Easter Sunday

Happy Easter! Here's where I spent Easter Morning:



The weather was pretty crappy--windy, spitting rain--but we (Kelly First, Dave, Judi, Paul, and I) were determined to go here, to the South Mountain Dairy to see some baby goats and buy some absolutely wonderful goat cheese.

First things first, here are the babies:



The little white one in the front was my favorite. She was perfectly white with a little pink nose and little pink lips and little gray eyes and if Megan, the young woman who was giving us a tour of the dairy, had turned her back on us I would have scooped up that little goat baby and put her under my jacket and run away with her.



See? Here she's, all, Take me with you! I don't bark! I won't eat much! I'll stay little and cute forever! Say, you don't have any milk on you, do you?

We couldn't take them home, but we could hold and pet them.



There's Kelly First petting a baby that our tour guide Megan is holding. That goat baby is, like, two or three days old! They bleat and suckle and nibble on everything.



This guy also wanted to come home with us.

The babies are bottle fed so they bond to people and so they can be given pasteurized milk. (Some types of diseases are passed from mother to kid via milk, but pasteurizing the milk kills the disease-causing germs, which is why the babies get the pasteurized stuff.) We showed up just after feeding time, so I didn't get to feed any babies. Next time, though, I'm going to feed the babies even if I have to bring my own goat milk from home.



Where are you going?! Seriously? No milk? Did you check your pockets?

We spent about an hour touring around the small dairy (small compared to cow-based dairies), looking at the milking room, the cheese-making room and the birthing/baby pens. Three of the goats were close to giving birth (one began having contractions while we were there). They had, I think, around forty babies in two pens (we saw the tiniest babies, just a few days old at most), eighty or so female goats, and a handful of rams.

Here is one of the mama goats:



That's a La Mancha goat. La Mancha goats don't have ears just because. Is that not the freakiest thing you've seen today? Earless goats. That's not right. (Megan, tour guide extraordinaire, told us that the La Mancha goats "get jealous" of the goats with ears and try to bite the other goats' ears off. I suggested that maybe La Mancha goats were so ecstatically happy sans ears that they were trying to help the other goats by biting their ears off. What? It's plausible.)

Anyway, after spending much time with the babies, we went back up to the cheese-making room and sampled some different types of chevre, yogurt, and fresh cheeses. The woman handing out the samples is one of the owners of the dairy. She was very happy to talk about cheese and cooking and to hand out samples of the products they make. Judi and Paul bought a handful of different flavors of chevre. Kelly got feta, yogurt, and some raspberry chevre. Dave and I came home with apricot chevre, chipotle chevre, and close to a pound of goat feta, which is absolutely fabulous. I really, really like goat cheese. Almost as much as I like baby goats.