For 4 servings: 1 kg courgettes, 4 tbsp olive oil, 3 small onions, 3 cloves garlic, (possibly. 50 g finely diced dried meat), 4 tomatoes, 200 feta cheese, flour, salt, pepper.
Cut the courgettes lengthways into ½ cm thick slices, salt, pepper and dust with flour. Cut onions into rings, chop garlic and fry briefly in hot oil. Slice the tomatoes, layer with the courgettes in a greased casserole dish. Sprinkle with onions, garlic and possibly the dried meat. Sprinkle with crumbled feta cheese and bake at 180 degrees for a quarter of an hour. Serve with pita bread or rice.
Wendeline sheep cheese from the Westerwald
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When Hilmar Koch and his wife Martina Blötz picked up their first milk sheep from East Frisia, the owner had called it "Wendeline". So it made sense to also name their self-produced sheep cheese after Wendelin, the patron saint of shepherds.
The teacher for sports and industrial education and the graduate agricultural engineer came to the Westerwald from southern Lower Saxony. "Twenty years ago, we thought about buying a small farm in the area, restoring it and then starting with dairy sheep," Hilmar Koch recalls.
Starting something with cows didn't seem very appropriate at the time, because dairy conformation was just being introduced. "We looked for a niche, goats or sheep were the alternatives; it turned out to be sheep."
In 1986, the couple started with dams of the East Frisian Dairy Sheep breed, the only sheep eligible for sheep milk production in this country's low mountain ranges. "We have expanded that to twenty mother animals, more is also not possible here with us."
The farm dates from 1651, partly the original half-timbering is preserved and has been exposed.
"It actually worked quite well from the beginning, even with the cheese sales," Hilmar Koch looks back. Martina Blötz has largely taught herself how to make cheese with the milk from the sheep.
The animals are milked twice a day from the beginning of April, when the lambs no longer need to be suckled. By hand, as Hilmar Koch points out. "Because it has turned out that this is more hygienic than milking by machine, because tiny skin particles get into the milk through sucking, that is omitted with hand milking."
The milk is added to rennet in a vat, salted, scooped and formed into loaves. "Then we take the cheeses to our natural stone cellar, where they mature for three to four weeks and their reddish rind forms, which you can eat along with them." The result, then, is one of the sophisticated, Munster-like red smear cheeses of which the couple are justifiably proud. "It represents a delicacy, you don't find anything like it here very often". In the south of France, however, it is, in the Pyrenees in particular, matured sheep's milk cheeses are more common, probably the best known being called Ossau-Iraty and Tourmalet.
In addition, other varieties are made from the raw milk of sheep. A semi-hard, unripened, very mild white sheep's milk cheese "tastes good in a mixed salad or with tomatoes, herbs and olive oil on fresh white bread." This cheese is also available pickled in oil with herbs and garlic. Not to forget the Camembert made from raw sheep's milk! Popular with the clientele, they all are.
Milchschafhof Wendeline (EU organic)
Martina Blötz and Hilmar Koch-Blötz
Wallendorf 28
35753 Greifenstein-Beilstein (near Herborn/Westerwald)
Tel u. Fax: 02779-458
E-mail: <link>martina.wendeline@t-online.de
Sale by telephone arrangement
Markets in Driedorf and Beilstein
from Waldemar Thomas