pursue. 

I am going to perfect goat milk caramels. While most caramel candy recipes call for cream, I had read that goat milk makes especially creamy candies and figured it would be fun to work out a recipe suited for our Nigerian Dwarf goat milk. The results so far are heavenly. Today I began the process of keeping a more detailed record of my process so that I can pin down the best approach. Sea Salted Vanilla Bean Caramels this week. Next week I'd like to play with an espresso caramel. By April I hope to have the caramels perfected and cool packaging developed so that we can sell them! 

The End of the Season is Bittersweet

There were a few bitterly cold days recently. When I came in from the barn my pinky fingers (the only ones not involved in milking) were little blocks of ice. If you had visited on those mornings I would have said that I couldn't wait to stop milking. But in truth, when I begin to dry off the herd it always feels a bit sad. Morning and evening milking becomes so much a part of my life, that I begin to depend on these half hour breaks at dawn and dusk as a quiet time to refocus and reflect. The same is true for the daily routine of cheese making. The simple beauty of cracked pepper on a plate, plain cheese in a stainless bowl, the scent of freshly sliced herbs and garlic, and cheese hanging in a flour sack never gets old. The whole process is so aesthetically pleasing that it feels more like reward than work.

Time away from what we love, however, refuels our passion and the goats have earned the weeks of rest when their only job will be to grow the 1-5 healthy kids which are now brewing in all of our 13 bred goats! So I began by switching to just evening milking and soon will milk every other day and by the end of January, they should all be dried off.

Perhaps the perfect celebration of this transition in the season was our final cheese making class last weekend. Eight eager cheese makers gathered for an afternoon to try their hand at milking a goat, snuggle our kids who are now 8 months old, and to make chevre, feta and cajeta. It was such fun to share the magic of turning milk into cheese with others and we had a ball. When the class was done, my energy was renewed and I couldn't wait already to start all over again in the spring.

There will be mornings in February for sure when I miss the splash of milk in a pail, miss leaning against a warm goat to fight the cold, the soft sounds of a goat enjoying grain, but there will be plenty of cold ones, when it will be just fine to ignore the first alarm and sleep in an extra half hour.  There's always next year.