Strawberry Wine and a taste of the future

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Success! Strawberry wine and goat cheese! Yay. I was beginning to give up hope with regard to ever producing good-tasting wine from the fruit that we buy or grow. But last week I experimented with strawberries and made a REALLY good strawberry wine out of a quart of them. VERY tasty.

I bought 3.5 lbs of plums and found an easy plum wine recipe online. It takes about two weeks to finish, so I'm hoping this works, as well, now that I know that if the balloon goes down, it's ready. And then mead. Would love to make mead that actually tastes proper. Last time I tried making it, it turned into vinegar. I didn't test the pH.

But the best news is about the cheese... I made cheese with curds and whey (with my new rennet that we processed from the stomach of the goat we killed) and it worked! I bought a small cheese press that's REALLY cheesy-looking and chintzy - it would never work for a commercial cheese production kitchen. But nonetheless, I was pressing and turning the handle to create pressure after I wrapped the curds in cheesecloth and put them into the pvc pipe that has a wooden base (never use wood... too much acid in the whey which has already stained it). The curds 'gave' as the day went on and then finally, I released the press and put the whole thing in a tupperware and stuck it in the fridge. The reason it doesn't stay on a cool shelf? This is Texas. Between the cockroaches, fruit flies and other assorted bugs, it was just best to keep it cool in the fridge.

Anyway, I had to wait for almost a week and then when I opened the container, it was cheese! Not imperfect cheese, but cheese that looked like cheese and tasted like milk and a hint of cheddar. Oh, it was wonderful! So now I am going to seal the other half of it in wax and really put it on a shelf to age. I hope that works.

So two successes in a week. I hope there are a lot more. I'm counting on it.