Now that we have weaned off Thistle, our bottle lamb, we have a lot of milk available!  Nice good fresh goat milk!  Miss Buttercup is giving us about 3 gallons a week!   Which is a lot for a family of three that normally doesn’t go through a lot of milk.

Don’t dispair…  we have been busy finding other good uses for our goat milk bounty!

We have been working on learning to make caramel candy!   And caramel sauce…  The candy is tough, our first batch, though yummy, turned out a little hard.  More like a hard butter candy to suck on…  which of course is not bad at all!  Our second batch came out too soft and is like a thick sauce.  Which is just find on ice cream, apple slices and I suspect, apple pie!

We are going to make some cajeta…  Mexican goat milk caramel sauce today, I will let you know how that turns out!   Stinking good, I suspect.

And we are making goat milk cheese!  I learned how to make the classic Chevre goat milk cheese and it’s fantastic!  And so easy!  Now I have made several kinds of cheese so far…  Fromage Blanc, Ricotta, Mozzarella, and a failed cheddar.  I am much better at soft cheeses then hard.   Now the chevre is a semi soft cheese…  pressed and molded, it does slice, but it is a little crumbly.   It has a taste that is like a tangy cream cheese, at least from our goat!  I like to mix in a little spice and sea salt, or garlic and sea salt and it’s fantastic.   Good on a salad too!  I want to try it with some slices of ham and avocado on some nice crackers…  There is a lot you can do with this easy and quick farm cheese.

I am going to give soap a try as well!  Why not?  Buttercup loves to milk, it’s her favorite time of the day.  She will risk life and limb to jump the paddock fence and linger near the screen porch until I come out to milk.  She loves the snacks!   And I think she likes the interaction time as well.  She gets brushed and patted and she just loves it.  So we might as well get her milk back as a thank you!  We will probably milk up until it gets tooo cold and then we will dry her off.  It’s very unusual to have a doe go into milk without having a baby, but we will probably give motherhood another try next spring.  Because having a milk goat rocks!