Photos from Le Bouquet

I have now officially added the term "goat herder" to my resume

The only escargot I'm likely to get here...

Daily cheese making.

Fresh milk each morning and evening

The little molds for fresh chevre

The Cat Ate My Quiche

I arrived last week at a new farm in a little town called La Caunette. Our new home, Le Bouquet, sits at the foot of the Pyranees, just a short drive from Narbonne and the beautiful beaches of Southern France. We had finally arrived at our destination for the trip: a goat dairy. Our host, Melissa, came to get us at the train station, greeting us with a kiss on both cheeks. I kid you not, her Bob Dylan fro actually had a caterpillar crawling in it; this woman was a true farmer.

Le Bouquet has a small herd of goats (about 30) that are milked twice per day and this is the mainstay of the business. Melissa inherited the farm from her parents and, amazingly, runs the whole operation by herself. She's a tough broad, and I gotta give her props for the huge amount of work that she manages all by her lonesome. It takes a lot of commitment to work a 12 hour day, 7 days a week and live by yourself with a herd of smelly goats. She really seems to enjoy it, and has managed to make a vital business from cheese-making.

My respect for her is the upside. The downside is that our relationship is characterized by mutual bafflement. I have never thought of myself as a particularly high-maintenance person, and since I started traveling and staying on farms, my expectations for daily comfort have drastically reduced. But somehow, I still seem to come across to this kind farmer as hopelessly posh. My daily shower was interpreted as extravagant. Heating milk for coffee in the morning is greeted with a raised eyebrow and a quick glance at the propane tank. I have never felt so bougeois in my entire life.

The entire WWOOF program is predicated on a basic agreement of three things:
1. You come and work
2. You are fed
3. You receive a place to sleep and bathe.
I have had no trouble with adapting to the lifestyle of my hosts...until now. We arrived on Monday and by Wednesday had eaten, literally, the same thing for every meal: the same loaf of bread, the same block of cheese, the same pot of plain, cold pasta, the same bowl of salad. Not that there's anything wrong with that...I just was in the mood for something, say, warm or perhaps, not pasta. Melissa went to the farmers' market on Wednesday morning to sell her cheese and left Elly and I in charge of making our own lunch. I got super resourceful and made a lovely quiche with whatever I could find; a bit of flour we found in the pantry, some leftover cheese from the evening before, a few eggs we had collected from the hen-house, a bit of mushroom and onion we scrounged from a bin and voila! delicious quiche.

Melissa came home and looked a little skeptical. I could see that she thought this was a bit of a production for an afternoon meal, but I was really ready to have something tasty and sat down to munch. I thought myself very clever to have made two so that we could have a bit for dinner as well and was congratulating myself for being so thrifty. It felt like a small victory. But I really had only won the battle not the war. This quickly became evident when I went into the kitchen post-lunch to clean up. On the counter was the bloody cat, hovering over my perfect, tasty, live-affirming quiche. She had eaten big bites out of the whole thing and I thought I might break into tears on the spot. Here's the thing about staying on farms: your whole world is reduced down into the most basic elements. You do not have movies or parties or social circles or any of the other things that make life so full and busy and rich from day to day. All you have is a full day of hard work and the promise of a bit of relaxing and eating in the evening. These basic elements take on a new meaning since they are literally ALL that you have to look forward to each day. So when that damned cat ate my quiche, I felt like someone had sucker-punched my new puppy.

And here's the real kicker: Bob Dylan served it for dinner anyway.

Fromagerie Tours

I may not have made this particularly clear until now, but the entire point of my travels in France is to learn the art of cheese making. While I was in Hawaii I fell in love with goats. There was a herd at my farm on the Big Island and my host taught me how to make basic fresh milk cheeses from the excess of our milkings each day. Perhaps it is my Aries nature, perhaps it's just their charming personalities, I'm not sure, but there is definitely something about goats that appeals to me. After Elly giggled through watching me milk one morning, we began to hatch a plan: go to the land of good cheese, stay on some farms and learn the art of making delicious French cheeses.

So now here I am in France for the summer. Our first farm happened to be on a winery (mostly because it came so highly recommended), but Elly and I told our hosts at Chateau Brandeau about our intentions for the trip, and they kindly set up some tours of local fromageries for us during our stay in Bordeaux. Last Sunday we went to the farm of their friend Regine. She has a small herd (70 goats) and handmakes her own cheese each day, mainly a fresh milk cheese in the Saint Marcellin style. Each day she and her husband milk the animals in the morning and then take them out to pasture for a few hours in the afternoon. Goats are very smart and easily trainable, so much so that they will stay within calling distance of their herder, not straying off and needing a fence or herding dogs to keep them close. Regine was trodging through the rain, leading her herd back into the barn when we arrived, and keeping dry under the most enormous umbrella I've ever seen. She said that she had sat under that huge umbrella the past few hours, calling to the goats every now and again to stay close, and reading a book in the soggy pasture.

Regine was also kind enough to show us her fromagerie (cheese making room) right off the kitchen in her chateau. We donned little disposable booties over our shoes, and, in half-French/half-English, she explained how she saves a little bit of the milk from the day before to start her culture, then forms the solidified curds into molds for the cheese. Most of her product is sold fresh the next day, but some she leaves to age in the cooler, maturing into a nutty, slightly firm disc of deliciousness after a month or so. In her cozy kitchen she let us sample different varieties, encouraging us to eat it with honey, sugar or jam. Some she had just made the day before and it was wonderfully creamy, with a little herby-freshness at the end.

The second fromagerie we visited was a less down-home and more modern. Fromagerie Van der Horst is a family operation which specializes in gouda. The patriarch is a Dutch immigrant who came to France in 1951 and started the business. He has passed down his recipes to his sons, who took over the operation in 1975. Unlike Regine, it is a cow's milk fromagerie and the Jersey girls were housed in a barn right next door to the tasting room.

Elly and showed up in the morning for our tour and were greeted by a very nice lady with absolutely no English. We know enough to get by in most situations, but this lady had us stumped. I thought that she was asking us "Ou est-que vous livre?" which in my head sounded something like "Where is your book?" This did not strike me as a question at all relevant to the situation, and Elly decided to reply that we were from Chateau Brandeau. This did the trick and we were introduced to a lady whose name sounds a whole lot like "livre." (Upon returning to Chateau Brandeau we asked Fearn and Andrea how to say this lady's name, but, though they both had met her several times, neither of them could pronounce it either; this made me feel like slightly less of an idiot.)

So "Livre" gave us some sanitary white clogs and took us into the big, state-of-the-art cheese making room to show us the ropes. She had taken milk from that morning (700 litres!), put it into a huge stainless steel vat and added a culture that made the milk separate into curds and whey. After a whole lot of mixing, the curds started to form up and she carefully and slowly drained and separated the solids from the vat. The next step was to transfer the curds into molds and press even more liquid out with a giant lever. Then the wheels were dipped into a brine bath to form the rind and allowed to age.

The cheese cave was a sight to behold: rows and rows of gouda wheels drying and aging to perfection. They were all sitting there, molding on the outside, but turning delicious and creamy on the inside. It was all dark and cool and peaceful and smelled heavenly. It was like a cheese sanctuary with mediating gouda wheels. Most of the cheese is sold after 3 weeks, but there are some varieties that are allowed to age for 3 or 6 months. The six month cheese was pure nirvana, nutty and full.

Elly and I bought a sampler platter of our favorites to take back to lunch at Chateau Brandeau and gave ourselves a self-guided tour of the barn. The baby cow were so friendly; one kept trying to lick my face like a puppy. Another took a shine to Elly and was licking and sniffing her jeans. A third was mysteriously attracted to my leather handbag and would have eaten it if I hadn't ran away. This gave me a little pang of guilt...like somehow my fashion choice was encouraging cannibalism. Poor little fella didn't know that the attraction was simply a misplaced camaraderie.

Starting Again

I finally got around to having some film developed.   My sister gave me a Diana F--the type of camera that actually takes film...that you actually have to get developed.  Unlike most things these days, it's a process where there's a gap between the exposure and seeing the image you've created.  Isn't that a tempting metaphor?

I took all of my film in to be developed at once and it certainly had been accumulating.  There were five rolls of film, some of which I honestly could not remember taking.  So I get this grip of images and all I know for sure is that they were taken some time in the last year, they must have been of something I thought was important, and obviously I was present at that particular moment of light.

I just turned 29 this week.  My 28th year didn't treat me so kind, so I'm getting a little philosophical this birthday.  I'm starting to comb through the strands of my thoughts and trying to find some wisps of insight, some clues to keep 29 from repeating the mistakes of 28.  But I'm finding it just as difficult as putting a place and time to these rather abstract images.

I keep looking at these pictures and wondering where I was when I took them and what I was thinking and who I was with.  And, more importantly, what can I learn from them so that 29 is a happy year for me?

All these question seem particularly important since I am starting this year much like the last one.  Last year I began a year of journeying by coming to New York, doing a visiting tour of my family and friends, and then taking off for an indeterminate amount of time on an agricultural adventure.  So it was for year number 28 and so it shall be for number 29.  I really do not want to be just a skipping record.

The journey is experiencing some delays, however.  The plan: fly to France to stay at some farms and learn how to make goat cheese.  Last year I crossed the Pacific, this year I cross the Atlantic.  There's just one little snag: a pesky volcano in Iceland is keeping me USA-bound and I'm here in limbo, with too many strange pictures and too many questions.  As my friend Lu put it, I've got a little dust in my wings and its keeping me from taking off.  So here I sit to think and wait and, after 3 long months, take up this blog to untangle my thoughts.

Ode to Barbara

Barbara Kingsolver's books have followed and supported me through some very strange twists and turns in life. Three in particular I've come to associate with important crossroads. First is The Bean Trees. My grandmother sent it to me when I was a teenager and I devoured the story of a gal from Kentucky who decides to drive across the country with no particular destination and ends up making a life where her car brakes down in Tuscon. One thing that stuck with me was that a girl from the middle of nowhere would just get up and leave with no place in particular to land and with no one to greet her on the other end of the journey...ballsy and inspiring for a young lady with an active imagination. A few years later I did the same thing, driving from Ohio and ending in San Luis Obispo California, sight unseen, not knowing a single soul. I lived there off and on for eight years and that move was the single scariest and best thing that I've done yet. Also inspiring was Kingsolver's description of a spectacular plant, the night blooming cereus. I've always remembered the beautiful name that just rolls of the tongue and conjures up all this mystery and beauty when I roll it around in my mind. It's bright white bloom opens only one night per year and then closes again at dawn for another 364 days of obscurity. I'd never seen one until last week when my host brought one home for me. It was closed tight when he gave it to me, so I set it out in the moonlight and waited. It slowly opened into a gigantic bloom, bigger than both my fists, and gave off a musky scent like a lily. I could make literary allusions to the dark night of my soul, the angelic white beauty that perfumed my room that night, but I'll spare you from the final throws of my aborted literature degree. Let's just say that it was rare and beautiful and magical and something that I'd always wanted to see for myself.

A little while later, there was the Poisonwood Bible. It's an epic book, following a family of missionaries who travel to the Congo in the 1960's with disastrous consequences. It laid the seeds for my own break from my religious upbringing, something I'm still negotiating. Barbara tells the story five times from the viewpoint of five different women in the family and it's brilliant. That retelling is what made the book so important for me. I'd been brought up very religiously in the conservative Mid-West with one constricting perspective of how to see the world. No nuance, no room for interpretation and no questions. Seeing the problems that religious rigidity had causes for these fictional missionaries cracked open my own heart just a little and let in a bit of acceptance for my own questioning. Just seeing more than one side to story was a revelation and my soul began to wander outside the church I'd been raised.

Barbara's most recent work is equally apropos to my current life. I found a copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle at the little Kapa'au Public Library a couple of weeks ago and devoured it in about two days. In this homey memoir, Barbara recounts the highlights of a year of her family's life where they pledged, and successfully ate, only local food, primarily through growing and raising it in their backyard. Oh, Barbara, how do you always know what I need to read? Her latest book is a perfect complement to my little organic gardening adventure, and, as a bonus, has tons of great recipes for enjoying the harvest of your kitchen garden. Since we have an abundance of goat's milk here at the farm in Hawaii, I decided to try her recipe for mozzarella, which promised to be both quick and easy. I was skeptical, but in the end was won over when I had successfully made my first batch of super tasty homemade gooey deliciousness in less than 30 minutes. It's so easy, and here's all you'll need:

• A big stainless steel pot
• A thermometer
• Liquid rennet
• Citric Acid
• A gallon of unpasturized milk

There's a little boiling, a lot of kneading and presto! you've got fresh cheese. You can order the liquid rennet and citric acid from Ricki Carroll's New England Cheese Supply Company, and it's dirt cheap. Plus you get to pull the mozzarella in long strings to see if its stretchy enough to be done. What is it with Italians and their interactive food-readiness tests? Throwing pasta on the ceiling to see if it sticks? Stretching cheese like bubble gum? Crazy daegos...

So let's recap all the things that Barbara has guided me through this far:

1. Moving across the country
   
2. Learning to think for myself
   
3. Succor on my quest to mend a broken heart through gardening and eating
   

Really, Barbara, you're too good to me.