Making Things

In case you were wondering, the weekend blizzard is over and I survived.  Friday we had wind.  Oh the wind.  I watched the barn cat  get lifted off her feet by the wind.  The dog was blown over by the wind.  I was blown across an ice patch by the wind.  It was seriously windy.

After a day of wind, I woke up Saturday to do chores to find that there was only a dusting of snow.  Well that wasn’t bad! I thought.  Maybe I won’t even be able to do all of the new things I had planned! 

I had made plans.  Like actually planned ahead which is like a whole new world for me.  I am more of a fly by the seat of your pants kind of girl, which usually works pretty well for me, except I sometimes don’t get things finished because all of the supplies aren’t ready.  The plans for the weekend had involved cheese making, sausage making, and soap making.

Wow, Snarky.  That is an impressive list!  You must be very good at those things! 

No.  No I am not good at any of those things.  As a matter of fact, the only one of those things that I have even ever tried is soap making and then I basically just watched a friend of mine make soap.  I got to stir it a little but to be honest, the lye kind of freaked me out.

These are, however, things that I want to get good at.  The problem with wanting to learn about things is that we rarely take the time to actually learn about them.  It just seems overwhelming.  There is so much information on any one of these topics that it makes it seem like you need a PHD in the subject to even attempt it.

I was feeling brave, though.  I decided to focus on just one recipe for each thing and give it a shot.

On Saturday, the wind started to bring in some snow.  High winds and heavy snow are not conducive to getting things done outside, so I locked up the chickens, rolled up my sleeves, and got started with cheese making.

This is all of the cheese I made.

Just kidding.  I decided to focus on mozzarella cheese because I hear it is a fairly easy cheese.  It doesn’t need to age so you know if it was a success right away, and you don’t need any fancy cultures or a cheese press.

I got out a gallon of my goat’s milk, added some citric acid, and slowly started heating up until it was just warm.  Then I gently stirred in a couple of drops of something called vegetable rennet.  I bought both of these exotic sounding items at the local health food store.  Then I covered the pot and left it alone for five minutes.  When I came back, the milk had turned into like a gelatin substance, which is exactly what you want!  So far, so good!

Next I cut this gelatin into a checkerboard pattern right in the pot and stirred it some more.  Then I scooped out all of those squares, which had now turned into gummy blobs, and put them in a strainer while I heated up the remaining liquid.  Once the liquid was the proper temperature, I stuck those blobs back in the hot liquid.  Then I would pull them out and stretch them like taffy until they would get too cool to stretch.  I didn’t do this very long because they are super hot when they come out of the liquid.  Also, they were starting to look like cheese and I wanted to eat them.  I added some salt and gave them a taste.

They tasted exactly like mozzarella.  Not even like goat mozzarella.  Just regular, fancy, fresh mozzarella.  The kind you slice up and eat with fresh basil and tomatoes that you just picked out of your garden.

Now, my mozzarella was a little grainy, but I looked it up and that is just because I didn’t stretch it enough.  Apparently I need to get tougher, more heat resistant hands.  Next time should be an even better success.

Now that I had mastered cheese, or at least attempted it and not failed completely, I decided to try sausage.  Sausage making intimidated me more than cheese making because I am more afraid of raw meat than raw dairy.  I did not want my entire family dying of some kind of meat related food poisoning.

The first thing I did was to debone a couple of rabbits that I had just thawed out.  This proved to be way easier than I thought it would be.  Mostly because I used a kitchen sheers.  Those things make everything easier.

Next I ground the meat in The Pastor’s dad’s electric meat grinder.  This was also way easier than I was expecting.  I dropped the meat in and out came ground rabbit!  I then mixed the ground rabbit with some ground pork from last year’s pigs.  I did this because rabbit meat is very lean.  It has almost no fat.  Brats are better with some fat in them.  I then added some herbs and spices and a cup of nice dark beer.

I then put all of that into the freezer to chill while I prepared the casings.  Casings are the part of the brat that holds the brat together.  I won’t tell you what they are made of because if you don’t already know, you might not eat brats again after you find out.  The casings I bought were dried out and covered with some sort of salt looking substance.  They also smelled exactly like dog food so I wasn’t holding out much hope for the sausage making.

I followed the directions and rinsed off all of the salt looking stuff and soaked the casings in clean water for a half an hour.  I used that time to prepare the sausage stuffer (also borrowed from The Pastor’s dad).  The sausage stuffer is basically a big press.  You turn the crank and a disk pushes all of the meat down and out the tube.

Once everything was ready, I loaded the casing onto the tube of the stuffer.  This took me like forty five minutes because the casing looks like wet tissue paper and I was freaking out that I was going to tear it.

Finally, when it was all loaded up, I had Baby Snarky turn the crank while I guided the sausage out.    This is when I learned something interesting.  As the sausage was filling the casing, a little air bubble formed.  I had read that if this happens, you just need to pop it with a knife.  I gently tried popping it.  Nothing.  I tried harder.  Nothing.  Finally, I stabbed it as hard as i could.  It barely popped.

It turns out that while they look like wet tissue paper, those casings are actually super tough.  There is no way you are going to accidentally tear one.  After filling and one long tube of sausage, I put on another casing.  This one far less carefully.  It took me maybe five minutes.

When all of the sausage meat was in the casings, I twisted the brats into links and I was done!  I then fried up some of those brats for dinner and they were amazing!  Even my daughter who refuses to eat rabbit tasted them and said they were very good.  Just like fresh brats from the butcher, only fancier!

At this point I was pretty tired and not really looking forward to soap making.  Also, I realized that I did not have a mold for the soap or a special pot just to make the soap in.  I didn’t really want to put lye into a pot that I would later make food for my family in.  I decided that two major accomplishments were enough for one weekend.

On the down side, I did not get any blogs written because I was too busy being amazing.  Today I decided to be less amazing and tell you about everything I accomplished during the great storm of April, 2018.  It turned out, it was quite a storm.

Maybe more on that tomorrow.