Thirty Years Old!

Yes, I have turned 30 years old this week! I had a lot of fun celebrating with everybody.

First, Doc booked a session for us at Dore Studio to get some glamour shots done. I wanted the whole glamorous experience, so I even had them do my makeup for me.

Makeup by Dore Studio

To be honest, I’m not really a makeup person, and it was weird to have so much on. I hardly recognized myself in the mirror! But it was a lot of fun, and all part of the experience of looking really, incredibly glamorous.

I also found out that it is difficult to photograph makeup to show that you are wearing a lot. It seems that makeup is actually really good for cameras, but doesn’t look that good in real life (my opinion). I don’t think this photo accurately conveys how much makeup I had on. But I digress…

The ladies at Dore Studio really knew how to direct people for a photo shoot (which is good, because Doc and I are awful models), and they had a really good eye for what worked and what looked good. True professionals!

Then, for dinner Doc had it catered by FOB Kitchen, which is always amazing. They even printed out little “Happy Birthday Christine” menus, which I feel was above and beyond their responsibilities. And of course, everything tasted amazing, including some of the new dishes we got to try. Always a hit! They are so accommodating and kind.

I also made a big wheel of farmhouse cheddar to be my “birthday cheese.” So that, when it is my birthday next year, I will know that the cheese is 1 year old when I eat it.

I also also got my hair cut. I attempted to do a Liberty Curl, but it kind of looked like a big pompadour or something. Which was also cool! But one day I will master the Liberty Curl. One day.

New Haircut

I couldn’t be happier with the new haircut. Hooray! Birthday!

Peace Master! Duhn nuhn nuhn nuuuh!

Right up until just a few weeks ago, I was completely without any inspiration as to what to wear for Halloween this year. I had finally resigned myself to recycling a previous year’s costume, but then I saw the Adventure Time episode “Nemesis” whilst trying to catch up on Season 6.

Suddenly, I was inspired! There was this goofy character that was a riff on the old Witch-Hunter / The Hunter Trope, who has sworn to defeat evil, whilst also raising 3 children and driving around in a minivan.

Doc thinks that Peace Master leans a bit towards He Who Fights Monsters and/or Van Helsing Hate Crimes in that he believes Peace Master is struggling with evil within himself and this is what fuels his intense hatred of evil and the dark arts, but I disagree. I think he is more of the Mage Killer / Witch Hunter played straight.

Peace_Master_costume

Plus, he looks very “costumey.” So I pulled together a costume, and it worked out! Hooray!

An extra bonus about the Peace Master costume: it has a built-in purse. Most costumes don’t have a purse, and/or wearing your purse with them detracts. But the Peace Master costume requires a purse. That worked out really well.

Farmhouse Cheddar

Today, since Doc and I had already taken that cheese making class, I decided to make some farmhouse cheddar today!

Since we are still experimenting with all the factors, Doc and I decided to make four little cheeses instead of one big cheese:

  1. Pasteurized milk, aged 4 months
  2. Pasteurized milk, aged 8 months
  3. Raw milk, aged 4 months
  4. Raw milk, aged 8 months
Cheese making
Stirring the curds in a warm water bath (aka my sink). The pot on the right has the raw milk, the pot on the left has the pasteurized milk.

These were the only variables, though. All cheese permutations were made from non-homogenized Jersey cow’s milk. I’m hoping that the pasteurized milk cheese tastes just as good as the raw milk cheese, because raw milk is incredibly expensive (makes sense why it would be, having a much shorter shelf life, but still).

Cheese making
Breaking up the curds into little pieces and salting them, after the first draining step.

I could really tell the difference between the two milks, though. You need to add calcium chloride to pasteurized milk in order to use it for cheese, otherwise it won’t form a firm enough curd. So there’s that. But the pasteurized milk whey was a very bright brilliant yellow, whereas the raw milk curd was a much duller yellow, almost a greyish yellow in comparison. I do not know why this would be. You can see the color difference in the photos, but it seemed even more dramatic in person.

Cheese making
One of the cheeses after the first pressing.

When they’re done aging, we’ll taste them in side-by-side comparisons and decide if the raw milk is worth the extra cost. I wanted to age one of the test cheeses for over a year, but Doc suggested that since these are just tiny test cheeses, we should do a shorter aging process so we can start on the large-batch cheeses (to age over a year) sooner.

Cheese making
We made improvised cheese molds by cutting slits into old salsa containers for the whey to drain through while they got pressed.

The bacteria we used were lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis and lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris. I’ve read that Streptococcus thermophilus is being used more and more in industrial cheddar production, but it wasn’t present in the little culture packet we bought.

We’ll see how it turns out!