Spilled Milk

You may have noticed I've grown my hair out (among other things) and colored it.  James seems to approve of the changes.

We've been getting so much milk lately I have to make cheese at least every other day and sometimes a few days in a row.   Much as I like making cheese, sometimes I want more days in between making it.  I need to find other uses for it - things I can do quickly, besides give it to the pig.
 
We eat homemade ice cream quite a bit in the summer and the recipe we use calls for a small can of evaporated milk.  James suggested I make some from our own milk.  Why not?  Turns out it's very difficult to do.  The ingredients?  Milk.  Tools?  A stove, pan, spoon and cheesecloth.  Read this very closely so you can do it yourself.  Here's the difficult recipe. 
Pour 1 gallon of milk into a large pan.  Place on stove.  Bring to boil then turn down to medium heat.  Keep stirring to keep the film from forming on top and milk from burning.  When milk is reduced to 40%  (this took me maybe an hour and a half) of original amount strain through cheesecloth to get out any clumps or skin.  I know this sounds challenging but you can do it.

Did that sound simple to you?  Well, it wasn't for me.  Sure the cooking part was easy but after that I ran into trouble.  In my last blog post I told you how I was having trouble getting into the swing of things.  That hasn't changed much.  I've been kind of numb for a week and a half.  I'm lazy, distracted  and not very interesting or interested.  I guess I wasn't thinking clearly because I poured the hot milk into a glass bottle which then cracked and my evaporated milk spilled all over the place.  It seemed to me like I should have cried over this but I didn't.  I don't think I even cursed, not out loud anyway.  I cleaned it all up and then strained what didn't get spilled into a pan.  It was slow to drain through the cheesecloth so I picked it up to swish it around a little to move things along.  How'd that work out?  Yeah, not so good.  I spilled more of it down the side of the stove and onto the floor.  I don't know how much evaporated milk I got out of my one gallon because I stuck the pan in the refrigerator, put some clothes on and went out to walk my donkeys. 

I may try this again on a better day.