So it was a real treat for me to attend last year’s Wild and Woolly Weekend, a fiber arts fair hosted by Six Loose Ladies and Fiber Arts in Vermont.  ­­­Now, I’m looking forward to this year’s installment, on April 27 and 28 at the Pointe Hotel.  This fiber arts weekend is 50% craft fair, 50% classes, and 50% social networking.   No, that’s not careless math; it’s just that this weekend has so much packed into two days that it overflows!  Veteran and virgin crafters alike really ought to swing by to check out the vendors and classes being offered by this energetic group of artists and crafters.

Those who are new to this sort of event may have the wrong impression.  A weekend about yarn?!  Probably a bunch of old ladies sitting around with knitting needles, balls of yarn, and maybe even a cat or two by their feet.  You couldn’t be more wrong. When you look up the meaning of the phrase Wild and Woolly, you’ll find synonyms such as boisterous and unruly.  And, based on the energy that is present from the moment you walk in the door, boisterous and unruly seem like achievable descriptors!  (I mean, with a retail store name of Six Loose Ladies, you know that rowdy humor will be a part of the fun!)

The Wild and Woolly Weekend has classes available for the very beginner, like me, but they also have classes appropriate for those who are already pretty established in the crafting tradition.  In some classes, you’ll go home with a finished product; in others you’ll go home with enough knowledge and enthusiasm that you can tackle a new project on your own.  You can choose between three-hour classes or 50-minute ‘mini-classes.’  The topics range from spinning on a wheel or on a drop spindle; choosing and working with colors; making mug rugs (coasters), chair pads, animal pins, and mittens with needle felting; designing decorative boxes from paper collage;  and creating sparkly bracelets using beaded knitting.

Whether you’re still a latent crafter or an admitted junkie of all things wool, this event is well worth checking out.  Entrance is not only free, but there are door prizes galore.   The costs of classes are $5 or $10 for the mini-classes and between $30 and $45 for the 3-hour classes.  Class listings are available at the Six Loose Ladies website.

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We found this recipe by trying to get our teenage kids out of bed on schooldays. Never an easy task, we devised a new plan.  First one downstairs in the morning, ready for school, gets to pick which new breakfast recipe we’ll try (for dinner)!  This plan seems like a good way to get going a few minutes earlier, while also trying out new creative breakfast recipes for the inn — where we love to wow guests with great food.

So when the “first one down” picked Cheese Filled Blueberry Blintzes (stay tuned for this upcoming blog post), a recipe that relies on farmer’s cheese, we promptly had to research: what is farmers cheese and how do we get it?   Here is how to make homemade cheese. Well, as for what it is, Farmer’s Cheese is a mild and soft white cheese made from milk curds. It is a good melty cheese, like a mozzarella or a ricotta. Since “easy to make” was part of so many of the descriptions, we decided that’s how we’d get it.  We found this super easy Homemade Farmer’s Cheese on allrecipes.com.  I tailored the recipe’s volume to match the amount of raw milk I had in the fridge (3/4 gallon) and then embarked upon my first cheese making conquest!  The “waste product” of this recipe was a surprise bonus. Keep reading…!

The quick summary of the recipe is this:  heat milk; add lemon; wait; strain; refrigerate.  It’s that easy.  That said, here’s a little more detail –

Ingredients:

• ¾ gallon of milk (raw preferred, pasteurized tolerated, but not ultra-pasteurized … because really that’s just not milk anyway!)
• the juice of a medium lemon
• a pinch of a salt

Heat the milk with salt until the milk almost boils, stirring frequently to avoid scorching.  (Another recipe warned: don’t heat too much or you’ll destroy the healthy bacteria in the milk.)

Turn off the heat and stir in the lemon juice.  Wait 5 – 10 minutes for the milk to curdle (starts immediately).    While waiting, line a strainer with cheese cloth, and place the whole set-up in a deep pot that will collect the runoff liquid, more fondly called whey.

Ten minutes later,   

this is about what the milk looks like, er, um, I mean the cheese.  Like magic!

Pour the mixture into the strainer lined with cheesecloth (don’t forget the catch pan!) and let drain for a bit, maybe 5 minutes or so.

Straining the curds

The remaining whey can be removed by picking up the cheese cloth and squeezing out most of the liquid. (Caution: do not drop your iphone into the curd when trying for a photo.)

Squeeze out excess liquid from the cheese.

For kicks, I weighed the cheese.  Nine-tenths of a pound.

3/4 gallon of raw milk made 9/10 pound of cheese, plus the 8 cups of whey

The cheese gets wrapped and put in the fridge for use within a week.

But the unexpected bonus of this recipe was surely the 8 cups of whey.  All that runoff liquid that’s no good for cheese is great for a buttermilk replacement in biscuits, pancakes, or even rhubarb coffee cake.  We poured they whey into 2-cup portions and put it in the freezer.  Perfect for future baking!

At seven dollars per gallon, raw milk is rather expensive.  But for this $7 investment, plus under 30 minutes of my time, we got a pound of cheese and a half gallon of healthy buttermilk replacement.  I’m impressed!  Eating local is so often considered a luxury, but this recipe is a reminder that it can also be affordable and practical too.

Coming Soon ….  We’ll post the Cheese Stuffed Blintzes recipe that requires this Farmer’s Cheese.  Looks SO good!

You can experience homemade farmer’s cheese at our beautiful Vermont B&B!

The post How To Make Homemade Cheese – Farmer’s Style appeared first on Golden Stage Inn.

The Okemo Valley Shuttle will drive an hourly loop through the valley, picking up and dropping off passengers at Ludlow hotels, condos, bars and restaurants along the way.  The route begins at Jackson Gore on the north and travels through Ludlow, ending at The Pointe Hotel, continuing onto Golden Stage Inn Bed and Breakfast and Glimmerstone Mansion on a “on demand” basis.

Shuttle Service in Okemo Valley is complimentary to our Vermont Bed and Breakfast guests

The 24 passenger vehicle is available to travelers on winter Fridays, Saturdays, and holiday periods from 6pm through 2am, through the e­­­nd of March 2013.  A second vehicle, a 15 passenger van, is used for fare-taxi service in Ludlow and its surrounding communities. For taxi service, call (802) 438-8089.

The buses are owned and operated by The Good Bus, a local business offering taxi service and private charters for all occasions including weddings, bachelor or bachelorette parties, brewery tours, corporate outings and family reunions. Tesha Buss, owner of The Good Bus, says The Good Bus  “is excited to fill the transportation need for the Okemo Valley and contribute to the safety and vitality of our night life.”  For more information on The Good Bus and its services, you can call (802) 776-8333.

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What a blast!  Our family of four just got home from a 2-hour guided tour through Calvin Coolidge State Forest in Plymouth, Vermont.  Not far from Killington, and less than a half hour from Golden Stage Inn Bed and Breakfast, the tour company offers tours of varying lengths and cost.  Helmets and boots are included in the cost and I am happy to report that safety is only one feature of the helmet; it also provides incredible warmth!

The Woods go Snowmobiling in Vermont Wonderland!

After some brief instructions on how to use the snowmobile, we were led by a guide onto Vermont’s Snowmobile trails, up and down the rolling hills (mountains may be a better word), winding through the forests, and careening through the open meadows.  (Okay, so maybe some of us were a bit too conservative to actually careen, but my memory tends to exaggerate my speed and confidence!)  In the open area, we were offered some time to drive around, practicing our speed and turns, and just goof off a bit where the potential for damage was pretty minimal.  Overall, the entire tour filled nearly two hours and we covered about 25 miles of scenic Vermont trails.

The customer service at Snowmobile Vermont was fantastic from the initial phone reservation through the representatives in the shop and certainly including our tour guide. We absolutely recommend this snowmobile tour as a fantastic way to see the winter wonderland of Central Vermont.

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Our gracious guests at our Vermont Inn this week were not spared the New England winter experience as the area received two separate snow accumulations (I hesitate to call them storms as they were so peaceful and non-threatening), one early in the week of about three inches and one overnight last night that seemed to drop somewhere between four and five inches of the white stuff.

Nelly’s view of Vermont Snow from our back door on the first day of winter

Although heavy and wet down here in the village with temperatures in the mid-30’s, in neighboring Ludlow, Okemo Ski Resort is boasting much softer, fluffier snow because of the higher elevations. Our dog Nelly is in heaven as she feels like she’s visiting a brand spanking new place each morning even though it’s only outside our regular back door…. that’s how different the area looks under a fresh new blanket of snow.

Despite the rain scheduled for later on today, snow is said to resume tomorrow, beginning overnight tonight when the temperatures become a bit colder. As a quick aside, Vermont schools in this area have been called off three times so far this school year (including this morning) because of snow. Our best guess is that this state requires a level of caution regarding school bus safety that we just did not experience in suburbia, USA. With the mountainous terrain and the number of secondary roads up here, far less chances are taken regarding decisions about school closing or remaining open seem to occur up here than we had been used to in the flatlands of Massachusetts…much to the girls chagrin.

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This is how we increased our flock recently at our Southern Vermont Bed and Breakfast.  After a summer of a declining chicken population (but an increasingly satisfied raccoon and fox population), we were down to four hens for our source of farm fresh eggs.  This is nothing short of a crisis for a country inn that is so committed to serving wholesome local foods at breakfast each morning!  And, as maybe you don’t know, it’s not real easy to find hens for sale in the fall.  If you don’t buy them as chicks in the spring, the options disappear quickly.  So when were alerted in October that a Massachusetts farm was selling pullets (that’s the hip word for ‘teenage hens’), our interest was piqued.  But it only got better from there.  My Mom and Dad (who still chuckle at my interest in backyard farm animals) went to the farm, bought us six pullets and delivered them to us at the bed and breakfast as birthday presents for me and Michael.  Thanks Mom and Dad!  We kept the six new pullets separate from the four mature hens for several weeks, until they were all similar in size.  Then late one night, we stealthily executed “Operation New Chickens” and placed the six young birds on the roosting bar next to the four hens.  Although some feathers were indeed ruffled, all ten birds shifted and wiggled just momentarily, and then drifted back to slumber.  The following days were relatively peaceful   …though it was interesting to watch the young hens earn their status as equals.  Expressions like ‘ruffling feathers’ and ‘hen pecking’ are fully explained in our backyard!  We now gather about eight eggs per day and we’re inviting you to Okemo Valley for a truly local breakfast.

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Mary’s Wedding was very enjoyable and I recommend the Weston Playhouse to anyone that enjoys the theater, whether you are a theater fanatic or just someone  looking for something fun to plan while on their vacation!

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Editor’s (mother’s) comments:  I’ve done a lot of berry picking in my day, and I’ve never seen such bountiful bushes, nor such a scenic berry spot.  This is well-worth putting on the annual traditions calendar!   …and for what it’s worth, I came in second place with almost 50 berries!

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It is only our second year at our Bed & Breakfast in southern Vermont, but we are already feeling the rhythm of some spring rituals.  The sheep is sheared .The koi pond is cleaned (four fish, two frogs, and one salamander are happy about this!).  The leaves are raked and the gardens are being tended to.  Even the pool cover has been removed.  (Not quite ready for swimming though!)  It is a beautiful time of year to embrace our new home in Proctorsville, VT.

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