Our family's life in New Zealand
Several days ago, I cut open a pumpkin to cook. Little Miss wanted to dig the seeds out of it, and we were talking about how many seeds there were. I got curious, so we divided all the seeds into three groups and I had the three school children each count a group. First, we all guessed how many. I was closest; I guessed 500 and there ended up being 518! That’s a lot of seeds.
Do you sense a theme here? Milk last week, meat this week. Hmm. What does my life revolve around? It couldn’t be feeding a lot of hungry people, could it?
We’ve processed two cows in the past month. One was an old dairy cow that we boned out and ground up because she was too tough for much else. The other was a 1 1/2-year-old steer that we raised. He was on the small side for eating, but because of his bad habit of jumping fences, we decided that he had better jump into the freezer before he caused any more trouble with neighbors. We have a lot of meat in the freezer! I thought I’d share a few pictures of some of the things we did with all that meat.
First, here is a picture of Simon running it through the mincer. We normally use that table for school in the mornings, but the days that we were working on meat, we set up a table in the living room and used that, instead.
I made a lot of the meat into meatloaf. I packed it into plastic-wrap lined loaf pans, froze it, then popped it out and put two loaves into each ziploc bag in the freezer. We’ve already had a couple of easy meals from that.
Another lot of meat got shaped into hamburger patties and frozen, then put into bags, free-flow. I put plastic wrap between each two layers of patties on the cookie sheet, and stacked them up about four layers high. It wasn’t too hard to pop them apart with a butter knife to transfer to a bag when they were frozen.
I also saved out a lot that day to make into meatballs the next day, which are also in the freezer. I guess we forgot to get a picture of them!
Another lot of meat I cooked up right away and froze that way. It sure is handy to pull out a package of frozen, cooked hamburger and throw it into my soup or whatever! I liked it so well after doing the first cow that I cooked up a lot more from the second one. I was also going to can a lot of it, but I got sick and spent the day in bed, instead, so Esther just divided the meat up and froze it raw.
We saved all the bones, too. We cut them into smaller pieces with a power saw, and divided them into bags according to the amount that will fit into my biggest pot. I fill the pot with water and add some vinegar, then simmer for a day or two. Then, I pressure can it and we have the beginnings of instant soup or gravy!
We got all these bones from the old cow! I didn’t make it through all of them before it was time to do the steer, but had friends who were happy to take some.
One of the evenings we were working on meat, I didn’t have much time to cook but needed a nourishing meal quickly. I opened these jars–beans, stew beef, and broth–and made a quick, delicious stew.
Then end product: I had some black beans in the fridge, and added a package of pasta. We enjoyed it that evening, and there was enough left for men’s lunches the next day or two.
We are milking two cows this year, and right now we’re getting about 20 liters (5 gallons) a day. Poppy, our older cow, gives about 12 liters a day, and Bluebell, the younger one on her first lactation, is giving about 8 liters. Bluebell gives A2A2 milk, so we primarily use her milk for drinking, kefir and cooking, since Gayle does all right with that kind of milk. Poppy’s milk is A1A2, so that’s what we give to friends who need it, and turn the excess into cheese. In the summer, I used a lot of it to fertilize the garden or as a spray to try to ward off powdery mildew (I still don’t know if it works). I was thankful for friends who needed a lot of milk for the last few months, but now their cow is giving them plenty of milk, so I have a lot to deal with again! Yesterday morning I decided to make a lot of cheese, to clean the fridge out for the weekend. This is what I started with:
The big pot, 20 liters (5 gallons), was mostly cold milk from the fridge. I turned that into a block of hard cheese. The pot to the left is about a gallon (5 liters), which I made into feta. The pot to the right is six liters (a gallon and a half) which I turned into mozzarella.
I started with the hard cheese, since that takes about four hours of on again/off again work to get it into the press. This is what I end up with a day later; it’s a type of Colby. Because I use raw milk, and don’t have a climate-controlled area in which to produce and store it, it varies quite a lot in texture and flavor, but is always delicious. I keep the cheeses in the kitchen on a mat for a week or two, flipping them frequently until they develop a rind. Lately, with the chilly, damp fall weather we’ve been having, I have had a problem with mold growing on the outsides, so I’ve been rubbing salt into them to help the rind grow without mold; when mold does grow, we rub them with vinegar to slow that growth down. Usually, the cheeses develop a nice hard rind within two weeks, and then I move them to an old fridge where they keep, without any wrapping, till we use them. Some that we have out there right now are four months old, with quite a sharp flavor.
These are the cheeses I made over the past couple of weeks. The oldest is the back one on the left; the front right one is only a couple of days old.
After the curds are out of the whey, I bring the whey to a boil to extract the rest of the protein. During the growing season, we just take the whey out to the garden and feed it to the tomatoes, but there isn’t anything out there right now that needs it. We can’t eat very much ricotta, since most of it is made from Poppy’s milk and Gayle can’t have it, so we feed it to the chickens. It’s a good source of protein for them! I bring the whey to a boil, stir in a little vinegar, then drain it through a cloth and hang it up overnight to finish dripping.
When I was about halfway through making the hard cheese, I started the mozzarella. A few years ago, I came across a recipe that gets around using citric acid. Instead, use a mesophilic starter to acidify the milk. The proportions given were 1 quart of starter to 3 quarts of fresh milk (I doubled that this time), and I’ve found that works very well with the Caspian Sea yogurt I use for starter for everything I make. Kefir would likely work just as well. The recipe says (and I actually followed it this time!) to mix the starter with the milk, heat it to about 90ºF, hold for half an hour, then stir in half a teaspoon liquid rennet diluted with water. When it coagulates, cut the curd, then stir gently while heating slowly to about 100-105ºF. Strain through a cloth, let hang to drain for about 20 minutes (I think I went about an hour or an hour and a half this time). Reserve a quart or two of whey for a brine. Heat some water in a pot to about 150ºF, slice the curd into roughly 1/2-3/4 inch slices and cut into chunks about 2-3 inches square. Put a chunk of curd into the hot water till it’s soft, then stretch and form into a ball. If it is just the right acidity, it will stretch beautifully and form a smooth, shiny ball. If it’s not acidic enough, or too much, it won’t work. This time happened to be perfect–I’ve had a lot of failures, though! Drop each ball into cold water, or if you want a block of mozzarella, use larger chunks and drop them into a container to melt together and form a brick of cheese. If making balls, when finished, cover them with a brine made of a quart of the reserved whey and a teaspoon of salt. These balls rarely last more than a day or two around here; the children love them!
The smallest lot of milk turned into feta. This is the easiest cheese to make! I take milk still warm from the cow, put it into a pot, and stir in maybe 1/4-1/2 cup of starter. The Caspian Sea yogurt works great; kefir would, too. Stir in 4-5 drops of liquid rennet diluted in water (for 4-5 quarts/liters of milk). Cover and let sit on the counter top all day. In the evening, ladle out into molds (or a cloth-lined colander). I have several ricotta/feta molds, and they are wonderful for that. Let drain overnight. In the morning, unmold and sprinkle all over with salt. Turn once or twice through the day and sprinkle with more salt. Eat any time. As you see here, someone had a sample an hour or two after I took them out of the molds this morning. I rarely bother to refrigerate this cheese, since it stays nice on a plate on the table for 3-4 days and is gone by then anyway.
So, there is my day yesterday, in cheese. I also made butter, but forgot to get any pictures of it before it was finished and in the freezer. In one picture, you can see the cream warming up. I got it out of the fridge the night before and mixed some started (the Caspian Sea yogurt again) into each jar. Halfway through the afternoon I made the butter. I have discovered that my Bosch mixer, with the whisks, works great to make butter. Depending on the temperature of the cream and the cows’ diet, it takes anywhere from five minutes to half an hour to make a batch of butter. I can put about 3 quarts of cream in my 6-quart mixer at a time. From about 9 quarts of cream, I got around 4-5 pounds of butter. Because the cream has been cultured before churning, the butter can stay at room temperature for a couple of weeks without going rancid, as long as I work all the buttermilk out of it and salt it properly.
We are thankful to be able to have our cows! It does get to feeling like a lot of work sometimes, but I’m grateful to be able to feed my family such good food.
Here are the rest of the pictures I have found on our devices from the last couple of months. For some reason, we aren’t taking many pictures. I guess we’re too busy living life to document it! And, nothing that exciting has been happening; just daily life.
We found a pear tree near the river that no one claimed, and processed a lot of pears. What a treasure!
James had a bicycle accident in March and landed on his face on the pavement. The three younger children all saw it happen, and Mr. Imagination drew this picture while I was at the hospital with James. He had a concussion and his face was messed up, but by now he is no longer extra tired, no longer getting headaches, and his face is looking much better.
The hot peppers in the greenhouse have done very well this year. I dried a lot and ground them in the food processor into hot pepper flakes. When I need cayenne pepper powder, I’ll grind that in the spice grinder.
Elijah went to the farm on which Simon is working and they shot a stag. Elijah had quite an audience the next morning as he skinned it before he went to work!
We spent the day boning out the deer, and got about 80 kg (170 pounds) of meat.
As usual, we went to Timaru for Easter. We took a shortcut on the way, which led through a very beautiful area I had never seen.
The Lego lovers of the family built some four-wheel drive vehicles, and then tested them out on the stove.
Barring our trip to Karamea, detailed in the last several posts, I haven’t taken many pictures this year! I’ve been living life, not documenting it. Here are the ones I have from the last couple of months, though.
The last time I went to the States, four years ago, Mom gave me a quilt top that my sister had pieced, from blocks I cut out of a lot of fabric scraps before we moved to New Zealand, over 13 years ago. I put the quilt top in a closet and basically forgot about it because I didn’t know what I was doing with it. After she got through all the other sewing projects we had on hand, Mom still wanted something to do, so we figured out what to do with this quilt top. We found an old sheet for the back and a couple of flannel sheets for the middle, and she tied it together for a comforter. The next problem was to find a place to do the work. Our house is too small to lay it out on a floor, so she took it outside! The ground was dry, so it worked. It was amusing, though, to see a quilt laid out on the grass.
We found a playground in Karamea, and Miss Joy and Little Miss played on it for a little while one afternoon. This little girl is infatuated with playgrounds!
We arrived home from Karamea on a Friday, and spent the entire next day working through the ripe produce that had accumulated in the garden while we were away. This was over 250 pounds of tomatoes, and the green pile in the living room was cucumbers. As you can see, we ran out of room on the table for the washed tomatoes and had to make piles in the living room, too! We are very thankful to have a lot of jars of tomatoes to use over the winter.
The little girls love to dress up. I love how Little Miss sometimes reads to Miss Joy, who obviously loves that, too.
James is helping to build a house behind us, on the edge of the hill on which our village is situated. We took a field trip one morning to watch them pour the pad for it. How do you like the view? The mountains you can see are the Paparoa Range, between us and the Tasman Sea.
Just before Mom left, the children decided they needed to make Chocolate Cream Doughnuts, after we read a book in which the main character built up a business making them. I had the stove covered with pots that day, as I was canning, so they used a camp stove on the table to do the deep frying.
The children liked helping us peel tomatoes when we canned them this summer. What a mess they made of themselves, but we appreciated their help!
On the way home from taking Mom to the airport, we bought a budgie. Kea now lives with Jo-Jo in his cage, and they are very happy together. We started out with them in separate cages, but the birds soon let us know they wanted to be together. The funny thing is that Jo-Jo has put on so much weight since he has company that he can hardly fly now! We’re trying to force him to fly every day, hoping to slim him down a little. Kea flies very well. We can hold Jo-Jo, but Kea won’t let us touch her. She readily goes back into the cage after a fly, though.
Simon was feeling enough better by March that he looked for things to do outside. Obviously, the children benefited from this!
One Saturday morning, we started seeing vintage cars cruising around the village. Mr. Imagination took my camera and went out to take pictures of a lot of them. It was a rally that went around the various villages in the Grey Valley.
Miss Joy loves books. At this point, she likes to read them aloud almost as much as she likes to have them read to her! In the last two days we’ve gotten a few videos of her reading. Enjoy!
We’ve had a wonderful summer! My mom was here for three months (December, January and February). She left a couple of days ago, just as the weather is turning cooler and feeling like fall. We’ve been very busy canning food from the garden and going on trips, so we’re hoping life slows down a little now. I’ll soon start writing posts and sharing pictures from our week of vacation a couple of weeks ago, but today I’ll share a few other pictures that have been waiting.
We washed Miss Joy’s blankie one afternoon, and she watched it spinning around in the washer! She can hardly function without that blankie, although we’re working on weaning her from it except in bed. Slow process, that.
We haven’t seen that many rainbows this summer, because it’s been a very dry year, but this double was gorgeous.
We played a lot of games with Grandma while she was here. This is TransAmerica; we also played a lot of Wingspan.
Even with a broken collarbone, Simon can play a game with his little sister!
The inside of the strip canoe finally got a coat of fibreglass and epoxy! Now it sits in the garage and waits for the gunwales and seats.
I took the picture above and then headed for the house. On the way, I noticed Gayle chopping wood, so got his picture, too.
All those tiny green plants are baby beets! I let six Chiogga (candy-striped) beets go to seed, and these came up from the seeds that dropped.
James and his crew are building a house at the far west side of our village, about a five-minute walk from our house. We went to visit him and see what they were doing. They had built the forms for the concrete, and were lining everything with polystyrene before pouring the floor.
The girls often went on a walk with Grandma, and this one frequently campaigned for a stop at the playground. I love how her ponytails are flying up in this picture!
Somehow, I missed sharing these photos! This first one was a rainy Sunday afternoon, and obviously Simon and James were tired.
Mom was sending a birthday card to one of my brothers in the States, and several of the younger children wrote letters to their cousins to include with it. Mr. Sweetie took several pictures to add to his letter. This one was taken from the hill across the road, and shows our house and garage, and, to the right, the small guest house Mom is staying in.
A thistle on the hill across the road.
Foxgloves–a major weed in the pastures.
A view of our back yard from the roof of the tiny house.
Next, he climbed the garage roof to take some pictures. This is Esther tying up the tomatoes to the posts on the other side of the greenhouse. It sure looks different now–the tomatoes are taller than I am!
Another view of the garden from the garage roof.
Looking down from a tall tree at part of the back yard and a corner of the garage.
The corner of the back yard by the garage, with the boys’ collection of bicycles and their workshop.
A photographer has come several times to take pictures of our family. Here, one of the children got a picture of him!
Little Miss learned to make hollyhock dolls this year. She loved them!
After she took a picture of her doll, I suggested she take a picture of the incredible hollyhock plant! I’ve never seen one so tall. It no longer looks so nice; it’s about done, and falling over.
She also took a picture of a potato blossom.
Esther spent several days staining the woodwork around the deck of the tiny house. It now has a roof, too!
As usual, I love the way the garden looks right now. January is such a wonderful time in the garden! Everything is at its peak of beauty, and the weeds haven’t taken over yet. I took a few minutes the other day to make a video tour. It was interesting watching it this afternoon. The little lettuces in the last minute have doubled in size since I took the video two days ago! And, it’s raining today, with more predicted tomorrow, so things should grow even more. (I also noticed that two of the cats managed to get themselves into the last couple of minutes!)
There are a few extra cameras floating around here right now. Several people have either upgraded or gotten phones that take good pictures, so the old cameras were up for grabs. One of the boys gave Miss Joy an old camera that still works, and she spent several days taking pictures of whatever caught her fancy. Some turned out fairly good, so here is a glimpse at life as seen by a three-year-old.
