The Dining Dish blog is Dara Bunjon's take on anything food, both national and in her hometown of Baltimore. Warning: this food blog can be harmful to your waistline.

Friday, November 07, 2014

Charlottetown Farm: Pam Miller and happy goats make extraordinary cheese

Here is an equation for success. Take one empty nest mom with time on her hands, a 4-H background, goats and a passion to brighten the tables of many with her goat cheese products – voila, you have Charlottetown Farm’s Pam Miller. She is a vivacious, down home, spunky,  charming gal who has taken working with goats milk and turned it into a viable, sustainable “buy local” product for our top farm-to-table restaurants with chevre cheese, feta cheese and the ash aged crotin.  You the consumer and many like you purchase her cheeses along with her confections of goats milk cheesecakes, truffles, cajeta (Mexican goat milk caramel sauce) and fudge at local farmers markets.

A chance meeting with Pam had me excited to come to Charlottetown Farm and interact with her pet goats. The milk producing goats; all 263, are at her partner’s dairy farm in Pennsylvania. What looked like a gray day in Northwest Baltimore was a bright blue sky with puffs of white clouds up I83 near the Pennsylvania line. The air was brisk on the autumn day as Pam took us (the husband and I) out into the field to meet her pet goats; these are goats that Pam will bring to the farmers market, fairs and other social engagements. Once inside the gates and out into the field the goats were over to us tout suite, in fact, they seemed fascinated by me and pinned me in from all sides. Later I deduced my popularity with the goats was probably my loose leaf paper as one of the goats took a big bite out of notes. “Goats don’t eat tin cans,” Pam said with a smile on her face, “their favorite food is what they can forage on the floor in the woods.” What the Charlottetown Farm goats eat on a regular basis is free range grass and hay along with supplemental grains; out in the field that day it seemed the fallen leaves were the meal du jour along with my notepaper.

Read the full story, watch the video and check out the slideshow HERE.

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