Raise, save, and prep "God's natural, organic, whole foods, grown locally, in season"
Every once in awhile, I will be tempted to buy a convenient squeeze jar of ready-made lemon or lime juice. Then I read the ingredients on the jar. Then I put the jar back. Not only is the juice usually not organic, but other ingredients – such as preservatives – are listed besides lemons or limes.
I followed (cough, cough) the recipe at FiasCoFarm.com for chevre. I made a mistake and while the picture doesn’t really show it, let me tell you what not to do when making chevre “bag-style”.
One of the great ways we’re enjoying our raw goat milk is to make chocolate milk. You can use any natural sweetener you’d like – I think honey would be wonderful, as would maple syrup. But I better stop talking about those. 
I’m using whole dates for the sweeteners, since the month of May is devoted to our Beyond Sugar Challenge, where we avoid the use of concentrated sweeteners, natural or refined. This chocolate milk is really good! Adjust the number of dates for your desired sweetness. This milk is on the not-too-sweet side, just how we like it.
It’s been fun having raw goat milk in the house. Every day we get about 3/4 of a gallon, and it should go up when our goats acclimate more and their milk production gets to where it should. (We think.) Over the weekend, I opened up some cultures from CulturesForHealth.com – dairy kefir and villi yogurt starter. I also got some chevre going following a recipe from FiasCoFarm.com.
“That’s the best desert EVER!” said my kids, practically in unison, jumping up and down with excitement when I told them our dessert was going to be strawberries and raw goat milk.
We desire to follow a traditional, non-industrialized, diet for ourselves. We also desire that our animals follow a traditional diet. And this not only for their own health, but to support our health when consuming the meat, eggs, or milk they provide. As the proud owners of (so far) two Nubian milking does, two Nubian doelings, and eight Nigerian Dwarf goats, we are hard at work to figure out what we should feed our goats so that they are healthy and the milk they produce is of the highest quality.
Fun links for you to check out — How many factory farms are in your state/county? — Meet our new milking doe, Honey — How to sneak liver onto your family’s dinner table — Minding the Microwave in May challenge. Enjoy the reading!
Woo! We’re on the third week of going without natural or refined sweeteners (Beyond Sugar Challenge)… is that possible? Before we started, I wondered how we’d (okay, how I’d) ever get through it! This post will be somewhat like a diary entry, okay? I’m just going to write my reflections of how it is going so far.
I made over an old, favorite recipe yesterday: Carrot Cake/Bars. As part of our Beyond Sugar challenge during the month of May, my family is not consuming sweeteners, natural or refined. But I decided to fix a treat once a week or less using whole fruits as sweetening. Whole fruits come with nutrients, fiber and water, too. The recipe now calls for sprouted spelt flour and coconut oil. The carrot bars hit the spot! I hope you enjoy them.
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