My name is Charlotte, sometimes known as Ms Lottie, occasionally as The Slightly Mad Quilt Lady. This is my blog, where you'll find me writing a lot about my quilting and textile arts and a little about my family's life in a small seaside town in New Zealand. Haere mai!
Showing posts with label cheese making. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cheese making. Show all posts

Friday, January 28, 2011

Cheese making with Wilma


So a very good friend of mine initiated me into the secret society of cheesemakers today.  And it really wasn't all that hard.  But you have to have patience.  The recipe* reads something like:  heat your milk to 37 degrees, add the culture, wait 30 mins, add rennet, wait an hour and a half, stirring three times, pack curds into moulds, leave overnight.....so that's the stage I went home!  Pip is draining the curds overnight and then putting it in a brine solution tomorrow.  Then magically, we will have feta!

It was the perfect day for making cheese - raining.  The tropical low that is coming down has not been downgraded, she is still officially Cyclone Wilma.  It was ominously still this morning when I went for a walk and the clouds were the most amazing crimson.


It started to rain about ten this morning and it's gradually got heavier and heavier until it was hosing when I got home with the kids in tow.  Only to find a torrent of water pouring under our house from a blocked drain behind, making a large puddle under the freezer that we have in the last open bay of our shed.  The electrical plug was under water and the freezer had shut off. 

I set to work and my boy and I cleared as much as we could,  then hubby arrived home and got stuck in too.  We managed to redirect the flow and clear the ditch but whether the freezer will be ok or not, well, we'll have to wait until the plug dries out. 


The photo above is taken hanging out a bedroom window.  You can see the water pouring off the overflowing water tank and the stream flowing along the ground is the full drain (which usually doesn't hold any water at all) that was previously mostly flowing under the house!

*I don't have a copy of the recipe so please don't take that as a full and complete set of instructions, you may just be a tad disappointed.