The Witch aint so crafty

My new motto: BURNS WELL AT THE STAKE.

My consistent inability to make butter would have, at one time, been a great reason to lash me to a flag pole and roast marsh mallows by my blackened toes.

That's not going to happen... I don't think. I'm not mean and I don't have any warts on my face, although I do have a single hair that springs out now and again. You haven't noticed it because I pluck it often. I enjoy the moon, but I don't ride a broom, though I do seem to be spending an awful lot of time with it lately. And, unfortunately, I think bats are important.

The difficulty of buttering has piqued my curiosity and I found myself pouring over my new library of cow and cattle books to discover what was wrong. Nothing like a repeating failure to goad me in to finally reading the directions!

Here is what I discovered: February cream doesn't butter, but June cream does. Cream from a fresh cow butters, but cream from a cow over half way through her milk cycle doesn't. It's apparently about the size of the fat globules. Too big or too small and they won't butter. And the size is determined by juiciness of grass and duration of milking. AND...that's not all! I also read that getting butter is a random act of god, hence the burning of any woman who couldn't do it. I have no idea how Darigold sorts these things out.

We've got a September cow on her 6th month of milk, so fresh butter will not soon be spreading on my toast. She'll dry up before June and won't freshen again until Sept. We may never butter our buns on that schedule.

I've tried blenders, hand mixers and food processors, everything but the whole day with a stick and a long wooden barrel. I'm starting to follow the directions, what I've read of them anyway, as best I can.

I thought I'd have a leg up on all this. I thought that helping my grandpa with the cows and my mother's childhood on a dairy farm and my dad's youth spent milking a few cows for his enormous, non-Catholic, non-Mormon, absolutely-no-known-reason-it-was-so-big family. You'd think something would have trickled down the gene pool. Maybe I'd osmotized the farm. I hoped my childhood with steers just outside my bedroom window would have prepared me for a cow and her calf and their milk and all the milky endeavors thereof.

But, alas, none of it means anything except that I began this endeavor knowing what a cow actually looked like and that their eyes were juicy and listeny, ten times more soul-matey than a dogs. And their shit smelled familiar, homey even. My mom said it smelled like "money." I suppose my cow ownership is much like smoking for those who had parents that did: the odor of home, objectively offensive it may be but to me it smells like mom. Maybe that's what drew me out here, to put a bucket under a heifer and squeeze until the sun shines: the smell of a good home.

say *CHEESE*

It feels so improper, posting so soon after the last. Am I being too forward?

I'm sorry, but I just can't help it. I am positively giddy. Not a bone in my body is Not dancing right now! And all because the yogurt turned out terribly!

Really bad. Not that I know anything about this, but I'm guessing it was over-done. It was whey with chunks and caused crying and tears this morning at breakfast. It wasn't me that wept over the imperfect result. It was someone a few decades younger than me, but I wouldn't put it past me. It just happened to not be me this time. I did think, for a moment, that maybe I do believe in factory farming and in mega food corps that can turn out huge vats of yogurt and cheese with the flip of a wrist on a couple of controls. Mad cow be damned, let's conveyor belt 'em and get efficient.

But the chunks gave me a cheesy idea. And it is sooo good. Like a chevre. I'd post a photo, but it's all full of cracker crumbs now. I don't even know why I have crackers on hand today. Usually I eschew anything prepared so that there have been times where my kids whine: "Moooom, I'm hungry." And all I can say is, "I'll whip up some brown rice and we can have a little snack in only 45 minutes!" It's just a small step up from having to chaff the rice first. Sometimes I get sick of this, and yesterday I bought 6 boxes of crackers. And I've tried them all on my cow-chevre. And they are all delicious accessories.

I'm so stoked, I had to share this with EVERYONE! The news, that is. The cheese is mine.

Teeter totter, bread and butter

Wins: X
losses: X + y - y = X again!

The gains are lousy long shots and the losses luckily don't out weigh them.

I tried making butter today. Today, and not yesterday, because today was the first day I had enough cream, separated, to try for butter. I felt so clever with my sun tea jars. Just strain off the milk from the bottom! Right?! Unfortunately, there's that last full inch of milk and cream clumsily sloshing around. So I poured my several days worth of cream in to a jar. And then I actually syringed the errant milk from the bottom! Syringed. It took a long long time because the syringe only holds one tablespoon.

The directions said to let the cream sour for a day on the counter. Easy! Then it said to put the cream in my blender. I have the world's best blender. Not only does the carafe perch upon a chrome beehive with retro perfection, it's also very powerful. Don't mess with my blender. They said it would take five minutes, and butter is nothing but over-whipped cream. I turned it on, removed the lid, as per directed. And sat back. If you recall my spring smoothie incident, you'll know that I kept my hand securely on the blender. They said it would outgas a little. So I took it in stride when curls of gas began to spiral up. But when the gas became gray, and took on a more billowy shape, I stuck my nose in to investigate. Yes, after five minutes, my cream was still cream, spraying up my curious nostrils. And there was smoke.

When my kitchen experiments become (unintentional) disasters (see below for Huck's contrasting disaster), I dive into avoidance and denial like the deep inexhaustible lakes they are. I just put everything back. The disobedient cream is in the fridge (still in the carafe) and the blender butt is right where it belongs. Almost like Nothing happened.

I'll freeze a fiasco for MONTHS before tossing it, just to burn off the humiliation and waste of it all first. The curry where I accidentally increased the toasted cardamom seeds by 10 fold: that sat in large bags in our freezer for 6 months. Took up the whole thing. No ice cream could even fit. But how could I trash the 4 hour dinner that ended in pizza? Eventually... but not immediately.

Huck looked in the fridge, saw the blender carafe filled with cream and said, "Oh! You made butter!" He saw my face and said, "Oh! you tried to make butter!" We'll call that a shoot, in the dairy game of life.

Not entirely put off by the experience, I plugged in my new yogurt maker. Scoff. Scoff, I know you will. Yogurt maker! HA! What kind of woman needs a special appliance to let something sit around for four hours?! Well... I have tried it without and it was a 2 quart disaster. So I decided to set myself up for success, stoke my ego, get me a maker and some starter and see what I could do. With my accessories in hand and my failed past behind me I achieved total success...so far it's a ladder! My yogurt looks right at least. I'll find out more about the flavor in the morning.

This fresh milk thing is sort of a wash. Financially, it could be years before we recoup anything. Ladder! today, I got my first massage in 7 years. Shoot: because my arms are really getting sore from squeezing out teets. Ladder: I'm visibly buffer too. It was only a 15 minute massage, on a lark, at the local natural foods store, but it was GREAT! I got to keep my clothes on, which helped me relax, a lot! Aromatherapy was used and all day people have been telling me that I smell like the natural food store. Shoot: I just spent two weeks worth of milk on a massage.

Shoot: forgot to muck the stalls for two days. Had to do it tonight after putting the kids to bed. Ladder!: stood out for a long long time admiring the stars and the silk of a late summer evening on my skin.

Ladder!: fresh milk. Shoot: had to milk these last two days while sick, with a fever. I hadn't anticipated that. I had imagined cold, dark mornings, snowy mornings, drowsy mornings, etc. But not sick mornings. Even so, it's better than a third kid, I think.

Pickle Chiffon Pie!

What better activity to busy yourself with on a singular day off than making infuriatingly inedible food? There are those among us, neigh, even under our very roofs who would, and indeed, have already done such. One, Huckleberry Husband, perpetrated this dastardly deed. After many days of long hours, in which 70 hours of work were accomplished in six days, the man got a day off.

And he took to the kitchen.

A favorite children's book, Pickle Chiffon Pie (found at http://www.chinaberry.com/prod.cfm/pgc/11200/sbc/11202/inv/8962), has been the source of years worth of pleadings for such a kitchen atrocity. My response has always been a look of disgust and a quiet shake of the head indicating: obviously NOT!

Huck on the other hand always said, "Maybe some day."

Just a few days ago was some day, apparently. Huck had been tied down to his job, to work, to engineering, to things making sense and being useful and practical. And he'd had it. My interpretation of this crazy endeavor is that he just needed a grand moment of frivolity. He needs a regular dose. This is likely one of the best reasons I married him eight legal years ago, today! (That and we'd already had a kid.) He's got this surprising streak of grand and silly gestures that keeps a gal on her toes.

So he actually spent half a day in the kitchen, over double boilers, whisking egg whites to snow peaks, and Frankensteining recipes from our 1950's American-International Encyclopedic Cookbook.

What emerged at the end of the day was sublimely perfect. A white whipped topping over green chiffon. It sliced liked heaven. The texture was cumulonimbus. And then we took our bites.

Tears.

Coyote hung his head in utter dejection.

Blue tasted and spewed.

I drew it in to my mouth, laid one part of my tongue upon it, and withdrew the intact piece immediately.

The most perfect and beautiful thing to appear on our table in ages was totally disgusting.

"Did you know it was going to be horrible?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Obviously Pickle Chiffon Pie is not going to be good."
"You...you...you spent all day in the kitchen making something so perfect and no one can eat it?" As the woman of the house who's role is now suddenly also to be the constant cook, I could not, cannot, will not (on principle) understand this.

So I threw my piece at him. My aim was true, by the way.

Chocolate? Vanilla? Lemon even. But dill and vinegar? A grave injustice indeed.

This isn't his first inedible pie. He once mistook flowering quince fruit for fruiting quince fruit and made pie out of it. My response was the same as this one. But he stubbornly ate an entire piece and spent all week puking. But that pie was an accident, a mistake. This pie was a piece of intention, a willfully wrong whimsy.

Indignant though I may be, I am amused. I do understand the requirement for an unnecessary flourish, a foolish trick, a waste of time, a glorious, perfect waste of time. Especially in the midst of too much work. Ah... Huck, a man who knows the value of play.

And yet I still feel I am owed a really really good chiffon pie.