The smallholding

Cheese and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

Last sunday was my first delivery for Ging`s Artisan Goat`s Cheese- CSA in Brussels.  

For the past few months I`ve been working hard to choose which ones to present and loving every minute of it. 

I finally came up with these beauties for the first delivery. 

- a fresh goats cheese with honey from our own hives ( sadly no picture) 

- a fresh goat's cheese with apricot and sage ( top left) 

- a hard cheese with cloves and cumin ( 3 photo, top left) 

- a fresh aged, white moulded goats cheese, called "oh, so Billy" ( 3 photo, top right) 

- a fresh aged,  charcoal ( charcoal, made here on the smallholding)  goats cheese. ( bottom photo) 

My passion for making traditional, artisan goat`s cheeses: 

I am passionate about my artisan cheese`s, to me it is very important to know were all my produce comes from and what impact if any, it has on the enviroment. With these thoughts in mind it took me down a road to make my own cultures and rennet for the cheese`s, so I could truely say everything in the cheese making is natural and made here on the smallholding. After a far bit of research I discovered it was possible to make a culture for cheese making with ant eggs !!! yes ant eggs and I make the rennet with nettles. 

Collecting the ants eggs and how I make the culture: 

well ofcourse true me style, I had to go hunting for the ant eggs, after a bit of trial and error, digging holes all over the place, I discovered that I only needed to move a animal feed bin in the field and there they were, lots a ants running around like mad trying to move there eggs, I just assisted and took about a teaspoon of them. 

now here are the steps to make my culture ( it also works for making yoghurt ) 

- I started with about 125ml of milk

- I put the ant eggs in a little piece of sterile cheese cloth and I tied it so the eggs wouldn`t mix freely with the milk. 

- I slowly heated the milk up to 25 celcius and then put the milk into a thermos flask to keep the heat constant. 

- After about 5 hours, you will see that the milk has set, it looks a bit like a soft jelly, then it`s good to go. 

- strain the eggs in the cheese cloth out of the milk  and... 

hey presto, we have a culture for the cheese  (yoghurt). 

I use around 60ml of this mother culture in 1 litr of milk to make a new batch of culture and freeze it for further use in cheese making. 

Workshops

I organise different types of workshops in the small holding. Follow Love & Living the Good Life at Facebook to see the upcoming dates. 

• Goats cheese making (hard and soft)
• Sausage making
• Bread making
• Edible walks
• Sewing classes
• Five course dinners with local produce  - most of which is from the smallholding. 

We keep goats in the smallholding and the milk from the goats we use for making the cheese in the cheese making workshops. I find it intruiging to be as self sufficient as possible and hope also to inspire other people to learn more about how to make cheese at home - even people that don't keep goats themselves. The workshops include a lunch with a selection of my soft and hard goats cheese. More information on the other workshops to come...

About me

A few years back we left the rat race to set up a smallholding and to do our best to be self sufficient. We grow and rear all our own produce and try to revive old lost crafts.