The Bread Beast

Nothing goes better with French press coffee in the morning than a thick slab of homemade bread. For me, anyway. Dense and chewy whole wheat or light and airy ciabatta, I love it all—as long as it’s made with high quality, unadulterated ingredients.

Dinner Under the Pergola

To me, the finest summer meal celebrates our garden, which is just coming into its own right about now.  Since it’s on the small side, I usually need to supplement with the produce of other local growers and producers, so the meal becomes a local foods fête in the best sense of the word. When the weather cooperates, I like to eat under our pergola, which feels like an airy room framed on one side by the garden, and on the other by a row of raspberry bushes, with grape vines, wisteria, and weeping larch entwining overhead. If asked to visualize a happy place, I would put dinner under our pergola at the top of my list.

Heaven Is a Farmers Market

You can tell a lot about a town from its farmers market. Who the vendors are and what they’re selling—and who the consumers are and what they’re buying—are both accurate indicators, I’ve found in my casual, ongoing research, of the health and vitality of a community.

Lessons in Cheesemaking, Part 2

From the warmth of the cheese vat to the coolness of the cave, the process of making cheese involves multiple steps. After helping out with the transformation from liquid milk into solid cheese, I next would be introduced to the mysteries of the cave at Crawford Family Farm.

           

Donning rubber clogs and hairnet, I followed Julie over to the entrance. Before I stepped into the cave, which is simply a small room adjacent to the cheesemaking facility, she handed me a thick sweatshirt.

            “Here, you’ll need this,” she said. “It gets pretty dirty in there.”

            Dirty? I thought we were just going to be turning cheeses like we had the previous time, when the pale yellow wheels were new and smooth and clean. What I didn’t realize was that most of the cheeses, having been in the cave for longer than a few days now, were covered with a thick mold that needed to be wiped off.

Julie handed me a cheesecloth (they really are used in making cheese, despite their myriad other mundane uses) and picked up one of the wheels to demonstrate. It was gray and furry, growing what resembled mouse hair. She wiped the top off, revealing a mosaic of brown, beige, and gray, and then the sides and bottom. She wiped the spot where the cheese had been resting on the shelf too, before placing it back, this time top down. I picked up a wheel and did the same, coughing as the mold dispersed into the air. “You might feel it in your chest tomorrow,” she warned. “The intern who used to work here would wear a face mask.”

Photo by Linda Hampton Smith

Lessons in Cheesemaking, Part 1

A confession: I’m crazy about cheese. I’m one of those people who pack a smelly cheese in my lunch and don’t hesitate to open it on a train or in a small office. I eat it nearly every day, sometimes for breakfast. Fortunately, I also eat a lot of vegetables (roughage) and enjoy my share of red wine (resveratrol) to counteract the possible negative effects.

Since I’m so passionate about cheese, and am also a naturally curious person, a few years ago I volunteered at an artisan cheesemaker’s farm, Crawford Family Farm in Whiting, to learn how cheese is made. The Crawfords produce Vermont Ayr, a semi-hard Alpine tomme style cheese with a natural rind, which happens to be one of my favorite local cheeses. I wrote about that experience here in an article for Culture, a magazine devoted to, you guessed it, cheese. In addition to being fascinating, the experience got me thinking about cheese on a deeper level.

           

Before my forays into cheesemaking, I had never used the length of my arms to stir anything before, anything edible at least. The process felt both primitive and completely new. 

Photo by Linda Hampton Smith