Or at the very least, life enhancing. There’s a part of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, where Barbara Kingsolver and kin visit homemade cheese guru Ricki Carroll somewhere in Massachusetts and feign cheesemaking ineptitude for the sake of the reader. Clearly, Kingsolver has been at this for awhile, but I’m not one to be intimidated, so I ordered some cultures from New England Cheesemaking Supply (pretty much the only source, as far as I can tell) for a Christmas present with the hopes I would get to participate and eat.

We’ve only made the chevre so far, and only with cow’s milk, but it is amazing and incredibly simple. You essentially let some milk get warm, add the culture, stir, let it get thick for 12 hours and then drain for another 12 or so. You just have to forget how disgusting it looks in the process and not be grossed out by watery cheese oozing from knee highs and dripping into a pot below, like some weird form of Chinese water torture. Knee highs are the key to this process though, since they cost much less than cheesecloth and make for, shall we say, interestingly shaped cheese.

So I take back my claims made last summer that it’s not worth making your own cheese. Making chevre from cow’s milk is absolutely worth it, if only because you can have 2 lbs. of fresh, organic soft cheese for about $6.

www.cheesemaking.com