Making Mozzerella Cheese, Moving a Piano, and Smoky Skies

Heating the milk...

 Our Pastor and his family came over for dinner last week and this is his wife showing me how to make cheese from her goats milk.  I've always wanted to learn and it seemed quite easy; just needing a bit of time to heat the milk, but 30 minutes isn't bad!  What I really appreciate and enjoy about our Pastor and Family is that they are real.  They built their log cabin, work their land, raise animals, run a logging business and still have time to minister and encourage the body of Jesus Christ.  Perhaps they know how best to encourage because they live like the rest of us, not above, just walking beside.

Stirring the milk...

 Here the milk is getting stirred with an up and down motion, which is important for making it as well as the rennet has been put in.  It began to clot a bit and then it didn't take long for it to become a wet sticky mass of cheese at the bottom of the milk pot.  She scooped it out into a bowl and began to squeeze it dry.  You can salt it if you want and I think it tastes much better salted.  That's it!  It does take a lot of milk to get a little cheese.  Now I know why cheese is so expensive!

A piano arrives in time for my 40th birthday!

 It just so happened that our Pastor, in the suspenders, was available to help move the piano along with two more Dads and our two guys.  They pushed it up the steps on this make shift ramp.  Not to much heavy lifting and lots of help, now that's the way to move a piano!  What fun we've had playing on it all week.  I hope to continue giving lessons to the kids and add a new dimension to our family worship time and someday to share at church.

The sun barely visible due to smoke from all the fires...

One of the kids snapped this photo last week when Fairbanks was under a heavy layer of smoke.  It is so unnerving to breathe and smell smoke for days on end.  We were so glad when it cleared enough to see sunlight again.  It was so bad it made our throats sore and eyes water.  A ridiculous amount of acres have burned in Alaska this summer already.

Have a wonderful week everybody and thank God for smoke free skies!  As we approach the 4th of July, we have a statewide ban of any backyard fire pit fires, including charcoal fired B-ques.  Gas are O.K. and no fireworks this year.  Which, we don't normally do anyway because it's broad daylight out all night long!  We do fireworks on the 1st of January as it is dark enough to see them.