This Side of the Pond

I would never describe myself as domesticated, though I was the only 19-year-old in my student halls who forewent the fast food to batch cook chicken and vegetable stews.

I can whip up a soup in a heartbeat, I can make pastry and put anything in it you might fancy, I can whip up a broth from scratch and I can bake a cake that doesn't bring shame to my family.

All of this makes it sound like I have a handle on the homemaking thing, right?

Unfortunately not. The gaps in my knowledge are wide enough that you could barely string what I do know into a decent net.

I can't can, or pickle, or process my own meat.

I don't have a sourdough starter and I can't make a garden grow in Wyoming for love nor money.

I can't even sew in straight lines – I knitted a shawl over the winter and did so badly attaching the pieces that I still refuse to let anyone see the back of me while I'm wearing it.

So when I talked to Sara Fleenor about her plans as our new Extension Educator, the part that excited me most was the homesteading classes she had in mind. Finally, I thought, I can learn to be at least partially self-sufficient.

I was forced to miss the session on container gardens because it happened right after the storm when the power went out and, at that very moment, I was furiously stuffing pieces of paper into other pieces of paper so that we could send out your newspapers in a timely manner.

This means that my thumbs are no greener for the growing season, which is a shame.

On the other hand, no such disaster struck last week, when I learned how to make my very own mozzarella.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, cheese is as important to the taste of a dish as salt. There are very few dishes that do not benefit from – nay, require – a sprinkling of the good stuff.

There are times when you could probably make the accusation that the rest of my meal is an accompaniment for the cheese.

Mozzarella-making seemed like the sort of thing that would strongly improve my skill arsenal, so I dragged a group of willing volunteers to the courthouse basement to get our hands dirty with the help of Sara and our instructor, her daughter Madeline.

It turned out that transforming milk into mozzarella is far simpler than I expected – or perhaps my affinity for cheese just extends to creating it in the first place.

The process involves adding citric acid and rennet to whole milk as you warm it, delicately stirring the concoction through various steps of heating and then allowing it time to stand and to "heal" once the curds have begun to separate from the whey.

Adventure Assistant was my partner in the creation process, as was fitting, and this was fortunate because it turns out that my natural stirring pace could generously be described as "vigorous", while hers is more appropriately chilled.

I was chastised three times for being excitable with the spoon, though I think I can be forgiven on the basis that I genuinely was overexcited.

To our great surprise, it worked. We now had a saucepan full of floating curds.

They looked less than appetizing at this point. Sort of like a pan of rice that had been forgotten on the stove for several days.

Things improved once we fished the curds out of the cloudy water. They now looked like cottage cheese, which was much further towards the kind of thing I was looking for.

Adventure Assistant is also much more capable of handling heat than I, so she was invaluable for the next stage. The curds must be repeatedly brought to a temperature I would describe as unpleasant so that they can be kneaded to remove all the water and formed into a single cheese, then stretched out just like taffy.

Once this was done, lo and behold, the finished product sat on the counter in front of us. It looked like mozzarella, it tasted like mozzarella – it really was a ball of homemade cheese.

There's a particular pride that comes with making things for yourself. This may have been a simple portion of cheese, but it felt like a true accomplishment.

I agree wholeheartedly with Sara that these are skills that should not be lost – partly because tradition is important, and partly because self-sufficiency is a wonderful feeling.

By the time this summer ends, I hope to know how to make bread and pickles, process a chicken and finally sew up my knitting projects properly. I will have a much longer list of things I can do for myself and, should I suddenly be cut off from society, I will have a much better chance of keeping myself alive and comfortable, which we all know is impossible without a decent cheese sandwich.

When the apocalypse comes, please do feel free to head over to my place for pizza.