Teenage Chickens

pc190024 150x150 Teenage Chickens Here are the chickens — they’re so goofy looking right now, they seem to be in whatever passes for eighth grade in chicken-dom. Their feet are enormous, and while their feathers are coming in, they’re still not really feathered out (look at their funny tails). But they’re getting little chicken-y personalities, and they like to torment the dogs by flapping their wings.

I took the chooks outside for a little air last week, and here’s Raymond watching them. He spent the entire afternoon out there, occasionally running inside to whine at me that there were birds! birds! out there. In the yard! Birds! pc110023 150x150 Teenage Chickens The next step is to build the coop. I’ve got a big packing crate that we’re going to recycle, but since it’s snowing again, and wet, and nasty, and well, the chooks are fine out in the shed in their dog crate, it’ll probably be another week or so until we get the coop built.

In the meantime, we’ll all just keep watching the funny things. Funny, smelly, goofy-looking birds.

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Baby Camemberts

pc140028 150x150 Baby Camemberts Here are my first two baby camemberts. I made them last Thursday — and while the recipe was not difficult at all — it’s the same basic cheesemaking skills — heating milk, adding cultures, waiting for a clean break, cutting and separating curds from whey, and molding the cheeses. It’s not difficult.

Where the magic seems to come in is in the waiting. The cheeses are in the fridge, in their mini-cave made from a plastic storage box, and I’m waiting for the mold to form on their surfaces.I’m a little concerned that they are not entirely smooth — there are some pits where the curds didn’t settle evenly. So, we’ll see what happens as they ripen.

Cooking the milk and waiting for the curds to set took about 4 hours (most of that was waiting around). Waiting for the cheese to ripen will take 2-4 weeks. For me, this is the hard part. I am not patient. I am trying very hard not to pester the cheeses. I’ll keep you all posted.

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Spring has sprung …

The weather has turned glorious, sunny and warm with intermittent rains — the lawn has greened up overnight and there are daffodils and crocus blooming in the foundation beds.

I’ve been up to all sorts of fun. I made a couple of camembert cheeses that are ripening in the fridge, the chickens are getting big and we’re planning to build them a coop out of a packing crate in which a friend had some family things shipped over from England, and I planted lots of cold weather crops in the garden over the long weekend.

And perhaps the happiest of all developments, there seems to be a “we” in LivingSmall these days. I’ve got a lovely new friend, and we’ve been spending a lot of time up at his cabin in the mountains — so I think there might be a little more mountain fun like mushroom hunting and general foraging in our future here at the blog.

So, I’ll be back this week with tales of recent adventures …

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Spring Break

Blogging is sort of on hiatus for a week or so. “My” kids are back in town from LA for Easter break, there’s so much going on in the garden that I can’t keep up, and there are some other happy developments here at LivingSmall. So we’ll be back next week with lots of fun news.

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