We’ve just finished Stage 1 of our Project with National Renewable Energy Laboratories and the U. S. Department of Energy. This means the schematic design stage is finished and it was fascinating. Amazingly, 55 percent of the “zero goal” is met by simply making energy efficient choices in construction. Hmmm.. better take a closer look at the home front…

Anaerobic digestion and photo voltaic panels on the barn roof will get us the rest of the way.

Thank you team! We’re now moving into the actual drawing of plans. Thanks to all the Energy Center of Wisconsin guys, Mass Dept of Ag Resources and their guru Gerry Palano, the amazingly talented and patient Gene Kurtz and architect John Montano. And inspiration Lee Kane, “ecoczar” from Whole Foods. And all the rest of you who have listened to our excitement over this!

More soon, we’re moving more quickly now.

Jim Mercer, Executive Chef
The Bay Club.

Great use for your product…I mixed the cloumage with a little parmesan, roasted garlic and oregano….the rest of the pizza is
caramelized onions, chopped garlic, roasted red pepper, parmesan reggianno, olive oil….Fabulous

All the best, Greg

Before

After

“Way back in February, I attended a really lovely dining event at L’Espalier. One Tuesday a month, L’Espalier hosts a four course meal incorporating cheese to each plate along with a different wine pairing for each dish. On the night I attended, L’Espalier focused on local New England cheeses with a few of the cheeses coming from Shy Brothers Farm. After that evening, I was immediately a convert and became addicted to their lovely Hannahbell cheeses. In fact, I loved them so much that my fiancé included them in our picnic when he proposed to me!”

Read the entire article….

More information is available from the Cheese Society.

Hi Barbara, I made this Ziti using your curd instead of the Ricotta. Boy was it good! I didn’t bother with all the layers, I just poured the mixture in, put half a jar of tomato sauce on top. Jeff

Here’s a link to the recipe on AllRecipes.com.

This past week, Karl and I spent many hours working on the floor plan of the new cheese house for the home farm.  There’s a neat new cloud-computing program called Gliffy that will let you size rooms, drag and drop them, change a floorplan completely, try alternative flows, and then share the floor plans with others on line.  Cheesemaking demands several precise environments, and our recipes have even more.  So we’ve been having a great creative time figuring out the synergies between rooms that need many air exchanges and rooms that need low air exchange.  That’s before you get to temperature, humidity, milk and cheese movement, and equipment movement, cycling through the wash room. And then there’s the staff movement, and the visitor movement.  It’s just fascinating.
Then we backed into where the new barn needed to go.  We’re taking the current, but obsolete barn for chilling, packing and shipping, as well as some office space.  The new barn for the cows, we hope, will have voluntary milking systems that the ladies walk into when they need milking and their computer-chip collars give them permission.  The cows are under much less stress, energy usage is substantially lower, and the quality and quantity of milk is better if it is all designed optimally.  So the barn needs to be behind the cheese house to minimize piping from the milking parlors to the bulk tanks and be most efficient.  We got it on paper, or rather on Gliffy, and it all looked like it would work.  But, would it work on the somewhat rolling land?  The barn needs to be on the flatest land possible for pretty obvious reasons.  The cows need to be able to access pasture from as many sides as possible without large grade changes.  Even a good topo map is not as reliable as actually getting on the land.

At 4:30 on that pretty dark afternoon, we scooted up to the farm with fingers crossed.  We tape-measured the cheesehouse footprint, stepped off another 10 feet or so for margin of error, and paced off the barn.  It was perfect.  The design had pushed the barn into perhaps the best spot on the whole 120 acres.

I’ll tell you, being on the land with Karl, who has walked that farm since he could toddle, in the cold and wind and coming darkness, and seeing that barn appear before our very eyes, is something I will never forget.  He really is a very quiet man, but I could see the vision in his eyes as well.

Then we looked at each other and chuckled.  There’s a long way to travel between vision and reality.  Right now, we have no idea how we’re going to get there.  But we know that we are…going to get there.

We first played with des Nuages a few weeks before Thanksgiving.  We wanted to stuff our Thanksgiving turkey with it, so we tried it out by stuffing a chicken.  Man oh man…the des Nuages baked up like a ricotta, capturing all the aroma and flavor of the juices from the chicken, and the chicken itself was moist–just the way we always hope the turkey will be.  So we used it on Thanksgiving Day stuffing the turkey.  The turkey did not take longer to cook (interesting…), and was quite moist.  Meanwhile, we pulled the cooked des Nuages out and served it with bruschetta as one of the hors d’s.  At dinner, our guests went back in the kitchen to get the rest of it on their plates.  Made Leo, the chief cook of our family, look like a superstar.  But then, he is.

The reason we named Karl’s new creation Clouds:  the chefs we’ve given samples to have been limited only by their creativity!  One has stuffed quail with des Nuages, two have made gnocchi, another has used it in a soup, you get the picture.  We remember lying on the grass watching clouds take different shapes.  The same thing is happening with this artisanal curd.  What else could we name it? 

We plan to bring the des Nuages (Clouds) out for chefs and caterers first so we can use the great distributors who are working with us.  If it continues to work for them, we’ll create a retail package and label and get it in the stores.  Meanwhile, we’ll be selling it by the half-gallon, which is 3.5 pounds, more than most consumers need.  If you’re interested, email or call me/us.

Happy, Happy New Year!

Barbara