Denise asks: "I'm sure you've made ricotta cheese before, but I have just learned....and I'm hooked! Please tell me some cheese-making stories, if you have any to share. "

I've been ignoring the ChezWhat, but the last post in there was about making Brousse, a really lovely French goat or sheep milk cheese.  It doesn't work with cow, though.  Cheeses get complexity with time, so fresh cheeses are often not so complex - except for goat and sheep.  Those milks develop flavors much faster.  Thus the many and expensive soft goat milk cheeses you can find.  I'm trying to decide whether to keep our goat lease when the does are again ready for milking - they produce more than we can use for drinking, cooking, and cheesemaking.
Your ricotta wasn't traditional stuff, which is made with the whey left over from making other cheeses.  Ewe whey, specifically.  When you make variations, you can just specify: goat, whole milk, etc.  Whole milk ricotta (aka sweet ricotta) is made from whole milk and curdled with citric acid.  Whey ricotta is curdled with vinegar and, optionally and flavorfully, bacterial cheese starter.  You can actually make ricotta from just reheating the fresh whey without using an acidifying agent at all.  There are many ricotta recipes that use skim, lowfat or whole cow milk with vinegar.  They have a nice texture and much higher yield than traditional ricotta.  I haven't run across too many nomenclature purists - just call the cheese what it is: "(Vinegar) whole milk ricotta," for the cheesmakers; "ricotta" works fine for the cheese-eaters.
You can have such fun with the soft cheeses!  They're the ones to start with even if you want to work your way up to the hard stuff ;-)
You've got your lactic cheese, fromage blanc, chevres, mascarpone, buttermilk cheeses, yogurt cheese, kefir cheese, lemon cheese, panir, brousse, neufchatel, gervais, bondon, chream, ricotta salata (a great first-hard-cheese to make, easy and delicious), chenna, queso blanco, queso fresco... and then there's cottage...
Most of these can be used in any recipe wanting ricotta or cream cheese.  Most of them can be made with nonfat or low fat milk with little or no loss of quality.  Home made nonfat cream/soft cheeses are MUCH more like the full-fat store versions than the awful nonfat store versions.
There are two cheesemaking books I recommend: Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll - the book I learned from 30 years ago or so; and 200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes by Debra Amrein-Boyes.
If you do want to progress to other cheese types, ricotta salata might be your first, then most people try mozzarella first.  If you want to be happy with it, use a cultured recipe.

Brousse!! Brousse!! And Meatloaf!!

The baked minisquashes with butter, salt, pepper and herbs still needed something. I'm trying to get some raw milk goat brousse done in time for dinner - pop that in and broil it, maybe smear the squashes with roasted garlic first.

Update:  We have cheese.

Brousse is a French farmhouse cheese. The goat or sheep milk is brought to a boil, taken off the heat, then curdled with ½ cup white vinegar that had been stirred into ¾ cup water. Everything sterile, of course. The vinegar is stirred in, and the curds are separated by pouring the whey through a cheesecloth lined colander then gently spooned into a mold.  Traditional molds are little horn-shaped things; then, later, finger-shaped ones. I noticed looking for molds that what was offered were strainer baskets like you find with fresh ricotta. I made a small batch - 1 quart of raw goat milk for 4 ounces of cheese.  My mold was a plastic cup (think Dixie) with many little holes punched in it.  I put it an a champagne flute for the liquid to drain into, covered it with a baggie, then went on errands. It takes about six hours to drain. At that point, if your house is like mine, your daughter will reach for something behind the cheese, knocking the whole mini cheese factory to the floor - broussing it. Luckily, the cheese ended up nice and clean in the baggie.  

Serve the cheese the same day made, making sure to remove any shards of glass. Raw goat or sheep milk gives it a complex flavor you wouldn't get if made with cow's milk, those I have nothing against the cow milk cheeses made similarly, like Panir.  Panir is nice and firm, a little tofu-like. Brousse is crumbly.  Herbs, salt, whatever, can be easily kneaded in.  I added salt and freshly ground pepper, dehydrated onion and garlic, and a mixture of herbs.  The cheese melted deliciously into the tine pumpkin-like squashes.  I just tried a couple - about 2 ounces per.  

Brousse can be used in omelets or sprinkled on salads, among other uses - such as putting into minisquashes and broiling.  I'll mix garlic and herbs into the cheese first.  

The CW menu tonight: Miniquash with herbed brousse; Ranch beef meatloaf; salad of lettuce, beet greens, turnip greens, stellaria, and sweet radishes, tossed with homemade French dressing.  

The meatloaf was simple.  The ground beef from the ranch has a strong, beefy flavor - I just wanted to bring that out.  I sauteed a diced onion until golden and added a bottle of dark artisan beer.  I reduced that down to a third cup.  I combined that, 2 lbs. of our beef, ½ lb. ground chicken (even with great meat, an all-beef meatloaf doesn't get the right texture and flavor), 1½ tsp. salt, ¼ tsp. pepper, 1 tsp. freshly ground yellow and brown mustard seeds, 1 slice homemade sandwich bread, crumbled in the food processor with ¼ cup parsley, 1 of our eggs, and 1 white.  I cooked to at 375 to an internal temp of 160.  After half an hour, I tossed in the minisquash, sitting in a pan with about a third of an inch of water.  Broil the cheese to brown, if it didn't brown enough.  Record recipes in blog.  Eat.

Today's harvest:

Yacon, red frisee mustard, eggs, fava greens, golden turnips with their greens (which are some of the best), miners' lettuce, winter squash, apples and rosehips.

Limequats

Everything I've tried in the quat family has been interesting and good, from kum- to citrange-.
Limequats are not a good substitute for kumquats in cooking, though.  Good for limes, and use lots of the zest.  Tart, but sweeter than lime, and they do have the kumquat tones.  Remember them?  The Kumquat Tones?

Limequats are very refreshing and add a certain wonderfully bright limequatity to sparkling water and many mixed drinks, dry or sweet - or so I'm told. 
Limequats are what was from the farm today, with mizuna, eggs, stellaria, beets with very nice greens, daikon, nettles, purple sweet potato, and some well-rooted thick-stemmed cilantro that's just been laughing at the cold weather.

From the farm today:

Purple sweet potatoes, chayote, pineapple sage, hayachia persimmons, Chinese mini squash, fava greens, and pac choi.

Thanksgiving pies

Time to make the pies.  First step is to render lard, for the crust, from the leaf fat of our pastured pork.  Pastured lard is healthy lard. 

Going global

Chez What has been viewed from the following countries:
United States, Canada, Netherlands, Poland,Germany,UK, Israel, India and Slovenia.  I appreciate my international audience, and intend to translate it into the languages of my readers.  The second largest readership is that of Canada, so I will begin with that, eh.

Today in food

I mean today, literally, and food as in the last hour.  Ashmead kernel apples at the coop,  I'm accepting it may no longer be summer.  I think I've seen the last of the peppers and tomatoes from the farm.  Delicious pomegranates, though, nice soft seeds.  I sprinkled them on cinnamon-spiced waffles topped with our-own-pears-from-a-volunteer-tree and apricot jam.  I also have pomegranate juice to mix with nice bubbly water.  Or nice bubbly bubbly.
For food fun, I took some cold milk and Ovaltine and blended them in my Blendtec until so hot (by friction with the speedy blades) that it to be cooled off before drinking.  I linked to the model I have, but there are others.
Camille (chezwhat jr.) wants some more.  Hot Ovaltine, not more blenders.  We have enough.  Enough blenders, not enough Ovaltine.

From the farm today:

Green tomatoes, green mustard, Asian pears, spaghetti squash, pineapple sage in bloom (the red flowers are among your better garnishes), cherry tomatoes, peppers, radishes, roselle, mint.

Zombies!!!

Why eat all that candy on Halloween, when it's so easy to get some fresh fruit?

Blend together:

    * a quarter-cup sized chunk of pineapple
    * half a seedless orange, peeled
    * half a lime, seeded and peeled
    * ¾ cup rum or rums - 8 oz. light, 4 oz dark is traditional, but use what you want or have or both. You can even use spiced or coconut.
    * ¼ cup apricot brandy
    * 1 tsp. sugar
    * a cup of ice

Pour into four Collins glasses.  Float a tablespoon of 151 rum on the top of each drink. Maraud conscientiously.