"CHEESE - MILK'S LEAP TOWARDS IMMORTALITY"

Our Cheesepedition guidebook draws our attention to this quote by some author editor nobody. Cheeses can take years to mature, far longer than milk can ever be stored for, so it has been viewed by some as milk's attempt at eternal life.
I suppose then that long-life milk could be considered another leap by milk, but it really is all just a whole lot of leaping, as cheese and long-life milk both go off eventually.

The only food that appears to have landed in the immortality basket is honey, which evidently never goes off. They've found honey in Egyptian tombs that's still edible. Genius bees.
What about when it crystallizes, you cry? You've just got to heat it and give it a stir and it's fine.
But what about the best-before date on my Capliano easy-squeeze pack, you cry more feverishly? It should just be a packing date. The one on mine is. And if I'm wrong and yours says best before, ring them and ask. If they put a customer hotline on the pack they should expect customers to ring up with hot topics. Or hot tempers.

So, we have established that cheese is made from milk, which, for the purposes of human consumption, may mean milk from a:

• cow
  
• sheep
  
• camel
  
• yak
  
• donkey
  
• horse
  
• moose
  
• reindeer
  
• water buffalo
• goat
  

I must say, goat's cheese tastes like a goat. I cannot explain this further. It just tastes like a goat. A delicious goat!

To begin the cheese-making process, follow this simple recipe:

Cheese

1. Milk your cow, goat, moose, etc.
2. Add a bacterial starter culture to ferment the milk sugars and produce lactic acid.
3. Humanely remove the stomach from your cow, goat, moose etc. and extract from it the enzyme rennet. Alternatively, obtain a substitute for rennet such as vinegar or acetic acid.
4. Add rennet to milk. Milk will separate into curds (solids) and whey (liquid).
5. Sit on a tuffet and consume.


Here is a picture of curds and whey:


The curds or the whey are then processed in different ways to make different types of cheeses.


Whey cheeses:

• ricotta (Italian)
  
• a bunch of cheeses no-one's ever heard of except know-it-alls and cheese connoisseurs, including brunost (Norwegian), xynomizithra (Greek), Urda (Romanian), and Anari (Cyprian).
  

Curd cheeses:

• All other cheeses you can think of.
  

I suddenly have a recollection of bunsen burners, Mr. T and curds and whey, so I've obviously learned about this before in Year 10 Science. Can't remember anything about cheese though. Was probably too busy milking rubber gloves.

NO PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

Allow me to diverge from our Cheesepedition for a moment to focus on another expedition I took recently. My husband and I decided we should run away together before Junior arrives on the scene and entertains us so entirely we can't figure out our heads from our bums, so run away we did, to the Macedon Ranges and the infamous Hanging Rock.

The story of Picnic at Hanging Rock, as in the book by Joan Lindsay, is about a group of private school girls who go on an excursion to Hanging Rock on Valentines Day in the year 1900. Three girls and a teacher go climbing the rock and only one girl ever comes back, with a case of concussion and no memory of what happened, and no-one ever finds out what happened to the others.

Up until our little expedition, I, like many unsuspecting Australians, was under the impression the story was based on something that really happened, but it's entirely fictional. I mentioned this to my parents:

Me: "Did you guys know that Picnic at Hanging Rock isn't a true story?"

Dad: "Yeah."

Mum: "What?!! (To Dad) Why didn't you TELL me?!"

Dad: ".......Um.......it never came up?"

I would say the confusion arose both because Hanging Rock is a real place and because the book is written in a kind of false documentation style. But the clue lies in the details: Valentines Day in 1900 was a Wednesday, not a Saturday, as in the book. The other clue could possibly be the lack of any other historical documentation of such an event, but who really pays any attention to that sort of stuff when there's a book and a movie to tell you about it.

We stayed at the splendid and aptly named Hanging Rock Cottage, which is literally 300m from the Rock. Breakfast is included, and rather than ordering the night before and making sure you're awake and not wearing some sort of indecent attire and one sock when it arrives in the morning, all the brekky food is in the cottage when you get there - bacon, eggs, toast and jam, English muffins, juice, cereal..far more than two people could eat - and you cook it up yourself at your leisure in the morning, sock or no sock, whatever you want.


We visited the nearby township of Woodend for dinner and were shocked and pleased to encounter the most scrumptious, flavoursome, delectable, second-best eye fillet we had ever known, at Sequoia wine-bar restaurant on the main strip (although I consider it the best steak experience I've ever known because I didn't have people on either side of me puffing on cancer sticks while I was eating. Europeans.)
The menu selection is small but the service was excellent and the restaurant cozy, with alfresco dining and a wood fire inside. They boast a new French chef and the food really was fantastic. Expect to pay $25 for a main.
The fudge shop in the main street - 'Not Just Fudge' - is also worth a look. (But don't go expecting to find just fudge or you will be disappointed.)

So, we figured that of course it would be lunacy to go to Hanging Rock without a picnic, so we gleefully filled our gingham-lined basket with picnic goodies and chucked the picnic blanket in the car. And then it was raining by the time we got there. And it rained overnight. And it was raining when we left late the next morning. No picnic at Hanging Rock. Not a sandwich. Not even a crumb. Not even just Hanging Rock - it would have been wet and slippery and we could have fallen and only one of us might have come back with concussion and no memory of what happened and no-one would ever find the other one. Too risky.