My friends accuse me of being a hippie, and sometimes I wish I was. Lately, it seems like I have gotten even more “hippy dippy.” I would love to live off the grid, refuse to pay taxes to The Man, and just be generally more independent. There’s a community not too far from me that sort of lives that way – they raise livestock for their own meat and dairy, have kitchen gardens and orchards, grind their grain at their gristmill, make their own furniture. They have a blacksmith shop, a weaving shop, and a pottery shop. If the zombie-pocalypse happens tomorrow, these people are SET.
They have classes in pretty much everything they do, so that other people can also learn to be self-sufficient. My dream is to someday take the three day Homesteading class, but meanwhile, I started small. Last Saturday, I took a class in soft cheese making. I have to say, it was amazing.
First, we ate all day long. Everything we made, we sampled. The ladies that did the class had it down to a science, and it was like being on a food show. Some of the cheeses had to sit or marinate or drain for hours, so they already had the next stage done – we started it, then we got to see how it turned out. I’m a huge fan of fresh produce, but I never thought of how that philosophy would taste when applied to fresh dairy. Even buttermilk (nasty when store-bought) wasn’t too bad.
While we’re on the subject of buttermilk, I had a light bulb moment when we made that that made me feel really stupid. We started off with three gallons of fresh milk that had been allowed to separate. Then we skimmed the cream and made butter. The leftover liquid after the better had set? Buttermilk. Duh.
We made cream cheese, cottage cheese, feta cheese, cheese logs (I feel like Bubba)…all kinds of things. I am totally doing some of that for Christmas gifts! My biggest problem now is that some of the recipes really need raw milk, which is hard to find if you don’t own something that can be milked (like a cat. Or Robert DeNiro). There was a guy in the class that works at a dairy, so I might be able to work something out with him, but he lives about forty five minutes away, so that’s not practical for spur-of-the-moment cheesemaking (am I being really optimistic to think there might be some of that?).
Anyway, I’m really excited about having learned a new skill. And I’m even more excited that the skill that’s new to me is an old one. My husband’s grandmother (we called her Honey) took Home Ec in high school, and they learned how to butcher animals as part of the class. Really – cows, hogs, chicken, goats…they considered that a necessary skill for students. It’s amazing how self-sufficient people were back then. I think that’s why they survived the Depression so well. The next project I’m considering taking on is a canning class. I’ll use Honey’s pressure cooker, and there are probably some empty jars out in her garage. I’m hoping some of her skill rubs off on me.
