Sunday 24 March 2013

Cheese, Muck and an Olive

We've been busy on a new Spring cocktail here on the Croft; cheese, muck and an olive. 

We were given 5 litres of goat milk by a friend and so we made curd cheese. It's very, very easy. Just boil the milk, allow it to cool a little from boiling, add the juice of 2 lemons and leave overnight. In the morning you'll find a pan full of thick curd, and yellow, sweet  buttermilk.

Cheesy, easy
Put the curd into a cheese cloth and leave to drip for most of the next day. You can move the curd around in the cloth a bit to encourage it to drip more. Then eat, on fresh brown bread. Yum.

Meanwhile at the other end of the scale I have been Spring cleaning our sheep enclosure. Keeping cuddly, attractive lambs is not all sweetness and light. It's hard work clearing a sheep shed:

Where there's muck, there's more muck
And up at the top of the land, still overgrown with climbers, I found another olive tree, and cut away a pine to give it some breathing space. A hundred years ago the Croft was a producer of olive oil and wine. The pine (I counted the rings) started growing 30 years ago - in 1983, the point at which the olive grove was finally abandoned.



Olive sees the light

Friday 1 March 2013

Snow Storm

We had a perfect snow storm...

Snowy Lavandula sp.
 ...and then Storm arrived.

Storm, 30 minutes old

He's the calm, in the storm.