Freshly delivered milk - 11th March 2011
Since we moved we have had a milkman; I’ve never had one before and I love it. It is like knowing you are going to get a parcel with something extra nice in.
Whole milk is different when it comes in a glass bottle too, the top is creamy just like on fresh milk from our own cows or goats.
I found this story on Channel Five News this evening and found it really interesting.
Some scientists believe most of the milk we drink in this country can make the symptoms worse. Since our report, there has been growing interest in an alternative. We reported how some scientists believe one special kind of cow’s milk may help with the effects of autism. Yet getting your hands on this kind of treatment isn’t as easy as popping down to the shops to buy a pint. You might think milk from one cow would be much like milk from any other. But actually different breeds make milk that contains distinct varieties of milk proteins. Most milk sold in Britain comes from cows producing a form of of protein called betacasein A1. But these Guernsey cows mostly produce a different type, betacasein A2. The research is still hotly debated, some scientists believe drinking A1 milk may worsen the symptoms of autism: so switching to A2 milk could help improve the conditions.
I’ve just loaded a film of me and my youngest sister hand milking Primrose on to YouTube.
I hope our hands only look black and blue on my computer screen!
I’ve finalloy managed to load the film of making butter on to YouTube, I’ve had to make the file a lot smaller than I wanted to but I think it looks OK.
Posted in Food, home grown food, Homemade
Ok, this weekend are my first two days off the past two weeks, and I’m really glad of them. There is only so much you can get done in the evenings once you get in for work, just making sure I’m got enough clean work clothes (work and ‘animal’ clothes are something you have to have here) when it’s raining on and off all the time is almost a full time job. We don’t have a tumble dryer.
Any way. Milk is the other big job at the moment. Milking is taking about 45 min – 1 hour, youngest-sister and Mother are doing that, and then collecting the cream, bottling milk and then sorting that days milk is also taking up the best part of an hour. And now we’ve Had to start making cheese, it was starting to make itself really. Before we’ve only really made soft ‘cream’ cheese but this weekend I got the cheese press out and had a got at using that, and it makes REAL cheese! It even looks like real cheese, very posh real cheese in fact.
So Saturday was spent making cheese and cleaning the kitchen and then we had lasagne, with loads of veg either from the local farm shop or from the garden (the nettles came from the garden) homemade pasta, I was layering the pasta on as Rhys rolled it, with homemade cheese in the sauce and on top. It tasted really good.
It was a really nice relaxing day.
Sunday I spent mostly in the garden, when it wasn’t raining, weeding and I harvested the garlic and put the bean plants out. The sprouts and purple sprouting have caterpillars so I’ve feed as many of them as possible to the chickens, and a white butterfly I caught which the chick went mad for.
The next-but-one-village-over held their open garden this weekend, I’ve been saying I’d go for a few years but near managed it until this year. There are some really nice gardens that open too, there was one garden which you go into and you think it only has a small cottage-garden-y type lawn with flower boarders but when you get to the back there is a gate onto the owners studio/shed and a patio area with an amazing bread/pizza over, then the back of that goes into another area with a studio/pottery on one side and a veg patch with a huge fruit cage on the other side, then that goes through to an orchard with chickens, one of whom had a brood of chicks with her, a pond and right at the end a brick patio bit with woven hurdles around it, a chair and a bath! Not a bath just for looking at either, a bath with a fire pit under it and a bar of used soap with some old tea lights.
The garden nextdoor was lived in by an old woman who had been born in the house nextdoor and had moved in the house when she got married. It was a two up, one down when she moved in but they had added to it and the garden now has flowers as well as vegetables (the garden had all been vegetables before.) Her son, I think, had turned the old coalshed into an old Forester’s livingroom. It was lovely. When we arrived we got greeted by a Buff Orpington hen running towards us with their funny half run, half skip that they do.
We also visited another LETS members garden for a guild tour, a ‘yard garden’ which was full of tubs and the schools garden and wildlife area, where I bought a Pineapple Mint.
When we got back I cut some of the goats feet while Mother and youngest sister milked, lite a bonfire and when they got home “processed” the milk e.g. collected the cream that had been left to rise last night, bottled the milk, filtered and put more milk to let the cream rise, filtered and bottled the rest of the milk, put the flask of yogurt into the old cream tubs and in the fridge, put the last of the cream to turn into butter (it never turned) and feed the goat kid.
I made butter today, not from our own cream but Spar had six tubs for 10p each that couldn’t be left there.
It took an hour and half in the Kenwood, but was worth it and it was only single cream.
Primrose’s calf has now gone, he’s been sold, so we’re milking her again now.
Her milk is lovely; she is a Jersey cross so her milk has a yellow-y colour to it from all the cream and butter fats. Her calf hasn’t been nice to her udder and it is covered in cuts and sore patches, but she is mostly being very good about being milked.
The Dexter’s have also been sold which makes the cow field so much nicer, they were both very nice cows and good at rearing their calves but they did bully Sunshine and Primrose badly and weren’t really suited to our set-up.
Primrose was bottle feed from about six weeks old and has a very quite nature any way, and Sunshine’s a naturally friendly and nosy nature as well.
Between Primrose and Amber (middle-sisters goat who is the only one being milked) we’re getting about 5 and a half liters of milk a day.
A Life Less Simple 