Debi....
I actually got started out of boredom.
I have a very deep and very terrible hatred of winter and I've always looked for some type of hobby to fill the winter months.
I do play racquetball (year round) but even that is only good for a couple of hours a day during the cold months. After that I am stuck in the house, wondering what to do with myself.
Well a few years back I decided to take up the hobby of wine making. I figured that I love wine and love being creative so this seemed to be the perfect solution to my problem.
Well once I got started in this hobby I found out that less is more when it comes to making wine, meaning that you perform a certain task......sit back and wait a few weeks to a few months and then do something else.
Well one day while researching wine making I came across a site that also had cheese making supplies (leeners). This seemed interesting so I started doing some research.
Well eventually I found my way to Fankhauser's site and the rest is history.
I started out with a cottage cheese and just pretty much never looked back. My wife wasn't all that thrilled with yet another hobby but she understood my need to stay occupied.
I've basically spent every winter since that time reading everything that I can find (via the internet) about making cheese.
I"m sure that some books have their place and I'm certain that I probably would have been making better cheese a lot sooner had I read some of those books.
Regardless, I still feel that I have found the absolute best resource for cheese making that is available in any form.
I'm certain that you've heard the old saying that two heads are better than one.
Well the way I figure it we have several hundred heads, (if not thousands), working together on the same problem. That's pretty good stuff.
I have heard some pretty good stuff about a couple of the most popular cheese making books and I'll probably pick them up sometime in the future. I've read excerpts from one or two of them and always figured they were over my head.
Well thanks to members like yourself, Linuxboy, Wayne, Sailor and Francois I now understand some things that were totally beyond me even a few months ago. Now I feel that I could read these books and understand most of what they have to offer.
Okay, that went a little farther than I planned on.
Thanks for asking though.
Dave