The Fromagerie

Today we took a drive out to Coldbrook to pick up our sweet potato slips. That's right, apparently sweet potatoes grow in the valley here.  Late last fall we managed to get a few of the last harvest, and this year we thought we'd try to grow our own. Although after the deluge today, I wonder if anything will grow in this soup again!


While we were out that way, we stopped in at Fox Hill Cheese.  This is where we buy our chocolate milk.  Now, I'm not normally a milk drinker, but they have wonderfully fresh, non-homogenized chocolate milk.  Milk is pretty contentious these days - there are many people advocating for access to non-pasteurized milk. Those farmers which sell, give away or otherwise make their raw milk available for public consumption face hefty fines starting at $10 000.  There are a lot of resources online if you'd like to read about the health benefits of raw milk.

But by law, Fox Hill has to pasteurize their milk if they wish to sell to the general public.  That said, their milk is still wonderfully fresh and flavourful because it is not homogenized.

The bottle on the left has not been shaken (nor stirred) to mix in the chocolate. You can see the creamy bits at the top of both bottles - this is whole milk, so the cream will rise to the top!

A terrible photo of the back of the bottle. I included this one because it shows how the cocoa settles to the bottom. Ingredients? Milk, sugar, cocoa, Vitamin D. That's it!

Fox Hill also makes a nice selection of cheeses, primarily semi-hard.  Although their milk is not organic, they take care of the whole product from start to finish - they plant the seed and grow the grass used to feed their own Holstein and Jersey cows, they milk the cows and make drug and hormone-free, creamy, delicious, whole milk right there at the farm. 

The milk itself is $3/litre which is a bit more than what you would get at the grocery store, but for an occasional wholesome treat, it's well worth it.  The bottles are approx. $2 each, but if you bring the bottles back, you pay only for the milk.  And it's sooooooooooooo gud!

Is this blog starting to sound like one giant advertisement?

Ok, here's a shamless advert for the Annapolis Valley from the Globe and Mail