Snow Cream
•Snow
•Milk or cream
•Sugar
•Vanilla
Go outside. Scout out a patch of snow that is free from dog pee, cat pee, rabbit droppings, pine needles, and other contaminants. Scrape off the top layer of snow. Being careful not to touch the ground below, fill a chilled mixing bowl with loosely packed snow. Once you are back inside, add just enough milk or cream to create a slushy mixture. Add more sugar and vanilla than you deem reasonable. Then add some more. Serve with straight whiskey or, for children, hot chocolate.
Chapter Nine
That winter, thanks to the unusually cold weather, I found myself with time on my hands—lots of time. I had always wanted to try making my own cheese, and now seemed like the perfect time. While David chopped wood, I stocked up on rennet and cheesecloth, then perused the internet for instructions on how to make simple cheeses like ricotta and mozzarella. For now, I would use cow’s milk from a local creamery.
Mozzarella was somewhat complicated to make, and to me, it didn’t taste much different from standard, store-bought mozzarella, but making ricotta was easy—easier, in fact, than driving to the store to buy ricotta. It was also a great way to use milk that was approaching or even slightly past its due date. You simply brought a gallon of milk to two hundred degrees in a large pot, stirred in a quarter cup of lemon juice or three tablespoons of vinegar, brought the milk mixture back to two hundred degrees, then let it sit, covered, for about fifteen minutes. Then you drained the whey from the curds and hung the cheese. In just over an hour, you had heavenly homemade ricotta that was delicious in pasta dishes or smeared on toasted bread with plenty of garlic and oregano and a drizzle of olive oil.
I was also thrilled to discover that I could use the leftover whey in place of vegetable or chicken broth. I used it in soups, in rice, in puddings and pies. Then, encouraged by my success, I decided to try making yogurt, and though I knew a yogurt machine would greatly simplify this task, I wanted to make it the way my favorite homesteading blog recommended, the old-school way—on the stove top in quart-size mason jars.
None of my regular pots was large enough to hold four jars, but then I had an idea—my grandmother’s Burpee canner, circa 1940. If I removed the enamel liner, the outer pot would be perfect. I dragged the canner from the bottom kitchen shelf, shook out the spiders and dog hair, rinsed it, and placed it on the stove. The directions said that if you placed a cloth in the bottom of the pot, the jars wouldn’t rattle, so I folded up a dishcloth and set four quart-size mason jars filled with milk on top.
The next part was tricky. You had to add water until the jars were three-quarters covered, but you couldn’t get any water in the jars. I was a big-picture person, and my method of approaching most things was hit or miss, but this required my utmost concentration. It had to be done slowly and gently. If water got in the milk, the yogurt would not set properly, and all this effort would be for nothing. Finally, the water successfully added, I turned on the stove. According to the directions, the milk should reach 180 to 185 degrees. You could measure that with a thermometer, or you could look for a layer of skin to form on top. Uncomfortable with ambiguity, I clipped a digital thermometer onto the side of one jar and waited.
Every few minutes, the screen on the thermometer automatically shut off, so with one of my grandmother’s dishcloths thrown over my shoulder, I stood next to the stove, tending the thermometer, listening to Lake Street Dive on the radio. Eventually, the milk seemed to be doing something, shifting almost imperceptibly. The thermometer read 170 degrees. Close. From the kitchen, I could see patches of snow in the shady areas along the creek and underneath the low-lying shrubs. Icicles clung to the rocks in the waterfall and reflected the morning sun—tiny stained-glass windows.
I could also see the waterfall and the massive stacks of wood in the side yard. David had read on a homesteading blog that in pioneer times, a woman used to judge a man’s potential as a husband by how he stacked his wood. Poor stacking technique did not bode well for the couple’s future. Neat, careful stacks that allowed air to circulate and dry the wood meant a man was a keeper. His family would stay warm, and they would have plenty of fuel to cook their food.
Since we had been here, David had developed his own stacking process, a crisscrossing technique. He also knew which types of wood burned longest and hottest. He could eyeball a truck bed full of wood and say whether it was a full cord, a half cord, or something in between. Once, he ordered a cord from someone off Craigslist. The man drove all the way from Asheville, but when he tried to charge the price for a cord of wood when the truck bed was a quarter full, David refused to even negotiate with him.
“Get the hell on out of here,” David had told him.
By then, David had given up his office in town. He put his office equipment and boxes of files in storage and worked from home. At first, it was odd having so much time together, but now, it seemed strange when one of us ran into town for coffee or milk and left the other alone at the cabin. Our new normal, we called it. Each morning, we tended to our dogs and cats. Then we drank coffee and talked about the day’s agenda before departing to our separate work areas—my desk upstairs, his desk downstairs.
The thermometer screen went blank, and I pushed it on again. 177 degrees. Three more degrees. I loved this part of making yogurt. I loved that Hester sat on the cushion by the door and that Pretzel stretched at my feet, his nose pressed to the heat vent beneath the cabinets. I loved that in this space, my mind could wander, circling time and space, lingering where it needed to before spinning away again.
For the past fifteen years, I had taught composition to college freshmen, primarily underprepared athletes none of the full-time faculty wanted to teach. It was a job that required constant focus. Any lapse in my attention resulted in my students answering phone calls from their coaches or spilling spit cups on the floor or engaging in loud arguments about whether or not one of them did or did not look exactly like Jesus. Once, I zoned out for one second, and a student, a member of the golf team, raised his hand. He wore a pink knit shirt, plaid shorts, loafers without socks.
“Mrs. McGaha,” he asked, “who would you rather sleep with, Brett Favre or Obama?”
I had missed the chuckles on that side of the room, the elbowing and the whispered dares, so this caught me unaware. For a few tense seconds, the students, all of them, had the upper hand. I stared at them. They stared at me.
“Get the hell out of my classroom,” I said.
“But just tell me,” the student pleaded as I shut the door behind him.
I had no idea who Brett Favre was, and I had spent those quiet seconds trying to figure that out. Later, Alex would tell me.
“He’s a football player, Mom. How can you not know that?”
“Oh well,” I said. “Then the answer is clearly Obama. You know how I feel about football.”
Yogurt making was not emotionally taxing like teaching had been. Yogurt making was contemplative, meditative, forgiving. There was room for error, time for you to zone completely out without getting hoodwinked, usurped, outwitted. From my perch by the stove, I watched David whack a large chunk of wood. His arms were firm and muscular, his shoulders taut as he raised the ax above his head and dropped it, one clean sweep, followed by another, then another. There was the ping of the ax hitting the splitter, followed by a great thwap—the sound of breaking wood.
With both the stove and wood boiler running, the kitchen was at least ninety degrees. I stared at the milk, looking for the telltale wrinkles on top. The windows did not open, and the air was close and sticky, my shirt damp. Still, I sat close to the stove, pressing the thermometer over and over again until, eventually, it read 180. Then, I turned off the stove and, using my grandmother’s dishcloth as a potholder, I moved the jars, one by one, to the counter to cool.
According to my directions, when the m
ilk reached 110 to 120 degrees, it would be warm enough to stimulate the starter but not hot enough to kill it. At that point, I was to stir a couple of tablespoons of starter yogurt into each jar. While I waited, I went upstairs and answered a few emails. Then I came back and looked at the thermometer. 176 degrees. I showered, then checked again. 166 degrees. I threw on my farm coat and walked the dogs down to the bridge and back. I made a phone call. 150 degrees. I went upstairs and tweeted a photo of the mason jars in the pot. I posted the same photo to Instagram. Making yogurt the old-school way, I said. 145 degrees. I heated a bowl of leftover taco soup, doused it with Tabasco sauce, and sat down at the counter to eat. 140 degrees. Sweat poured down the side of my face. Wood boiler heat, I was learning, was fierce. The kitchen felt like a sweat lodge, or what I imagined a sweat lodge might feel like since I had never been to one.
“That wood heat is the best heat I’ve ever had,” I had told my uncle Bill shortly after we moved in.
“You’re gonna think that’s good heat until that damn thing blows up on you,” Bill had said.
Bill had been full of big, crazy talk like that. At his funeral, the preacher had asked if anyone wanted to say a few words, and one woman after another stood up and told about Bill flirting with them or propositioning them or proposing marriage. Finally, the red-faced preacher returned to the pulpit and said, “All right. All right. Let’s just go ahead and have a show of hands. How many of you in here did Bill Boyd propose to?” More than half the women in the funeral home chapel raised their hands. If my grandmother had been there, she would have raised her hand too, but the day of Bill’s funeral, she was at home, just weeks away from death herself. Shortly after my grandfather died, Bill, by then an eighty-nine-year-old widower, had heard a preacher say that if your brother dies, you should marry his wife. It was in the Bible somewhere, though Bill was vague on where, and although he had never been much for conventional religion, that passage particularly struck him. Immediately, he had called my grandmother and proposed.
“Ah, shut up, Bill,” my grandmother had said.
It was still so hard to believe they were all gone—my grandfather, Bill, my grandmother.
The milk had reached 130 degrees. Almost. I put my empty soup bowl in the sink, ran some water in it, and got out the yogurt starter and a tablespoon. And then I resumed waiting. In my past life, I was impatient, high-strung, constantly flitting from one task to the next, but here, if I wanted hot water, I had to wait for a fire. If I wanted enough water pressure to take a shower, I had to wait for the dishwasher to finish running. If I needed to use the bathroom, I had to wait my turn. In fact, things were so serene here compared to the rest of the world that whenever I drove into town to the grocery store, I felt overwhelmed by the people and traffic.
“Where did these people come from?” I would ask David.
“I have no idea,” he would say. “I was wondering the same thing.”
When I visited larger cities, my sense of detachment was even more pronounced. Before, I had enjoyed the occasional weekend trip to a major city, but now, any metropolitan area larger than Asheville felt overwhelming. Subways made me panic. As did elevators. And traffic. And people blowing their horns. In fact, some days, even Asheville was too much. Where was everyone going? Why were they all so loud?
Finally, the milk reached 120 degrees. Still, I waited a few more minutes, just to be sure. At 117 degrees, I stirred a couple of spoonfuls of yogurt into each jar and capped the lids. Then I moved them all to a cooler and filled it with hot tap water until the jars were almost covered. For the next ten hours, every few hours, I scooped out some of the cooled water and replaced it with fresh, warm water.
When I came downstairs to check the milk one last time, it was dark outside. The dogs had been fed, and they were sprawled about the house sleeping. Moths pinged against the windows outside, and “Fare Thee Well” by the Dead played on the radio. Above the waterfall, a full moon loomed. I opened the cooler and shook the jars, one by one, testing for firmness. The yogurt jiggled but didn’t slosh—a good sign. Satisfied, I moved the jars to the refrigerator. And then I went back upstairs and climbed into bed. David was still downstairs working. Kate, our beagle mix, was asleep in the clothes basket by my bed. I pulled my grandmother’s quilts tightly around me, turned off the light, and dreamed.
In my dream, it was evening, and I was walking down a wooded path when I saw three wolves curled together in a bend. The wolves were thick and gray, their muzzles silver. Flicking their tails, they watched me through icy-blue eyes. I stood in the path, hesitant to go back up the trail because it was getting dark but wary of walking past. Very slowly, I took my cell phone from my pocket and called my mother. There are wolves, I whispered. And I’m afraid.
Shadowy figures emerged through the trees ahead, one set of ears, then another, a pair of tall, fluffy tails. Two wolves tore down the mountain, their legs taut and lean, their muscles powerful. Scarlet tongues dangled from their mouths. They were bold, majestic, intensely joyful, and I was no longer frightened. I wanted to catch them, lean into them, and run my hands through their coarse fur, feel their hot, wild breath on my face.
Never mind, I told my mother. I’m okay. The wolves are friendly.
I hung up the phone and sprinted down the path, my feet pounding the earth, the wind stroking my hair like fingers. I woke disoriented, thrilled by the image of the running wolves. And then before my mind was fully awake, I knew: I had dreamed of my mother and all the other mothers before her. I had dreamed of crossing over.
Homemade Yogurt
•1 gallon milk
•8 tablespoons plain yogurt with active cultures
Divide milk into 4 jars, leaving 2 inches of space at top. Place a folded dishrag in bottom of pot. Add filled jars. Fill pot with water ¾ of the way up the sides of jars. Bring water to a boil, and simmer until milk in jars has reached 180 to 185 degrees. Remove jars from pot, and allow to cool to 110 to 120 degrees. Once cooled, stir 2 tablespoons yogurt into each jar, and cap jars. Place jars in a small cooler. Fill cooler with warm water, exchanging the water as necessary to keep the temperature consistent. Let sit for 10 hours. Remove the jars from the cooler and refrigerate.
Chapter Ten
My grandmother grew up on a farm in the mountains of western North Carolina, and in her recollections, farm life was never idyllic. The work was backbreaking and constant, food hard to come by. On frigid winter mornings, she woke covered with snow that had drifted through the slats in the bedroom walls. Still, her stories made me dream of the three-room log cabin in which she was raised, of her nine brothers and sisters, of the mother who cooked dinner for twelve on a woodstove, of the father who spent his days plowing fields and hoeing potatoes, tending cows and hogs and chickens.
Perhaps, to a more reasonable person, my grandmother’s stories might have seemed more like cautionary tales than inspirational ones. I’m sure that’s how she intended them. But there was also a richness to her stories, a certain knowingness that drew me in and held me there. I could see my young grandmother hauling water from the well with her sisters, crawling into the hayloft to search for chicken eggs, fashioning hollowed-out acorns into makeshift cups for tea parties in the woods. Those images were as real to me as my own recollections of growing up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood just outside of Brevard. Farming defined my grandmother, made her who she was, instilled in her a rare combination of toughness and gentleness, and somehow, after she died, I had a vague yet definite sense that living closer to the land, raising our own vegetables and farm animals, would bring me healing—not just spotty, episodic moments of happiness but something deeper and more lasting.
For years, David and I had talked about the possibility of getting a few goats or chickens. However, though our across-the-street neighbors raised cows, alpacas, and chickens, our old neighborhood was part of a development that had a restrictive covenant forbidding farm anima
ls. But once we moved to the cabin, all of that changed. There were no rules. We could do anything we wanted. And what I wanted was to raise chickens. All I had to do was convince David this was a good idea, which was easier than I had thought. I only had to promise him one thing: under no circumstances would I ask him to kill a chicken. The chickens would be for eggs and eggs only.
“Okay,” I said. “Fair enough.”
So I bought a copy of Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens. I read everything I could find online. I accosted farmers at the tailgate market and perfect strangers I found wandering around the homesteading sections of book stores: Do you have chickens? What kind do you have? How many? What type of feed do you use? How many eggs per day do you get? Finally, I asked a farmer at our local market where I should get chickens. McMurray Hatchery, he told me, a mail-order company based in Iowa. It seemed like an awfully long way for a baby chick to travel. Plus, it seemed odd to begin our foray into local food by buying chickens from halfway across the country.
“Iowa?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
He was sure. McMurray’s offered a wide variety of chicks and would replace any that died during shipping. Though the thought of a chick smothering to death on its way from Iowa to North Carolina was disturbing, I knew that if I wanted to be a farmer, I was going to need to toughen up. These were not puppies. They were chickens, and if one died every now and then, well, so be it. I just wouldn’t make the mistake of getting too attached to them. I would remember they were poultry, not pets. I would not name them or hold them. That afternoon, I called McMurray and ordered a rainbow variety pack of laying hens, to be delivered in March.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 11