Rustling Wind Creamery tour...

..it took all of about 12 minutes, but me and Sa went on a motorcycle ride over to Falls Village and hit up Rustling Wind Creamery for the tour and a block of cheese. We ended up talking for a while with the woman who owns and runs the place, who also happens to be the head cheese maker. It's kind of a one woman show, I think. Here's what we found in the fridge that followed us home:

I just cut off a very small piece to try while watching Gary Vey-ner-chuck on Wine Library TV's artisan cheese segment. Consider me blown away. I've never had raw cows milk cheese before, but this is the duke! This cheese so TOTALLY captures the real, well.. for lack of a better word, rawness of the milk this animal made. It's *so* pungent, and huge in taste. It takes but a 1/2 centimeter square cube to really get a big punch in the face flavor that lasts well over 5 minutes. This is really an eye opener for someone just stepping foot in the cheese making area. Very exciting!

In somewhat related news, I just found a place yesterday (a dairy, of course..) that sells raw cows milk, Holsteins in fact, to the public in a timely fashion and at a decent price. And weirdly, it's open 24hrs a day.. cause it's 'honor system' style stuff, I can swing by after my evening shift of work and bring a couple gallons home for cheese making on the weekend.. sweet! The pieces are falling into place, I can see it now.

In brewing news, I just scored a fitting from McMaster Carr last night that's gonna enable me to yet again fine tune the brewery to bring it to the next level. This is evolutionary, but it's going to really make for an ease of use model that will be hard to top. Brew partners, stand by.. you're gonna love this thing!

Double yolker! What the.. !

So, currently raising chickens, of course I've heard of these things.. the double-youlk egg. But to this day, I've only ever bought non-store, backyard flock eggs twice. The second time I bought 'em was 12 minutes ago on my way back home from the Dr's appointment I had. The backyard flock I bought these from (for just $2.00 none-the-less!) is a relativly large one of 30-ish chickens. I got the tour of the place pretty quick by a 10 year old boy who translated his Hungarian speaking grandmothers words for me quite well.. enough to gather that they've only had these chickens since this spring, and that they have had no chicken casualties all year. Nice! I noticed their sign for eggs pop up late last week and this is the first time I've stopped in.. glad I did. Nice folks.

Anyway, to bring this back around, a picture, worth a thousand words:

 

Color me surprised! Yeah, I've heard of 'em, but never before seen one.. but there it was, in my fry pan. This was just a medium sized egg too, not especially large. It tasted like heaven! I slapped it on a bagel made just yesterday in my kitchen, and covered it with a piece of cheese which was, unfortunately, not made in my kitchen. Give me some time on that front and we'll get that taken care of. 

In other chicken news, here's a pic of the girls enjoying a bowl of pasta this morning.. couldn't quite finish it last night, and figured they'd enjoy it..

Other than that, the IPA I made with Frank yesterday is bubbling away happily in the fermenter downstairs.. should have that on tape in a few weeks if all goes well.