Wild Food Dinner at Mariposa Creamery June 7

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We are so excited about our latest collaboration with our friends at the Wild Food Lab, we can hardly stand it. We think this is the most exciting food-related work happening in Los Angeles, so we are thrilled to be able to support it by offering our farm as a venue. 
Come celebrate spring’s bounty in our beautiful local mountains, canyons and deserts at this uniquely Californian dining experience created by local wild food expert Pascal Baudar and chef Mia Masilevich. From pickled yucca ribbons to elderflower beurre blanc, their multi-course wild food menu will inspire you to venture beyond the farmer’s market into the great outdoors. Each course will be paired with a wine specifically selected to celebrate the true flavors of Southern California.

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The Wild Food Dinner Series is part of the development of a completely new cuisine combining wild food, traditional preservation techniques and gourmet preparations created by Pascal & Mia over years of dedicated study and experimentation. Their work encourages us to rediscover our relationship to our surroundings and what it means to be an Angelino.

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We have been recipe testing and wine pairing for weeks. Now every time we walk in the forest, we see food where were didn’t before. Only 30 seats are available for this season’s dinner, and they are filling up fast. You can reserve your seat here. 

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June’s multi-course gourmet dinner is the most labor-intensive expression of the work Pascal & Mia are doing. Preparation for the meal includes days of foraging, months of fermentations, hours and hours of separating tiny lambs quarters seeds from foraged plants, the dehydration of cactus parts, frying up of hundreds of little buckwheat flowers. The suggested donation for the dinner reflects our belief that this work is valuable and that the people who are doing this work should be paid reasonably for their time. But there are also much less expensive ways to learn from Pascal & Mia and experience the wild food of Los Angeles. Check out Pascal’s page Urban Outdoor Skills for his very reasonably priced forage walks which include plant identification lessons and often basic preparation techniques. After all, there are no more accessible foods than those we can all harvest for free from the wild!

Have a question about the dinner? Send us a note at mariposacreamery@yahoo.com. We hope to see you on June 7, or on a hike with Pascal and Mia in the near future!

Gloria & Steve

Follow us! Instagram @mariposacreamery :: Twitter @mariposagoats

 

It’s Spring at Mariposa Creamery!

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Spring = eggs. Finally!

Spring = eggs. Finally!

Our stone fruit trees are blooming and the goats have spring fever! Our kidding season is about to begin–in fact, today is Mint’s due date, although I expect her to hold out until the rain stops. We’ll have 7 goats kidding between now and July. The best way to keep up with new arrivals is by following our facebook page.

Our Creamery set up for bread making class with Erik from Root Simple

Our Creamery set up for bread making class with Erik from Root Simple

The next series of cheese making classes starts Saturday, April 19th and still has some space available. You can read about the cheese making classes and register online at the Institute of Domestic Technology. Lots of other classes on the calendar as well, of course.

Delicious cheese tasting for students

Delicious cheese tasting for students

We’ve just opened up our Farmstay calendar for May bookings. There are still some weekdays available in March at a discount too.

In the next few weeks we will be hosting several school tours (3rd graders from the local Waldorf School and 6th graders from Oakwood School in Hollywood), a girl scout troop from Moorpark, and a couple of private events for local families.

We are SUPER excited about the Wild Food Dinner we are hosting for local foragers / foodcrafters Pascal and Mia from Transitional Gastronomy on March 15. We are having a blast working on what might be the first ever wine pairings for the flavors of the San Gabriel Mountains. Although this dinner is already sold out, we don’t expect it to be our last. If you are interested in experiencing their real Southern California Cuisine, follow their amazing photos here.

Speaking of transitions, we are in the process of saying good bye to some of our dairy interns who have made their mark on our herd and home, and are now off on new adventures. Megan is headed to Washington to try her hands at vegetable farming and living in a tiny 10×12 cabin. Emilie is moving to Athens, Georgia to catch up with a friend from college. And Peele is headed back to Brazil for an amazing project at a museum. But we are blessed with many new additions to our team! If you are interested in our dairy internship program, send us an email.

Rupert leads our morning walk at Angeles Crest Creamery

Rupert leads our morning walk at Angeles Crest Creamery

We continue to make progress at the new ranch Angeles Crest Creamery too. Our tiny house is almost ready, and then we can have the barn raising. We’ve been working with the local USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service representatives to learn more about the available forage including the wide variety of perennial grasses, and also to build a plan to increase plantings in the riperian area around the small lake to make more habitat for wildlife. Right now there is a sweet family of ducks in the lake with babies taking off on practice flights.

Mariposa Creamery is an educational project that is funded in part by our cheese making classes and our farmstay program, but mostly by our day jobs. Unfortunately this means we are not available to host individual visitors, since when we aren’t milking with our farmstay guests in the mornings, or teaching classes on the weekends, we are at work just like everyone else! Thank you for your understanding.

We hope to see you soon!

Gloria & Steve

Book by midnight Friday and get 1 night free!

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AirBnB has announced a special for first-time AirBnB customers! If you’ve been thinking about coming to visit our farm, now is a great time to book your stay. Book 2 nights and get 1 night free for stays between now and March 31. Our kidding season starts in early March, so if you book for the 2nd half of March there are likely to be lots of babies to play with, and you might even get lucky and get to witness a birth!

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Click here to read about the special and get the coupon code.

Click here to see our listing.

We hope to see you on soon!

Gloria & Steve

New Cheese Making Series Starts January 11

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Rupert Photo

Our next series of cheese making classes, which will begin in January, has been posted to the Institute of Domestic Technology web site. Which means registration is now open! The series makes a great holiday gift for that person you want to inspire to make cheese for you! To learn more, click here.

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And if you can’t wait for January, there are still a few spots in this weekend’s classes, just in time to skill up to make cheese for the holidays. Show up all of your food-crafty friends by giving beautiful jars of home made feta as holiday gifts, or showing up to a party with beautiful bloomy rind goat cheeses to share. We’ll teach you both in this Saturday’s Milkcrafting 102 class. You’ll also make a quick batch of mozzarella, and enjoy it for lunch on pizzas from our wood fired oven.

In Sunday’s Foodcrafting 102 class, you can learn to make the multi-seed crackers to pair with your cheeses. We’ll also be making chevre, hard apple cider, and pickled carrots. The cider is especially easy and makes a great shelf-stable gift, and is a great pairing with cheese.

At Mariposa Creamery, we don’t sell any cheese. Our goal is to teach you to make your own! To that end, we have spent a lot of time testing commercially available milks for cheese making. We recommend Summerhill (available at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods) for goat cheeses and Straus Organic Cream Top (available at Whole Foods) for cow’s milk cheeses. And here’s a tip: that Straus Organic Cream Top milk is also available at Trader Joe’s and is less expensive there–it’s just private labeled for Trader Joe’s. Although we don’t know why anyone would want to live without goats, it’s not necessary to be a successful home cheese maker. We are blessed in California with the availability of high quality and humanely produced milks in our grocery stores.

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Proceeds from our cheese making classes support our herd in Altadena, our Dairy Internship program, and our project to build a regenerative goat dairy in the Angeles National Forest at Angeles Crest Creamery. Thank you for supporting our goal of developing local, sustainable and humane dairying in Los Angeles!

If you have any questions about our classes, Farmstay, Internships or other projects, send us a note at mariposacreamery@yahoo.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Gloria & Steve

Next Series of Cheese Making Classes Posted!

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Every quarter we repeat our series of 3 day-long cheese making classes covering everything from yogurt to Gouda. Our next series will start with Milkcrafting 101 on October 12. Sign up for an individual class, or for the whole series.

Goat Milking Lesson - Cella

Want to stay overnight and help milk the goats in the morning before class? Check our Farmstay calendar and book your stay in our Airstream Bambi.

Any questions? Just send us a note at mariposacreamery@yahoo.com.

Our classes and Farmstays help fund the Mariposa Creamery Internship program and our project at Angeles Crest Creamery. Thank you for your support!

Come Hang with the Herd!

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Come Hang with the Herd!

We are opening our gates Saturday December 29th from 1pm-4pm for a free community open house. Come play with the goats. Attend a cheese making demo in the Creamery at 2pm. There will be a short talk about suburban goat keeping at 3pm, also in the Creamery. Forecast shows a chance of rain, so wear your boots!

Mariposa Creamery at the Zane Grey Estate – 396 E Mariposa Street – Altadena, CA 91001 – Parking on Mariposa Street

Where did this year go?

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Oh my. I’ve been busy on our facebook page but not very diligent about posting here. In fact it’s been almost a year to the day. Here’s a very brief review of what’s going on around here:

  • Our cheesemaking classes have been packed and keeping us very busy. We continue to teach our 3-part series through the Institute of Domestic Technology. The fall series is mostly sold out at this point, but there is a new series starting in January 2013.
  • Our cheesemaking classes have recently been featured in both Bon Appetit and Los Angeles Magazine! See our Press page for some links, but both of these complete pieces are only available in the print versions of the magazines.
  • We had 4 perfect babies in the spring: Apple (in image), Poppyseed, Honeybee, and Chewy. There are many many photos of all 4 on our facebook page.
  • We have been working toward opening our new restaurant in Altadena and recently finished the drawings for our Conditional Use Permit Application. We expect to file our application with LA County by the end of the year.
  • We bought 70 acres in the Angeles National Forrest where we plan to expand our goating and make cheese for both of our restaurants. The new project is called Angeles Crest Creamery, and you can see photos here.
  • Also, I continue to go to work every day as Director of Sales for Truesense Imaging.

When I review this list, I don’t feel so bad for not posting more!