Earthquake!

We live in an earthquake zone here and we had our first noticeable tremor this evening.
We heard it approaching, it took until the shaking hit us to realise what it was. It sounded like a wonky spin dryer coming closer and then the whole house shook quite significantly. Nothing fell apart or broke though. I guess the house has survived many many of that kind of size. Apparently there is a bit '100 year' one which is well over due. The house hasn't survived one of those as it was built just over a 100 years ago!

Sunny weather and the view

We have been having very warm weather here. The snow is melting worryingly fast, so hopefully it will get cold again soon. Although actually I am confliced whether to wish for that or not as it has been nice having warmer weather, we have been having lunch outside and the house is (obviously) much less cold and damp, but equally we want cold and snow for the skiing.

Lunch outside in the sun

Poppy loves sunbathing

Pretty sunset

Our house and rainbow

The view at night

Beer and Birthday party

We have put a couple more beers on to brew in an attempt to get ahead of ourselves so we can age some for longer. One is a brown ale (apocolypse brown ale) and the other is a mild (goat tag mild - we brewed it on the day we helped tag goats). We will see how that goes.

I mentioned a little while ago that we brewed some for a birthday party, the party was yesterday. Don - who's birthday it was - is also a keen brewer so they had set up a little pub with our beer as the 'guest beer'! Our beer seemed very popular. A number of people expressed some enthusiasm for brewing their own too so they could get something closer to 'proper beer' than you can get round here.
We met a number of people that we have heard about (from other british people we know) but not yet met and some new people too.

Eating, drinking and a few other things

Basically we have been lazing around doing nothing but drink and eat too much, as is traditional for the Christmas period. We went skiing on Christmas Day, it was windy and sleeting, but we were glad we got out and did some token amount of excersize. We had ham on Christmas Eve and duck on Christmas Day. Both very good (if I say so myself!)

We have spent some time making stock and soup with left overs, and we have managed to do a few useful things like make some more cheddar and beer. For a bit more excersize we picked up the wood piles from the drive. They were there because at the end of the summer Doug spent some time with an exciting new toy chopping down all the branches overhanging the driveway and stacked the resulting logs in neat piles along the drive.

Since then everytime we drive up or down, we say 'we must get round to picking those up'. We finally did and now it is all neatly stacked with the other wood maturing for a year or two.

We also tidied up some old tires and concrete blocks that have been annoying us littering the place up. There are a LOT of tires around, they are useful for things like weighing down the roof on woodpiles - the previous owner used them to stand his beehives on.

Merry Christmas!

We are going to have roast duck. Not home grown yet unfortunately. Maybe next year as Doug has given me some ducks for Christmas

(only virtual ducks at the moment - spring is a better time to actually get them and we need to work out some kind of little swimming pond for them)

Hope you all have a lovely day.

xx from Rhoda

Ski instructing in France

With our original plan of going to Canada rather than France, something I was very keen to do was ski instructing. I am already qualified with the CSIA (Canadian Ski Instructors Alliance) at level 1 (out of 4) and I was hoping to get a job and work my way up through the levels. In Canada this is feasible to do given a reasonable skiing ability and enthusisam to teach. In France it is much more difficult, so I had abandoned the idea when we came here. However during thinking about how to get covered for healthcare I started thinking about it again.
The difficult thing about qualifying in France is that every ski instructor has to pass a slalom speed test called the Test Technique to qualify as a trainee instructor and be allowed to teach at all. Then within 4 years they have to pass another race test (GS - Giant Slalom) called the Euro Test to fully qualify and be a full instructor. There are other exams around teaching as well, but these are the tricky bits for anyone who does not have a ski racing background as the level is set very high and most of the people who pass are French locals to the ski areas who have had slalom training from a young age. There is a lot of frustration in the skiing community from people who would like to be ski instructors in France that this test is so based on your ability to race rather than teach (I think many people who have had lessons with the ESF may feel the effects of this) and also that it descriminates against older people wanting to become instructors as a second career as there is no allowance made for age.
We are thinking of taking some racing lessons so we could have an idea of how feasible it might actually be - the internet has a lot about how difficult it is - but you don't know until you try. I think Doug is less keen to be an instructor (he doesn't have my fabulous people skills and love of idiots). Worst case we would have spent some money improving our skiing, and have a taste of something different - Of course I would be very annoyed if he could pass the test and I couldn't. I would have to send him out to be an instructor while I sat around with my feet up...

We have seen three ski schools in La Mongie the ESF, the ESI and Pyrénées Exérience. The first two at least do race training (ESF perhaps only for children) so we will go and speak to them about it sometime after Christmas. We also met a guy (who is a friend of the parents of Raymond who we bought the house from) who used to be a ski instructor at La Mongie and we may go and speak with him too for advice.

I am not quite sure what to say about this poster...

Getting healthcare in France

This is a riveting entry and unless you are very interested in what we are up to (ie our mothers) I would not bother to read it :)

At the moment we are covered until the end of 2013 because the UK is paying France for our cover, but we have started thinking about what we will do at the end of that time. I may have mentioned it before - French health care is not quite like the NHS where everyone is entitled to access. You have to pay in to the system via a tax similar to NI, if you don't make the correct contributions you are not covered and you need private health care. Not everything results in you making the correct contributions, for example income from rental property in the UK or from shares does not count. Each profession pays their NI like contributions to a professional body who administers healthcare and some other things for that profession, these are called mutuelles - so for example farmers pay NI to the MSA (Mutualité Sociale Agricole).

We have had a number of thoughts on how we might get cover
Private health care - this is likely to be prohibitively expensive given our rather small income.
Registering as farmers and joining the MSA - we had high hopes for this one, but after extensive investigation it seems it is not possible. The theory was that we would start some kind of farming activity (breeding pigs, breeding sheep etc) and we could register with the MSA and pay the relevant tax to them. We weren't thinking we would make much money out of it or that we would set up anything big, but we thought it could get us cover for doing something we would enjoy doing anyway that made a little money. However after extensive investigation and talking to a lot of different people with different opinions it seems that you have to have more land that we do to register fully with them. As far as we can understand if we started a farming activity we would have to pay ridiculous amounts of tax to the MSA, but because we don't have sufficient land we would not be covered for health care as we wouldn't be 'full members'.
Starting a company as an Auto Entrepreneur - This option is a bit complex. There are various structures in France under which you can start a company. This one was introduces only a few years ago to simplify the paperwork as well as limit the tax a company has to pay before it is really up and running in an attempt to make France more entrepreneurial. It is only for sole traders and with limited turnover. The current government doesn't like this structure (if you are REALLY interested which I am sure you are not you can read about it here or here truly it is riveting stuff) so it may not still be available in 2014. There is the other minor detail of what the company would do. Knitting? Wooden walking sticks? Ski rental apartment? Computor programmer?
Paying in to the CMU - Once you have been resident in France for 5 years you qualify to pay in to a thing called the CMU. You essentially pay 8% of your net income above a threshold (net of what I am not sure) and you are covered for health care. You pay other taxes on top of that of course - this is France after all. This would be a good option for us apart from the minor detail of having to be resident for 5 years before qualifying. The 5 year rule was introduced in 2007 to much uproar from foreign residents. The EU have now accused France of contravening EU laws around free movement of citizens and there is a case going through the courts at the moment. Perhaps this will have been sorted out by the end of next year. Although I doubt it despite the many years it has been running already.
Failing the success of the court case we could perhaps pay for private care for 3 and a half (or possibly 4 as a lot of things only count full years and that is possibly the case for the residency) years and then take this option or get a job for a few years that would cover us until we qualified.
Get a job in France - For example if we could qualify as ski instructors this would cover us or failing that we could do something with less difficult qualification criteria (work in a bar!!)

On top of the above health care you also need to pay for something called top-up insurance because the state health care only covers something like 70% of your costs. It all seems very complicated (and expensive) but the healthcare system is held to be one of the best in the world and our interactions with it so far (visit to A&E and a visit to the doctor to get certificates for ski insurance) have been very efficient and good.

Ski Insurance and the Club Alpin Français

Even though we live near to the ski slopes and don't need insurance to repartiate us if we have an accident or to buy new ski gear if the airline loses it, we still need insurance to cover us particularly if we have an accident off the piste and we need search and rescue services to find and rescue us.
We looked in to it and decided that that offered by the Club Alpin Français looked good with the added benefit that there is a branch in Bagnère which does walks in the summer and ski tours in the winter which should be a good way to meet some people and find good local walks and routes.
So we have joined up. We haven't got round to going and doing any of the walks yet but we plan on doing so after Christmas.

Social whirl and other things

We have been quite sociable recently, partially due to the run up to Christmas I suppose. We went skiing with some friends and to yoga, some others came round to get some holly as we seem to have some of the only holly still with berries locally

We took the 'Don Anniversaire' beer round to Don - who's birthday we brewed it for. We hope it will have time to settle and clear in the next week before it is needed.

We have spent time - as always - walking and training Poppy. Mostly she is pretty good and only shows us up occasionally (attacking a goat skin rug at someones house and setting off to kill their Christmas turkey a little early). She is getting pretty big now.

We asked the vet about a few things when we were getting her worm medecine. We were a bit worried she is thinner than she should be, but the vet says she is fine and will fill out a bit when she stops growing in height in a couple of months time. She also says she should have her first heat any time now - which we are looking forward to (not). We will have her sterilised, apparently this should be a couple of months after her first heat.

The weather has been very warm after the cold snap that brought all the snow. The snow is disappearing at a concerning rate, but we have still had fun skiing and Poppy still loves the snow and loves running around the ski area making friends.

Lime Pickle Recipe

I think it is magic that the pickle somehow soaks up all the juice and is dryish when finished despite how juicy the original limes are. It goes well with plenty of other things than curry. Sausages for example, or cheese or quiche.

Ingredients
16 Limes
5 tbsp salt
3 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp vinegar
50 grams mustard seeds (lightly crushed)
50 grams crushed fenugreek seeds
10 tbsp red chilli powder. (or more or less for hotter or less hot)
1 tsp asafoeteida powder
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
1/2 cup olive, nut or mustard oil

Method
Cut limes into 16ths (or bigger if you prefer bigger lumps of lime in your pickle - smaller bits of lime will soften more)

Add salt, turmeric and vinegar and stir well
Put in a warm place in a jar or box that has a lid. This should be in a warmish room temperature place
Stir the marinade every other day (or as often as you remember) for 4 weeks or until the pieces of lime are soft.
Add the other ingredients
Mix well and put back in the container for an additional week before using

Will get better with longer keeping

Egg Nog Recipe

We have never had this before, but decided it is good and Christmas-y and that now we have a christmas tree (and eggs) we had better try it out.

2 eggs
400 ml whole milk
15g sugar
Drop of vanilla or a small vanilla pod
70ml brandy
Cocoa powder, nutmeg or hot chocolate for dusting

Put the ingredients (except the brandy) in to a pan or a bain marie and heat gently stirring all the time until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon.
You can cool the mixture now and serve cold or serve hot straight away.

Share the brandy between the glasses and pour the egg mixture over the top.
Sprinkle with your chosen topping

I saw a recipe somewhere for egg nog icecream. Interesting idea...

Lazy Brandy Butter Recipe

I am usually too lazy to make brandy butter as they sell some yummy ones in Tesco and I hate trying to cream butter as it always starts off too hard as I don't plan enough ahead to take it out the fridge, then it fires across the room at high velocity when I try to whisk it and there is a big mess that has to be cleared up. They don't sell it in the supermarket here (heathens) and we haven't found the electric whisk yet, so I have been telling Doug we will have to do without this year. However I eventually cracked under the strain of his disappointment and got a bit inventive to make a recipe I could be bothered to make and that didn't need the electric whisk.

50g butter (rock hard from the fridge or whatever)
50g caster sugar
50g icing sugar
2 tbl sp brandy/whisky/cognac (or more or less to taste)

Melt the butter in a pan (don't get it too hot just melt it) and turn off the heat
Add the caster sugar and whisk (with hand or electric whisk)
Add the icing sugar and whisk a bit more
Add the brandy (or whatever) and whisk a bit more

You probably need about 1 min whisking in total with a hand whisk, when you have finished it should look pale and creamy. You can serve warm or refrigerate.

Poppy and the hams

For some reason Poppy loves going upstairs and when she hears the door open she rushes away from whatever she is doing so she can go too. Now we have the hams drying up there she is even more keen. We can't leave her with them unsupervised as I think she could learn to jump as high as them quite quickly.

Poppy's first bath

We took Poppy for a walk at Payolle  (nice for gentle walk winter and summer) and she splunged in to a swamp while chasing a crow. When we got her home she didn't smell very nice so we decided we needed to wash her down a bit. We showered her in the bath with lovely warm water. It took her a moment to get used to the idea, but after that and with a steady supply of treats, she put up with it very well. We towel dried her but she was still pretty wet. She has an obsession with licking wet things so licking herself dry in front of the fire kept her busy for a long time.

Hole in drive is fixed (for now!)

I mentioned that a hole suddenly appeared in our drive. Doug has filled it in with stones and gravel. We still don't really know why it appeared so we are waiting to see what happens now. If it was cause by water flowing under there presumably that will move to flowing somewhere else and we will get another hole. Waiting with bated breath!

A year since our first night here

It is a year since we spent our first night here. We completed on the purchase on a Friday and then stayed the weekend. It was all a bit surreal.
My main memory of the weekend is returning to London feeling like we had spent a weekend on Raymond's farm and were now heading back to 'real life'. Now this is REAL LIFE for us!!

Raymond was planning to move to French Polynesia which was why he sold the farm but after a few months there changed his mind and has now bought another farm locally. I think he would like to have bought this one back off us perhaps but now he has a new place is happy again. He has promised to invite us round when he moves in.

Homemade Oven Chips

In the supermarket here they don't seem to have oven chips, they have chips for deep frying. I didn't realise and cooked them in the oven, the first time they didn't come out very well because they weren't covered in oil and salt like oven chips are. After that I added some oil and salt - which got me thinking - maybe you could do the same with 'real' potato. Seems to work well, not quite the same as proper chips, but less messy than having a deep fat frier.

Chop potatoes in to chip shapes (you can peel or not as you prefer)
Put in a pan of cold water and bring to the boil
As soon as it it properly boiling drain and sprinkle generously with oil (something like a tablespoon per potato if biggish potatoes) and salt then stir well
Spread on a baking sheet and put in a hot oven (220°C ish) for about 30 mins or until golden brown.

Aaaargh a giant hole!

This morning a hole has suddenly appeared in the middle of the drive.
On the surface it is not huge, but when you look down it you can see that under the ground it is much bigger. Perhaps a couple of meters square and 30cm deep. We wondered if all the rain had somehow washed away the soil under under the hard surface of the drive, but somehow it doesn't really add up. You would think it would look damp if it has all been washed away plus it would be strange it has washed away only in the middle of the drive only and in quite a neat shape. Another idea is that there was some kind of pipe or tunnel under there to drain water away that has collaped. You would perhaps expect to see some remains of the pipe which we have not yet.

Less sensible ideas that have been proposed are, one of the meteors hit it, a giant mole dug it out, an army of shrews marshalled by Pernod dug it out...

We are not quite sure what to do about it, but need to do whatever it is fairly quickly before the car falls in and is swallowed. It is going to be hard to fill in without knocking out the rest of the top layer which would make even more of a disaster of the drive than it already is. We are thinking our initial approach will be to try to fill it in by putting rocks and gravel down there and using something to push them under the existing surface of the drive, I imagine the existing surface would then pack down on to them giving a lovely dip in the drive.

Geminids meteor shower

We read that the Geminids would be showering last night, we didn't expect to see it, as the forecast was for cloud. In the event it was perfectly clear and we had a lovely view with several meteors wizzing past each minute. Quite impressive. No photo I am afraid.

What have we been up to?

For the last few days we haven't been doing anything too exciting. We have been skiing on our own and with some friends, we went out to lunch with friends, we raked leaves off the drive (big job given number of leaves and 600m of drive), we put more gravel on the drive (feels like futile never ending task, but maybe it will stop sinking without trace at some point) and we have spent time searching for various things (bigger duvet, waterproof jackets, tax documents) in boxes.
Poppy was sick in the middle of the night. Seems to happen from time to time. Last time it was worse and we took her to the vet where she proceeded to barf giantly three times on his floor and scales. He was most impressed. He gave her an anti emetic injection (expensive!) which fixed her up quickly. luckly this time just seems to be the once so no need for a repeat visit.
The weather has been very cold with heavy frost over night (forecast was -7°C our thermometer said -2°C but it is close to a window). So far nothing has frozen solid and the pump has kept running. Water coming in to the house is REALLY cold though and makes washing hands etc a painful experience (as the hot water is only on when we shower). Showering is not very attractive idea either but we have been maintaining standards and braving it despite the freezing conditions. One day we didn't collect an egg and it stayed in the egg box overnight and froze and cracked, was fine when defrosted and fried.

Sloe Gin Recipe

We should have done this when we picked the sloes, then it would have been ready for Christmas. As it is they have been sitting in the freezer waiting to be dealt with and they will perhaps be ready for my birthday in February.

Fill a jar 1/3 full of sloes (best picked after the first frost or put in the freezer for a while or pricked with a fork)
Weight the sloes and add 2/3 of the weight of sugar (eg for 300g sloes add 200g sugar) to the sloes in the jar
Top up with the strongest (and cheapest) gin you can get
Leave for at least 2 months then strain off the liquid from the fruit.
Drink straight away or will improve with keeping.

I used 300g of sloes and 200g of sugar in a 1l jar with 75cl of gin. It all just fitted in.

Cheese Straws Recipe (or what to do with left over pastry)

Some pastry
Some cheese (any kind, grated if hard cheese). Around the same weight as there is pastry.

If you have a bit of pastry left over after making something cheese straws are a yummy thing to do with it.
Roll the pastry out, needn't be particularly thin, and spread some cheese on top, fold in half and roll again and put some more cheese. Repeat about 4 times or until you feel there is enough cheese in there.

Roll in to a rectangular shape
Cut slices off about 1cm wide
Put the slices on a baking tray and bake at 180°C for about 15mins until golden
Eat warm (with a glass of milk)

Not a great photo - but they are yummy!

Meringue Recipe (or what to do with egg whites)

There are a number of recipes that use only egg yolks (quiche being one).
This is what to do with the left over whites.

Ingredients
4 oz caster sugar
2 egg whites

Method
Beat the egg whites until stiff (they should hold their shape when you pull the whisk out). Use an electric whisk if you have one but doesn't take too long by hand either (our electric whisk is somewhere in a box)
Whisk in 2 oz of caster sugar on a low setting until the mixture has a shiny appearance (a few seconds or a bit longer by hand)
Add the remaining 2 oz of sugar and mix gently with a spoon.

Put dollops (table spoon kind of size) on to a baking tray and cook at 110°C for about an hour and a half then leave in the oven while it cools. They should be cooked through by then. I like mine chewy, if you like them perfect white and crunchy you need to cook longer and cooler. Bit of trial and error really.

Home Made Pasta Recipe

3 egg yolks
70g pasta flour (more or less depending on size of yolks)
Salt (if you want but I prefer just to cook in salty water)

Put the yolks in a bowl. Add the flour slowly mixing with your hands as you do (bit messy but the gunk comes off your hands as you add more flour). You need to mix quite hard to get the flour mixed in. Keep going until you get a dough with a consistancy like play doh (if you can remember what that is like). It should be pretty firm, but when you form it in to a ball and squeeze it, it should not crumble. If you add a bit too much flour and the ball crumbles add a little water. Probably the easiest way to get the feel of what the dough should be like is to keep adding flour until the dough becomes a little crumbly then add a little water. Then the next time stop adding flour when the dough is like this.

Push the soft part of a finger against the dough, at this point it should leave a dent.
Start kneeding the dough, if it sticks to surface then you have not got enough flour in it so work in a bit more.
Kneed for 10 mins. I am not sure if you could do this with a food mixer with dough blades (Rob) as the dough is much harder than bread dough and I think it might just bounce around.
Push a finger against the dough again and it should spring back and not leave much of a dent. If this isn't the case keep kneeding.

Leave the dough to rest for 10 mins (or more) then roll it out as thin as you can (1mm perhaps), you should be able to see through it a little. It shouldn't be very sticky at this stage, if it is then the dough was probably to wet, this time flour it well so it doesn't stick to stuff and next time make the dough drier with more flour.

Now shape as you want, for tagliatteli you can flour the sheet of pasta, roll it up and then cut slices of the width you want the tagliatteli to be, then mix them around a bit and they will unroll ready for cooking.
You can also use a pasta maker to do the cutting if you have one. I find it easier to make the dough as above rather than using the machine then if I want spagetti or neat looking tagliatteli I use the machine for cutting. You need to make sure the pasta sheet is well floured. It is quite hard work rolling it out with a rolling pin so you can use the machine for rolling too.

Or you can make ravioli, tortillini of lots of other things.
These make good ravioli as long as you make sure the sheets of pasta are damp where they are meant to be sticking together. I got mine from Lakeland.

Cook in plenty of salty water for a few minutes until done.

More skiing

I promise I won't do a blog entry every time we go skiing and bore you all to death. But at the moment it is all exciting and new. We moved here because it was relatively more affordable than the Alps and yet still within an easy drive of skiing. We bought the house without ever having skied here, so of course it has been a worry whether the skiing will be good and the terrain varied. Luckly we can be very happy skiing in a relatively small area as long as there is fun and challenging stuff. Runs needen't be long if they are interesting. We also often do the same run again and again with only small variations so don't mind if there is not miles and miles of area to cover.

We haven't covered the whole area yet (piste map), but we have found plenty of interesting skiing so far with trees, gullies, steeps, powder, rock gardens and probably some other things. I think we have been lucky as there is plenty of snow for so early in the season.

The Grand Tourmelet area is made up of two areas, La Mongie and Barèges. In the summer you can drive over the pass between the two, but in the winter the ski area is on the road, so you can approach from either side but not drive through. La Mongie is the area closest to us and where we drive to. There are chairlifts up to the pass from each side allowing you to go between the areas.

Rhoda in La Mongie

No he didn't fall over. The snow is from the gnarly pow!

Tracks under the lift

Barèges ski area

Trees in Barèges area

Rhoda in Barèges area

Hanging the hams

The two hams have been in salt with a weight on top for a month (we have another ham waiting in the freezer, perhaps we will wet cure it and the fourth was made into little roasts). According to the recipe we are following it was time to hang them.
We took them out of the salt and rinsed them off with cold water and rubbed some vinager on to them. It looks a bit gross here because we did not use saltpeter which keeps the pink colour more but doesn't seem to add much else so we didn't bother with it.

We then attached a butcher hook (which was much more difficult than you would think to get in) and have hung them from the rafters upstairs with cloth bags around them to protect them from flies.

It is not quite clear how long they will need to hang for, but some months. We can tell when they are ready apparently by squeezing them and they should be pretty firm but not totally rock solid. At the moment they feel pretty squidgy.

Cabin Fever?

I am a bit worried we are going a bit mad and need to get out more. We have started having conversations with the animals and invented personalities for them (Doug says we didn't invent the personalities for them they did that themselves...)

Doug picks up Pernod - 'Come here fat boy'
Pernod - 'My name is not fat boy. I am Pernodicus the Great (said in deep and portentous voice)'
Doug turns Pernod on his back.
Pernod stares at him fixedly - 'You're on my list. When I'm lord of the the WORLD you're going to SUFFER'
Rhoda bicycles his back legs for him - 'Come on kitty you need to do some excersize you lazy dollop - Buca has been catching all the mice, and you've beeen eating all her food'
Pernod switches his manic stare to her - 'You're on my list too. You're TOP of the list. You're going to be SORRY when I am your great leader and you have to GROVEL before me and feed me all the time while you have NOTHING and have to live outside in the COLD and WET. No you're not top, that dog beast is, you're second on the list. She will suffer the MOST. She will be my number one minion and do my bidding'

Poppy has two personalities, The Snarff (Queen of the snarffsey folk) and Princess Snoogles. The Snarff runs around snarffing (biting, chewing and monstoring) everything in sight, Princess Snoogles is much more dainty and picky and doesn't like sitting on the wet ground or getting her feet muddy.

Sambucca doesn't say much. Occasionally if you annoy her 'I am going to keeeel you' or 'I could keeeeel you with this single claw'

Farmhouse Cheddar

For the last few days it has rained and rained and rained and then rained a bit more. So we mostly stayed inside. Probably you can see from recent posts I spent a lot of the time cooking. One day I made 3 different kinds of cheese. Coulommier - this time using raw milk to see if it made any difference to the flavour. It is too soon to say really, but the curds were rather different in the final cheese has come out a bit more solid, but it is hard to tell whether that was the different milk or a slight difference in temperature or something.
I also made a farmhouse cheddar - this has a bit of a simpler method to real cheddar which involves a lot of a process called cheddaring which involves chopping and stacking and re-stacking the curds many many times while draining the whey out. The final cheese was ricotta as this is made from whey of which I had a lot by now. You are still left with lots of whey but you have extracted more of the goodness. The left bottle is the original from the Coulommier, the other three have been used to make ricotta too.

What do you DO with so much whey?

I am having trouble getting enough weight on to the cheese press, so not quite sure how it will turn out. The leverage is only x2 and the internet say you want something like 10psi, with a diameter of 5inches that means I need to get 80lb on the arm which seems quite unfeasible (full kettle is about 4kg, bag of rocks about 9kg which is what is on there now). In addition there seems to be a slight design flaw in it that the base isn't long enough and doesn't extend as far as under the weight, so for the moment it is clamped to the work top.

The cheese stays in there for 5 days being turned every day.

After a couple of days it is now looking a bit smoother and rounder than this but tastes extremely bland and has a more rubbery texture than I typically like in my cheddar. Hopefully it will be better after the month maturing that is recommended (or more if you can wait longer)

4 liters of milk makes about 1lb (1/2 kg) of cheddar.

Method for Farmhouse Cheddar
4 liters whole milk
6 ice cubes of starter
2ml rennet (diluted in 8ml of water)
9g salt (1 tbl spoon)

Heat the milk to 32°C
Add the starter and stir well
Leave for about 40 mins (I left longer for about an hour) or until the milk smells of butter.
Add the rennet and stir well.
Leave a further 40 mins until curd forms
Cut the curd in to 2cm blocks (approx)
Slowly raise the temperature of the curds to 38°C, stirring gently as you do so
Leave for 10 mins (maintain the temperature) to let the curds settle to the bottom
Squish the curds to the bottom of the pan and to one side and ladle the whey out the pan
You now have a 'mat' of curds. Cut it in to 8 thin pieces and stack them one on top of the other and leave to drain for 10 mins. Ladle out any whey that comes out of them.
Pull apart and re-stack so a different one is on the bottom and they are all upsidedown
Leave a further 10 mins and remove any whey
Continue to restack every 30 mins until the whey stops running and if you squeeze the curd only a few drops of liquid come out. Maybe a couple of hours.
Crumble the curd in to 1cm size pieces
Add the salt and mix in well
Place the curds in a damp cheese cloth in the mold and put it in the cheese press for 4 hours with just enough weight to squeeze out whey.
Remove the cheese from the mold and wrap in a new piece of cheese cloth and put back in the other way up. Put back in the press for 24 hours with a heavier weight (I used 4kg). Repeat 5 times (I increased weight to 9kg at the 2nd rewrapping)

Remove from the press and allow to air dry for a day then coat in oil and store for at least a month. Turn daily and wash off any mould.

Ricotta Cheese

Ricotta is made from whey. You don't get much from the whey, but it was interesting to do and seemed less wasteful to use the whey from the Coulommier and the Farmhouse Cheddar for something.

Method
However much whey you have (I used 4 liters here)
Heat it until it just boils
Add half tsp citric acid or vitamin c (or a squirt lemon juice) per 3 liters of whey
The whey should go cloudy.
Allow to cook for a few minutes
Strain through a cheese cloth.
Put the curds in to a bowl and add a little salt (to taste)
Put the cheese in to a container where it can continue to drain a little (cheese mold, coffee filter)

Use for recipes such as ricotta and spinach ravioli (coming soon...)

Mince Pies

Now it is December we have to eat as many mince pies as we can before they go out of season. Skiing is the perfect excuse to stuff your face with such things.

This is how I make them.
Extra Rich Shortcrust Pastry (240g of flour should make about 12 depending on tin size)
Mincemeat (or you can buy it!)

Cut out circles that fit your tin.
Cut out either smaller circles to make lids or shapes like stars or other christmasy things
Put the bottons in to the tin and fill with mincemeat. This is the tricky bit. You want to get as much as you can in without them overflowing. I find that using lids that don't fully cover the mincemeat means they boil less so they overflow less and thus you can fit a bit more in!

 

Goats Cheese and Onion Quiche Recipe

Makes 4 small ones (10cm diameter)

Pastry (see here)
120g plain flour
80g butter
1 egg yolk
Salt (unless you use salted butter)
Possibly a little water

Filling
1 onion
150g of goats cheese or other soft cheese (I used the Coulommier we recently made)
1 egg + 1 egg yolk mixed in a bowl/jug (or you can mix 2 egg yolks with about 50ml of cream or a variety of other egg mixtures work too)


Method Fry the onion gently with salt and pepper until golden
Make the pastry by crumbing together the flour and butter then add the egg yolk and possibly a little water.
Refrigerate for 30 mins
Put pastry in to the tins (you can roll out and cut shapes the right size, or grate and then squidge in to the tins to cover the bottom then the sides or break of lumps and squidge them in to the tins in the same way)
Refrigerate a bit more

Crumble the cheese in to the tins, add the onion and pour over the egg mixture (leave a few mm at the top so they don't overflow as they cook)

Bake in the oven at 180°C for 40 mins or until the pastry is golden brown and the egg mixture has set.

Perfect picnic food

Opening day at the Grand Tourmelet

The local ski area opened today. The drive up was quite exciting as it snowed a lot over night and then was lovely blue skies today - perfect and the road was still quite snowy. There were a lot of frantic people stopped in the middle of the road putting chains on. Luckily with the 4x4 we were fine. We are always nervous putting it in to 4 wheel drive as when we bought it the nice man from the garage gave us a lecture about being careful and not driving it in 4wd when the road isn't slidey enough - or the engine will leap out the bonnet or something. Don't tell Doug, but there was one time I forgot to take it out of 4wd for at least 100m and I was worried for ages afterwards about a little kind of click/tremor I could feel sometimes in the clutch - I then realised to my great relief that this is a little click that happens when the air conditioning comes on, so unlikely to be related to the engine leaping out the bonnet. Today we were good, it was plenty slidey enough. Usually I don't overtake that many people driving the 4x4 as it isn't a nippy little thing (Doug calls me Grandma Stationwagon - which I think is mean considering he complains when I drive 'like a rally driver') but today we were zooming past all sorts.

Only a few of the lifts actually opened, but it wasn't THAT busy for the first day and we had plenty of lovely fresh powder runs. The lifts opened at 9am and we were knackered by midday. There were a number of very keen looking people with nice skis and ABS rucksacks - which are an avalanche safety device that are meant to float you to the top of the avalanche and generally indicate a keen off piste skier. We just need to learn French so we can make friends with them!

Happy to go skiing

The drive up

Fresh snow

Shredding the pow

Happy to be out the car

The puppy dog waited very patiently (well perhaps not patiently) in her crate in the car. I was worried she would get cold because she is pretty skinny and only has very short hair. She loves the heat and sits right in front of the fire so close you think she would burn. But with her jacket on she seemed to be warm enough. We took her for a bit of a run around after we finished skiing so she doesn't get hacked off with going for car rides when they just bring her a cold wait at the other end then a drive home. We went to Payolle (where the sloes came from) because it is quieter and safer for her to run around, and with less skiers to monster - although as it turned out there were a number of cross country ones but they seemed to like being jumped on by an over friendly dog (possibly they will be less keen on the huge poo she laid in the middle of the track).

Are you getting bored of videos of Poppy being cute in the snow yet? Har har

What we needed after that was a lovely warm shower. If only!