The New Hotness

Best buds

Holy shit I fucking GET IT NOW. 

I get why people put up with the interminable soul-freezing apocalyptic hellscape that is winter, with all of its bone-chilling darkness and treacherous, alienating temperatures, only to be followed by the brief but nail-biting driving adventure that is "mud season," and, soon enough, black fly season. I. GET. IT.

Because Spring.

Yeah yeah I know. Everyone fucking loooooooves spring. It's all pretty and clement and there are things growing and the farmers markets are chockablock with little green things that five years ago were just weeds but are now considered delicacies and cost $20/lb (lambs quarters anyone?). It's like the only part of the warmish season in New York that doesn't smell like hot garbage. 

But here? Here it's a goddamned revelation. Tiny buds are budding. The meepers are meeping (that's peepers, a species of very noisy frog that makes its society debut around this time of year, if you want to get technical about it, but they sound like they're meeping to me, so .... ), the farm stands fling open their shutters, the trails open up and the roads that were impassable for all of winter and could add as much as an hour to your drive are now, for the most part, traversible. 

On the farm, a cycle begins anew. The darling little calves that I bottlefed when I arrived in September have moved up the road to where the big boys were (the big boys are now in Laini's freezer bew hew). The girls, what with a brand new milking cycle and its attendant vying-for-a-new-social-status bloodbathery, not to mention being holed up inside for goddamned months, have been giving Lindsay Lohan et al a run for their money in the Mean Girls department. It's been both fascinating and horrifying to watch this universal truth that all women must beat each other up and prey on one another's weaknesses in order to survive. To wit: Poor Ellen was getting the shit beat out of her and not eating and getting skinnier and skinnier and thus getting even more picked on. I'd come into the barn and see her little head bleeding. For a while we had to hitch up the rest of the girls just so she would get enough peace to eat her grain. Well now Ellen's found a weaker link to pick on and seems to be gaining strength from the sheer adrenaline of unleashing all of her pent up anger and resentment on a lesser goat.

Thankfully now that the fields are dry and the sun is out, they're finally back out on pasture, and with any luck, that fresh air and room to maneuver will temper their uppity asses. A brand new baby calf has taken up residence in the solar barn. Creemees (soft serve by any other name but LOLVermont) are in full effect at every gas station and general store worth its weight in terrible coffee. People are fixing to get their winter tires switched back to regular old car tires (I passed a sign outside the elementary school advertising a tire "event" and I suspect it has to do with this process but have no goddamned clue in actual fact). Last weekend I went for a hike WITHOUT wearing the fur-lined Sorels that have been glued to my feet for the last 5 months, and out on the trail, in addition to seeing trout lillies and beaver dams and all manner of nature, we came across a riotous little patch of ramps that would have made all of Brooklyn simultaenously orgasm. (P.S. I do not get the ramp thing but you do you, people.) And just to be extra devil-may-care, my bare feet made actual contact with real live grass. GLORY GODDAMNED BE YOU GUYS.

In the cheese room, things are getting back into full swing. Last week Rebecca patiently (re)taught me how to make the rather time-consuming and patience-testing Capriolas, which require much precision to remove enough whey and to scoop a perfect, unfettered poached-egg-sized lump of goodness into each mold before being cotinually and methodically topped off with unspoiled and paper thin little caps of curd until all that's left are the shitty shattered ones at the  bottom of the vat. Periodically one must smooth the pock-marked surface of the curd and start afresh. It's the sort of process that makes sense and probably becomes second nature when you've done it a few times but seems crazy painstaking and arduous to a quasi-neophyte like me. Rebecca observed that any time I felt I didn't get a good scoop I'd give up and dump it rather sloppily into the mold, which she astutely connected to some psychological habits I have of giving up on something once I think it's been compromised rather than seeing it through or trying to right the ship. Cheese-learnin' goes deep, fools! 

As green as I still feel when it comes to vat work, I must say I can feel what a long way I've come since I started. Today I learned a new cheese, the La Roche, which evidently I'll be making in addition to Pyramids and Capriolas on alternating weeks. And while I did take some notes on how to salt them and set up the forms, they were not nearly as copious and detailed as the notes I took initially, because certain things that might have previously needed elucidation or explanation or commentary are now obvious and second nature to me. I say this now, and with my luck I'll totally royally fuck up the next cheese I make, as the universe's way of keeping my cheese ego in check. Honest to god though, doing more vat stuff has been what I've been missing from this experience and I can't wait for the day when I look back on current me and think how far I've come. I can't wait for the curd cutting and hooping and salting to be, like, IN MY BODY. For all the weird letters and code that make up one of Laini's recipes  (she uses like HELLA molds and cultures and shit) to make sense. I'm in that awkward phase where I've been here long enough to know things and not to be off the hook for certain oversights or ignorances but not long enough to feel totally comfortable and a master of the things I want to master. I have a sneaking feeling that that elusive comfort and mastery, while worth striving for, isn't easily attainable at a place like Lazy Lady Farm, where there is much mystery and enigma and shape-shifting. 

In the meantime me and my blindingly white albino legs will be soaking up some sun and reveling in the outrageous beauty that is Vermont in the springtime. As I type this I am attempting to inject some much needed melanin (ok who am I kidding the most I can hope for are freckles) into my practically see-through shins. It's good to have goals.